Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Over on Verizon’s PolicyBlog, Link Hoewing, VZ’s Assistant Vice President – Internet and Technology Issues, has posted an interesting comparison of the US and European mobile markets. He’s put together a side-by-side chart comparing contracts, competition, coverage, prices, new services, and more. He’s asked for input from others, so take a look.
Credit is due Google for announcing a privacy-improving change to its cookie policy. According to Peter Fleischer, writing on the official Google blog, Google will be altering its cookie-setting practices to give its cookies an expiration date of two years from the time they’re set. The previous cookie practice was to give all cookies persistence until 2038.
Google’s change doesn’t tame the cookie monster, of course. A cookie re-issued every ≤2 years until 2038 and beyond has the same tracking power as a cookie expiring 31 years hence. But rare users of Google rightly should be “forgotten” by Google in two years.
As important as the substance of the new cookie policy, Google is talking about their information practices and the effects their practices have on privacy. What other company does even that?
It remains with you to tame the cookie monster, if that’s what you care to do. Your web browser provides you the ability to control them, which gives you the responsibility to do so. I control mine.
Ever get frustrated asking your Member of Congress to limit government surveillance and the advance of surveillance technology? Ever even try? Probably not, because you know you wouldn’t get a straightforward answer if you did.
That’s why I was delighted to read about the Seeing Yellow project on Ars Technica. The idea is for people to call and pressure printer manufacturers to let them turn off the tracking function that has been incorporated into many color printers at the behest of the U.S. government. Knowing that consumers care about their privacy, printer manufacturers (and others who learn from their experience) will be inclined not to build surveillance into their products.
It may not happen right away, but active consumerism gives you a vote about government surveillance every time you buy a printer, not just once every two, four, or six years.
Here‘s a sign of where we’re headed with uniform government identification systems and social control.
No, it’s not some futurist’s musings about the coming dystopia. It’s S. 1788, a bill introduced in Congress Friday to revoke people’s passports it they’re more than $2,500 in arrears on their child support payments. Bill text isn’t available yet, but what due process is given before the government revokes a person’s ability to travel internationally? Do we want to discuss whether this is an appropriate penalty for being in debt?
What other good purposes might de-identifying people promote? Simson Garfinkel wrote a good article on this back in 1994. In a Wired article called “Nobody Fucks with the DMV,” he wrote:
The driver’s license has become something it was never intended to be: a badge of good citizenship. Pay your bills to city and state, pay your child support, don’t get caught using drugs, and the state will let you keep on trucking. Screw up, and they’ll clip your wings.
Now for the futurist’s musings: Your margin of error for getting cross-ways with government regulations will get narrower and narrower as government identity systems get stronger and stronger.
We’re facing war against a technological civilization far superior to our own! Our enemy can take any shape! They could be anywhere!
– Defense Secretary Keller, played by Jon Voight in Transformers
I took a break from trying to transform bad tech regulation to see Transformers the movie. It was surprisingly cynical for a big, kid-oriented blockbuster movie. At the beginning of the ending credits, the mom and dad of the main character (Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBeouf) insert some skepticism about trusting the government with national security secrets to really act in the best interest of the country. And anyone notice that the evil Decepticons were military vehicles, while the good Autobots were civilian vehicles (all GM autos). A veiled message of the power of the market to do good versus government control? And what about the writing on the side of the police vehicle – “to punish and enslave” (which was the only non-military bad guy vehicle, a Saleen S281 based on the Ford Mustang)?
Over the last couple of months, we’ve noticed that our best shows have been when we had a really smart guest like Randy Picker, Tim Wu, or Fred Von Lohmann and got into an issue in some depth. These episodes tended to run long, because there was too much to discuss in the 7 minutes or so we gave to each issue. So starting this week, we’re trying something a little bit different with the podcast. Instead of trying to cover three issues each week, we’re going to starting having a single guest and cover a single topic, in depth, for 15 to 20 minutes.
Our first episode in the new format is Scott Wallsten of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. You’ve probably heard the factoid that the United States ranks near the bottom among developed countries when it comes to broadband speeds and penetration. In this week’s podcast, Scott helps us dig into these numbers and explain why the United States isn’t doing as badly as is commonly supposed. And he argues that it’s silly to base complex policy decisions on a one-dimensional ranking.
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!
