The WSJ reports that the French government has “rejected the sole bid it had received for the so-called third-generation, or 3G license, from French Internet start-up Iliad SA, on the grounds that it didn’t meet required financial criteria.” It also says that the “failed auction for a fourth mobile-operator license could forestall new competition and keep prices at their lofty levels for consumers[.]”
It seems like the French government is going to try to remove the technical roadblocks stopping the deal, and that desire for more competition is certainly gratifying. But what I’m more curious about is why there aren’t more bidders? After all the WSJ also says, “France is one of the more desirable markets in Europe for operators. Prices have remained high and competition — limited to the three operators — isn’t as brutal as elsewhere. Italy, for example, has four mobile operators and is set to roll out more.”
It wouldn’t have anything to do with forced business models, would it?
Here’s a satellite photo of Dick Cheney’s house, which I learned about on the Daily Show. He’s obviously very concerned about protecting his home from prying eyes. I’m sure he’s equally zealous in his defense of the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.
Update: One of Matt’s commenters notes that Mapquest doesn’t blur the observatory circle. Also, one of our commenters claims that although this is the vice president’s official residence, his family doesn’t actually live there. Still, I think it’s a safe bet that somebody from the government asked Google to blur the observatory circle. And I rather doubt they’d be so helpful if I asked them to blur my neighborhood.
Threat Level has an absolutely fascinating article about the topology of the worldwide data network and how it has given the NSA a windfall of easy surveillance access:
While nobody outside the intelligence community knows the exact volume of international telephone and internet traffic that crosses U.S. borders, experts agree that it bounces off a handful of key telephone switches and perhaps a dozen IXPs in coastal cities near undersea fiber-optic cable landings, particularly Miami, Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Miami sees most of the internet traffic between South America and the rest of the world, including traffic passing from one South American country to another, says Bill Manning, the managing partner of ep.net. “Basically they backhaul to the United States, do the switch and haul it back down since (it’s) cheaper than crossing their international borders.”
Continue reading →
I’m not sure I buy the elaborate interpretations it offers, but this illusion sure is neat.
PJ Doland, the serial entrepreneur who’s graciously hosted this site for the last three years, recently launched his latest effort, Shouting Match. It’s an aggregator designed to capture the trends in the tech blogosphere. Unlike TechMeme, which gives you an undifferentiated blizzard of links, Shouting Mat.ch uses on a carefully selected list of the best tech blogs, and includes a handy Ajaxy excerpt widget so you can see what you’re getting before you click through to view the link.
I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I’ve found it a useful way to keep tabs on the conversation in the tech blogosphere. I think you will too. It includes three channels: tech, politics, and lifehack. I think that last one is for the sort of people who obsess over what kind of containers to buy for their paper clips.
It’s a few weeks old, but be sure to check out Cory Doctorow’s excellent explanation for why copy protection can never work:
[Encryption] works brilliantly. You can download an email privacy program that uses standard, public encryption algorithms to scramble your email so that only its intended recipients can read them. You know that messages can only be read by the authorised sender and the authorised receiver because you are the only ones who know have the key.
It’s great for email, but it can never work for movies, TV shows or music, because in the case of “copy protection” the receiver is also the person that the system is meant to guard itself against.
Say I sell you an encrypted DVD: the encryption on the DVD is supposed to stop you (the DVD’s owner) from copying it. In order to do that, it tries to stop you from decrypting the DVD.
Except it has to let you decrypt the DVD some of the time. If you can’t decrypt the DVD, you can’t watch it. If you can’t watch it, you won’t buy it. So your DVD player is entrusted with the keys necessary to decrypt the DVD, and the film’s creator must trust that your DVD player is so well-designed that no one will ever be able to work out the key.
This is a fool’s errand. Because the DVD player has the key, it’s always possible that it can be extracted by academics, hardened hackers – or just kids who are in it for the glory.
Doctorow makes an analogy to the speed of light, but I think a better analogy is that DRM systems are to computer science what perpetual motion machines are to physics. Anyone who says he’s got an unbreakable DRM scheme is either clueless or lying. Yet DRM snake-oil salesmen, like the charlatans who periodically claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine (or infinite compression algorithms), are perpetually coming up with clever new ways to obfuscate the fundamental impossibility of what they’re trying to accomplish. If you make a system complicated enough, it can be difficult to explain its flaws in laymen’s terms. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have them, or that they aren’t fatal.
This is just appalling. You cannot win a PR battle from a defensive crouch.
A top Democratic leader opened the door Tuesday to granting U.S. telecommunications companies retroactive legal immunity for helping the government conduct electronic surveillance without court orders, but said the Bush administration must first detail what those companies did.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said providing the immunity will likely be the price of getting President Bush to sign into law new legislation extending the government’s surveillance authority. About 40 pending lawsuits name telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping laws. Democrats introduced a draft version of the new law Tuesday without the immunity language.
