Remember that old Saturday Night Live character, the Pathological Liar, played by Jon Lovitz? He’d deliver outrageous lies, like the recurring one that he was married to Morgan Fairchild. When he realized he’d thought of a particularly good lie, he’d exclaim “Yeahhh! That’s the ticket!”
Future references to tickets may only be idiomatic if a new paperless trend for concerts and sporting events takes off. Ticketmaster has introduced what it calls a “Paperless Ticket” and Veritix has a paperless ticketing technology called Flash Seats. The concept is the same – no more paper tickets.
But to me paperless tickets are not the ticket for consumer convenience.
Ticketmaster touts the convenience of paperless tickets: “Fans will no longer have to stand in line to pick up tickets at will-call”, it says, and the “entire process is quick, secure and simple.”
And, after all, it sounds appealingly convenient. It’s similar to ordering movie tickets from home on Fandango. But this is one advancement in technology that heads in the wrong direction.
First of all, check out this line from the Ticketmaster press release:
Fans who ordered tickets can simply present venue door staff their credit card, along with a valid photo ID, and they’ll be given a receipt and granted immediate access.
I added the italics for emphasis. So fans must present the credit card used in purchasing the tickets and a government-issued photo identification for admittance? Continue reading →
TCS Daily on June 18 ran an essay by me on regulatory policy. I excerpt thus:
In a sense, both models – market and regulatory — are flawed. But there is a difference. For every theory contending that markets fail, there is usually an answering argument that they tend to self-correct. Once, economic theory worried that markets would fail to fund “public goods” like lighthouses—until more careful economics revealed markets doing exactly that. More theory pointed to the evils of monopoly. But in reality a monopolist reaping substantial profits is a big target, with every entrepreneur looking for a substitute good or service. Many of the markets’ self-correcting mechanisms are simple Darwinism. Poor investors and badly run businesses lose (their own) money until they go under. Technology and other factors that bring change keep even established firms on their toes.
In contrast, self-correction is not a common response to regulatory failures. There is no good explanation for how an agency or a system of rules can be designed to systematically succeed or self-correct.
I’ve previously praised Rush Holt before for his thoughtful and energetic leadership on behalf of civil liberties issues. Over at TPM Cafe, he’s got a post explaining why he will not be supporting the FISA “compromise” tomorrow:
In reviewing the FISA legislation now under consideration, it is clear to me that it does not meet the criteria or the principles I shared with you earlier.
The bill lacks the very specific “reverse targeting” protections I secured in the two previous House FISA bills we’ve passed. This goes to the issue of not being precise in who we are targeting. It appears to me that innocent Americans who are not “targeted” still may have their communications intercepted with ultimately damaging results.
Also, the telecom immunity provisions are tilted in favor of the government and telecommunication firms, not the citizens. If enacted, this bill will ensure the plaintiffs never get their day in court. This bill contains an “exigent circumstances” provision–something so broad and undefined that virtually anything could be considered an “exigent circumstance.” That is not the way to conduct targeted intelligence collection designed to provide us with reliable, actionable intelligence on verified bad actors.
This bill also has a four year sunset provision, which is entirely too long and which would have the effect of tying the hands of the next Congress and the next President in terms of making changes to the law.
I agree with others who have commented that we have time to get this right. We do. The existing FISA statute has served us well and will continue to do so until we pass a more balanced FISA reform bill. This is not that bill.
Quite so. It’s too bad the majority of Holt’s colleagues don’t seem inclined to listen.
AP sends nastigrams to blogs for citing as few as 39 words from its stories.
Mike Arrington blogs about it at TechCrunch.
The AP quotes 22 words from Arrington’s post.
Arrington responds:
Now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I’m suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story).
Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.
Brilliant.
Google has begun including the “load time factor” into the quality score for ads on its AdWords program. This means that “Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.”
Google provides two reasons for the change: “First, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate [and thus lower profits for both the advertiser].”
One could easily imagine that some might complain that Google is “discriminating” against slower-to-load pages, and even hypothesize that this would introduce a systemic bias towards sites that can afford faster server throughput. True, this change makes the AdWords system non-“neutral” in ways that will benefit some advertisers over others.