As is typical, Julian makes a point I’ve been trying to make for a while, only it sounds a lot more eloquent when he says it. In reply to Brian Doherty’s argument that those who decry commercialism while using the products of capitalism are somehow hypocritical, Julian says:
Certainly very few Burners would last a week in the Nevada desert without many of the products of commerce, but it just doesn’t follow that the desire for a temporary commercial-free zone is therefore somehow hypocritical or steeped in “performative contradiction.” It is perfectly coherent to be a thoroughgoing free-marketeer, to appreciate how deftly the price system harnessed the self-love of thousands of individuals, from lumberjacks and miners to carpenters and plumbers, in order to produce your local church—and yet still prefer that Starbucks refrain from opening up shop in the narthex. Having bought prophylactics at the corner deli in the evening does not forbid you from taking umbrage if your lover leaves a fifty on the nightstand the following morning. The most ardent capitalist will want a few spaces where she can feel confident that her neighbor’s friendliness is not the opening gambit in a pitch to sell her a T-shirt, even if she was happy to buy the one she’s wearing. We are entitled to happily engage the butcher, the brewer, and the baker on the basis of our respective self-loves while hoping for a little benevolence from our brothers, our bowling buddies, and our Burners.
Today, the Well Connected Project of the Center for Public Integrity is excited to launch an issue portal jointly with Congresspedia. This issue portal is a wiki, like Wikipedia, creating a collection of articles on telecom, media and technology policy, in a single location. Anyone can read, write and edit these articles.
This issue portal builds on the great telecom and technology reporting done by the members of the Well Connected Project staff. This venture into collaborative journalism is a first for our project. It adds a new element to our investigative journalism endeavor. First of all, we have the Media Tracker, a free database of more than five million records that tells you who owns the media where you live by typing in you ZIP code. If we win our lawsuit against the FCC, we’ll also include company-specific broadband information in the Media Tracker.
Second, our blog features dozens of quick-turnaround stories on the hottest topics in telecom and media policy. Recent stories have broken news on the battle over 700 Megahertz, on the lobbying over the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and also over copyright controls on electronic devices. We also do investigative reports – like this one about Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co. – that build on the data that is freely available in Media Tracker.
Now, with the addition of this Congresspedia wiki, our project aims to incorporate citizen-journalism on key public policy issues near and dear to the blogosphere. These are issues like Broadband availability, Digital copyright, Digital television, Regulating media content, and Spectrum are at the core of what techies care about in Washington. We hope you will add others articles, too. In fact, I’ve already started my own wish list: articles about Patent overhaul legislation, Media ownership, the Universal Service Fund, and Video franchising. Our reporters can summarize these issues and debates, but so can you.
Take a crack at them!
Everything in the digital world moves fast, but this has to be a record. Apple’s new iPhone has gone from cool new innovation to a new form of slavery in less than two weeks. Just released on June 29, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) seems to consider it already a “must-have” — complaining yesterday about restrictions placed by Apple and AT&T on its availability. Speaking yesterday at a Commerce Committee hearing, he lambasted the fact that the iPhone is only available with AT&T service, as well as the $175 early termination fee on its 2-year contract.
The iPhone is like the Hotel California, he said — “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Some critics go even farther. On CNBC’s “On the Money” show last night, I debated the issue with Gary Goodman, of Customersatisfaction.com, who (and I’m not making this up) argued that “what we have here today is the equivalent of consumer slavery.”
Slavery? I’ve heard people say they are slaves to their cellphone, but are they slaves to their provider because they signed a contract? Is there perhaps a Thirteenth Amendment problem here that should be examined?
The idea is of course ludricrous. If this is slavery, it is a strangely popular kind.
Every once in a while I connect with my inner geek and read through Slashdot. I often see some interesting arguments by people that understand technical issues. However, this comment, made in response to news that Apple purchased the rights to the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), provoked me:
The real lesson here is that the idea that the developers should pool their copyrights into one person is flawed. That person can then cash out. The get all the profits for everyone else’s work. The other developers lose out on both getting a piece of the pie if they would have wanted that, and they lose out in the moral sense in that if they didn’t want their code to suddenly become part of a closed source project, they have no say in it anymore.
It seems to me that nothing wrong occurred when Apple purchased this code. CUPS, which is used for printing by many Linux distributions and in the Mac OS X, was an open source project created by Michael Sweet. Sweet presumably owned the copyright to the code, so the code was legally his to sell. Sweet should be rewarded for his labor — throw him a buck or two in the tip cup!
But wait…what about the other developers that contributed code to CUPS? Or — forget the tip cup, did Sweet profit from the entire give-a-penny, take-a-penny tray? Have no fear, as CUPS will continue to be an open-source project under a GPL2/LGPL2 license. So there’s no downside and no moral turpitude — developers that chose to contribute code will still see that code available as free software, and can take and add to it as they wish.
What seems to burn the Slashdot commenter is the fact that there’s an upside. Someone actually made money! It’s a shame that when a technology creator/owner like Sweet gets his reward, and doesn’t infringe on the rights of others to do so, he still draws fire. Oh well, in a world where people often materialistically prize money above all, there are also those who wrongly lust over other people’s money.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
