The Commerce Department today issued its long-awaited final rules on the new federal subsidy program for digital converter boxes. As expected, the program was expanded include households that have cable TV subscriptions, but want to keep using those non-cable TV’s in the basement or kitchen. In a nod to fiscal responsibility, however, the expansion came with one caveat: these “basement TVs” would be eligible only until the first batch of program funding ($990 million) runs out. The second batch (up to $500 million more has conveniently already been provided for by Congress) would be reserved for households that don’t have cable service.
In other words, the cash till will be wide open until the first billion or so is spent. Only when the money starts running low will sensible limits be applied.
Why the two-part process? After all, Commerce’s initial call was the right one: if subsidies go to anybody, they should go only to those who actually would lose TV service in 2009, when the analog lights go out. In addition to being good policy, excluding cable households made fiscal sense too: no one knows how many cable households would apply for benefits, and total spending could easily go over the total authorized by Congress.
Yet, however sensible Commerce’s initial decision, Capitol Hill didn’t like it. Fearing a public backlash when analog signals are discontinued, members of Congress pushed the agency to expand eligibility. Thus the compromise: spending will only be constrained once the money starts to run out.
.
Continue reading →
Advances in biotechnology are moving incredibly fast these days and many scientists agree it will soon be possible for most humans to live past 100 years. What’s not being discussed yet is how society is going to manage that longevity revolution. I’m writing a book on this topic now, and here is a link to my op-ed in the LA Times today discussing the issue.
Over at Ars, I expand on my recent post contrasting Brad Smith’s recent article defending software patents and Bill Gates’ 1991 memo warning that software patents threaten the software industry:
Gates’ memo suggests that in 1991, Microsoft still considered itself a relatively small company challenging entrenched incumbents. It was locked in a legal battle with Apple over the legal rights to the graphical user interface. It was in the midst of the OS/2 wars with IBM. And it was fighting to break Novell’s dominance of the networking market. In short, Microsoft feared the incumbents they were trying to displace would use the patent system to fortify their dominant positions in their respective markets. They thought their chances in the marketplace were better than their chances in the courtroom.
Continue reading →
This post isn’t meant to prove anything, just to note something of some small significance–a data point, basically.
Digg is major gathering point for the pro-open source, anti-big company, anti-DRM crowd. To be sure, many others use the site, and most Diggers who hold these views are casual about their advocacy and not among the hardcore folks who hang out on more focused sites.
But sometimes I wonder whether among casual holders of this creed, the motivating factor isn’t political, philosophical, or ideological, but just to get something for nothing.
So note the current top stories on Digg:
| Votes |
Story |
| 2061 |
Windows Vista One Click Activator-BIOS Emulation Crack (Paradox and CLoNY) |
| 1174 |
It has Been LEGAL to Unlock Your Cell Phone Since November 2006! |
| 726 |
Walmart Sends The Consumerist A DMCA takedown notice. |
| 621 |
“To whom it may concern: file-sharing is illegal” |
| 498 |
The Pirate Bay’s Torrents Quadruple in a Year |
Just a correlation, proof of nothing in particular.
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.)
Continue reading →
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.
Continue reading →
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?
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.