But so what? Google is simply engaging in smart management of their network: Giving priority to ads that load faster introduces a strong incentive for all advertisers to speed up their pages in any manner possible. This small change in pricing structure could have broader effects on the efficiency of Internet browsing for all users–at least in terms of building home pages that load faster–particularly if other advertising platforms follow suit. Continue reading →
The ACLU has joined forces with Ron Paul supporters in a “strange bedfellows” coalition to raise money that will be used in primary challenges against Democrats who vote in favor of the FISA capitulation. Personally, I don’t see anything strange about libertarians and liberals joining forces on civil liberties issues, but if the label helps them get more media coverage, more power to them. Another example of those “damned, so-called libertarians” getting involved in the FISA fight.
This is how political debates get lost:
While nobody is suggesting the bipartisan breakthrough on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is in trouble, it’s clear that many liberal Democrats will be disappointed in a measure that provides a modest level of lawsuit immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the Bush administration with warrantless wiretaps.
In fact, despite Steny Hoyer’s best efforts to obfuscate matters, it’s quite clear that telcos are virtually guaranteed to get immunity. All they have to do is get the attorney general to send the judge a letter saying that the White House had told them it was OK. Since we know the White House wants immunity for these companies, it’s a safe bet that the administration will produce the necessary “certification” and the telcos will get their get-out-of-jail-free card. There’s nothing “modest” about the level of immunity the legislation offers to telcos, and it’s disappointing to see journalists buying this plainly misleading spin.
The Hill generally does a great job of covering the Hill, but this story needed some fact-checking:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will be brought to the House floor on Friday, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) office said.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was brought to the House floor 30 years ago. What’s being brought to the floor tomorrow is an amendment to FISA that is likely to significantly weaken the system of judicial scrutiny established in that law.
This isn’t just nitpicking. Back in February, the president and his allies did their best to create the impression that FISA itself was expiring, and that the NSA would no longer have the authority to spy on terrorists. This was nonsense. FISA isn’t set to expire ever, and on top of that the president has all the authority granted by the FISA provisions of the Patriot Act. Writing that Congress is bringing “FISA” to the floor re-enforces this misleading narrative.
On June 10 at the National Press Club, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy organized a forum on technology policy in the Presidential campaigns, featuring former FCC Chair Reed Hundt, tech advisor to Senator Barrack Obama and former FCC Chair Michael Powell, advisor to Senator John McCain. One sees in U.S. elections such a fascination with the personal qualities of the candidates that one would think that the President ran the executive branch single-handed. But, of course, he doesn’t, and the teams matter. A relatively inexerperienced candidate might make up for this by having a knack for identifying astute advisors–or find his platform hijacked by a careerist with his own agenda.
Reed Hundt opened with an attack on Sen. McCain, including such details as McCain’s vote against the e-rate, the provision of the 1996 Telecom Act that funded Internet service to schools and libraries. This sally might have given him greater leverage had the room not been filled with tech-savvy types aware of the program’s difficulties–and the failure of the computerized classroom to produce any educational miracles. Then he offered an outline of an Obama administration’s tech policy. Continue reading →
I agree with Jim that the media’s treatment of Judge Kozinski has been outrageous. While reading up on the controversy, I was interested to come across this interview with Reason magazine. Here are his very sensible thoughts on copyright:
Reason: Do you see any big threats to free speech out there today?
Kozinski: There are always threats to free speech. Government doesn’t like to be criticized. Owners of copyrights and other intellectual property rights are very grabby. They think they own everything, or they think they invented everything. And the big problem is drawing the line between what’s protected by copyright and what’s in the public domain.
Nobody writes anything from scratch. We all build on the past from a shared public domain of ideas. We use copyrighted ideas to communicate with each other. For instance, when you say someone has a Barbie personality, it describes something without having to go into a thousand details. But Mattel, the inventor of Barbie, hates it. People who own those trademarks and copyrights want to control the way people communicate, and they have the ear of Congress right now. Congress just extended copyright terms again [in 1998].
Reason: So have we tipped the balance too much on the side of inventors as opposed to society’s interest in accessing their ideas when it comes to intellectual property rights?
Kozinski: The problem is that some people think of copyrights as an extension of property rights. And that’s OK. But maintaining a public domain makes property more valuable. A lot of things that copyright owners complain about are things that are actually good for them. Movie studios were really worried about Betamax. It seems quaint now, but they almost killed the video store business. It’s now a big source of revenue for them.
As a friend points out, he’s not a perfect libertarian by any means, taking the wrong side on the Kelo decision, for example. But he’s certainly one of the most libertarian (and pro-free-speech) judges in the federal judiciary.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.