Awesome:
Once the natural language processing people get with the program, we’ll be able to build C-3PO. More here.
June 2007
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Prof. Tim Wu of the Columbia University Law School, and Gwen Hinze of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Topics include,
- Tim Wu explains his wireless Carterfone proposal,
- The United States signs a trade agreement with South Korea that includes some controversial copyright provisions, and
- The FCC loses on appeal in an important broadcast decency case.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
Over at Ars I discuss Amazon’s new and improved one-click patent, which covers buying something for someone else with one click.
I have been posting a series of essays to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month” (Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). In today’s installment, I want to discuss the idea of a voluntary code of conduct for online safety.
Yesterday, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) announced an impressive new campaign by its members to offer parents an unprecedented level of assistance in keeping their children safe online. The NCTA’s new effort is called, “Cable Puts You in Control: PointSmart, ClickSafe.”
The NCTA’s new effort closely tracks a proposal outlined in a report that the Progress & Freedom Foundation published last August. In that report, I recommended that:
All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon–and in a collective fashion–calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by the wide variety of operators mentioned above. These principles and policies, which could take the form of a pledge to parents and consumers, must also be workable throughout our new world of converged, cross-platform communications and media.
The cable industry has responded to this challenge in a major way with the announcement of its new “PointSmart, ClickSafe” initiative.
Recently we learned that Apple has begun embedding information in MP3s sold by the iTunes Store that identifies the purchaser of the song. Randy Picker speculated that one motivation for this could be a form of “mistrust-based” DRM: that people would be worried about getting in trouble if a song with their name on it was released into the wild, and so fewer people would share their files.
Ed Felten suggests some reasons that this strategy might not work so well:
Fred von Lohmann responded, suggesting that Apple should have encrypted the information, to protect privacy while still allowing Apple to identify the original buyer if necessary. Randy responded that there was a benefit to letting third parties do enforcement.
More interesting than the lack of encryption is the apparent lack of integrity checks on the data. This makes it pretty easy to change the name in a file. Fred predicts that somebody will make a tool for changing the name to “Steve Jobs” or something. Worse yet, it would be easy to change the data in a file to frame an innocent person – which makes the name information pretty much useless for enforcement.
If you’re not a crypto person, you may not realize that there are different tools for keeping information secret than for detecting tampering – in the lingo, different tools for ensuring confidentiality than for ensuring integrity. Apple could have used crypto to protect the integrity of the data. Done right, this would let Apple detect whether the name information in a file was accurate. (You might worry that somebody could transplant the name header from one file to another, but proper crypto will detect that.) Whether to use this kind of integrity check is a separate question from whether to encrypt the information — you can do either, or both, or neither.
Huh. Someone at the hyperbolically-named “Save the Internet” Coalition screwed up. In celebration of Ed Whitacre’s retirement, they made a satirical cartoon purporting to be his final speech to his management team.
They then linked to this video in a blog post with some of the “quotes” in the video. The only problem is that they didn’t do a very good job of marking it as satire. In fact, they wrote what appears to be a point-by-point rebuttal of Whitacre’s “speech.”
It got picked up by Slashdot this morning, and the comments there demonstrate that hardly any of Slashdot’s readers got the joke.
I’m sure this was an honest mistake on Save the Internet’s part. But so far, there’s no sign of an update more clearly labeling it as a parody. Yes, it’s obvious if you watch the video that it’s a parody, but there’s hardly any hint it’s a parody in the text of the post, and it shouldn’t have been that hard to predict that a lot of people would just read the text and not watch the video.
Mike Masnick wonders if Lala is engaging in Newspeak when it describes its tracks as “DRM-free.” Something certainly smells fishy:
We noted the oddity of supposedly DRM-free files only being able to be loaded onto iPods, since that suggested there clearly was some form of restriction on the files. However, it’s becoming clear that there are certainly some types of DRM being used. In Bob Lefsetz’ latest blog post, he notes that each file has a watermark that identifies its owner, and if you’re not the owner, you won’t be able to play that song. In other words, the supposedly DRM-free tracks… have DRM. It’s just a slightly different type of DRM.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. It’s possible, for example, that it’s just a watermark, in which case the files wouldn’t play in other Lala players but it would play in any other music player. Of course, that would be kind of a stupid business strategy, because it would put your own software at a disadvantage. But maybe the labels, who are not exactly known for their business savvy, were convinced that would be an effective piracy deterrent.
I haven’t had time to look into this in a lot of detail, but so far I haven’t been able to find a clear description of how the watermarking system would work. The Lefsetz reference is rather vague. Does anyone know if Lala has made a clear statement of exactly what format the songs will be in and how the watermarking will work?
Danny O’Brien points out that ATI is releasing software “upgrades” that reduce the functionality of its hardware:
The latest update to ATI’s Catalyst drivers now offers”improved TV quality and Broadcast Flag support which enables full US terrestrial DTV support”.
It’s a little unclear from that README whether the new support is for a new, hardware revision of ATI’s Theater 650 digital TV tuner, or simply a new software implementation of the digital TV copy control for current owners of the Theater 650. However you look at it, though, “broadcast flag support” is hardly an upgrade.
Prior to such support, you could be confident that you could use these cards for their given purpose: to record whatever you want off the air, whenever you want, in whatever format you want. Now, ATI, recently purchased by AMD, is announcing support for equipment’s right to take that power away from you, and substitute a crippled subset of their tuner’s capabilities whenever a broadcaster commands it.
But this isn’t just an unfeature: it’s an unnecessary unfeature. You can have full terrestial HD support without the Broadcast Flag – mainly because thousands of concerned citizens fought hard for that right. AMD must surely have noticed that the Broadcast Flag proposal has been dead for over two years, ever since the courts threw it out as FCC overreach. Thanks in part to your letters and calls, no politician has managed to sneak it into law since.
It doesn’t seem like reducing the functionality of your products is a very good business strategy.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.