If Congress passes legislation giving the president expanded wiretapping authority, and he vetoes it because it doesn’t include a get out of jail card for AT&T, that should be a PR disaster for the Republicans. The Democrats should be thrilled to go on the campaign trail saying “Mr. President, we passed legislation giving you the authority you requested. It’s not our fault you chose to put the interests of your friends in the telecom industry ahead of protecting American lives.”
Yet for some reason, the Democratic leadership seems to have chosen a strategy of preemptive surrender, where they announce in advance that they’re so terrified of a veto that they’ll give the president basically whatever he wants as long as he promises to sign it. Under those circumstances, the president obviously isn’t going to budge an inch.
The text of the RESTORE Act is here. It’s not quite as bad as I’d feared from media reports, but it still has some serious flaws. The most frustrating thing about it is that it starts off really well. The first substantive provision is:
Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not United States persons and are not located within the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.
In my opinion, they should have just cut the bill off there. The whole thing would have been 3 pages long, it would have taken away the White House’s most potent talking point, and it would have gotten the enthusiastic endorsement of people like me.
Instead, it goes on to create this elaborate, cumbersome, and arguably unconstitutional “blanket warrant” process for eavesdropping on calls between an American and a non-American. I have yet to see any coherent explanation for why such a provision is necessary.
A significant amount of the bill is devoted to detailing a variety of reports and audits that various parts of the executive branch are required to submit about the government’s surveillance activities. While more oversight is rarely a bad thing, I’m frankly not that enthusiastic about these provisions because I’m worried they’ll be perceived as a substitute for individualized warrants. Moreover, I think there’s a good argument to be made that genuinely foreign surveillance activities shouldn’t be subject to the same level of scrutiny as domestic surveillance. So to the extent that all these reporting requirements blur the line between domestic and foreign surveillance, I think that could be a bad thing.
I continue to be baffled by the politics of all this. I imagine the Democratic leadership thinks they’re going to buy peace with the White House by compromising and giving them some of what they want. But that’s not how this administration works. They’ve never shown any willingness to meet critics halfway. (See, for example, Max Cleland) If the Democrats give the president anything less than everything on his wish list, they’ll be loudly denounced as soft on terrorism. So if they’re going to get attacked anyway, they might as well at least make their base happy by passing a bill that’s strongly supportive of civil liberties.
This is not that bill. The ACLU is endorsing Rush Holt’s alternative legislation, so perhaps that’s the legislation advocates of civil liberties should be demanding.
I find it amazing that people would make an argument like this with a straight face:
Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Cybercast News Service that he expects “the White House will threaten to veto this.”
“Some elements are problematic for anti-terrorism,” he said, particularly the lack of a provision that would grant retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that provided information to the government and may have done so illegally.
“It should be retroactive,” said Darling. “These companies are getting sued because they were trying to be helpful … to hunt down people who are abusing our telecommunications system to carry out acts in the United States.”
This sounds like a marvelous legal principle: firms can ignore the law and compromise their customers’ civil liberties with impunity, as long as they were “trying to be helpful.” Come to think of it, why do we need warrants at all? Instead, let’s just have the FBI and the NSA issue “certificates of helpfulness” in exchange for their customers’ private information. I mean, the nice man from the NSA would never ask for information he wasn’t allowed to have, would he?
In an interesting post today, Glenn Fleishman explores what AT&T’s purchase of 700 MHz spectrum from Aloha Partners today means for Verizon. While my conspiracy theory radar tingles a bit, I had this same thought earlier today. No point in paraphrasing; enter the blockquote.
AT&T spends $2.5b for 12 MHz across 200m people in the 700 MHz band: Let’s talk two-steps-ahead. In the terms for the C Block licenses that Google wanted very open and Verizon and AT&T wanted to have cell-spectrum-like restrictions, AT&T did a volte-face and said it would agree to most of the openness that Google wanted. Huh, I said, I wonder what made them do that? Well, it’s gamesmanship. AT&T was obviously already in a position to acquire Aloha Partners’s licenses.
This means that AT&T is reverse-encumbering the other band. While the C Block involves more bandwidth and greater coverage, Verizon is now in a worse position because of the lack of device and application lock-in if they choose to bid in 700 MHz as AT&T will already have holdings. AT&T can have the flexibility to deploy different services in the different 700 MHz blocks. I think.
AT&T can now focus on bidding on the A and B blocks, which can compliment their Aloha acquisition and which don’t come with open-access restrictions. So did AT&T pull off a Machiavellian ploy to saddle Verizon with an open access mandate?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.