Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
Citizens Against Government Waste has issued a report on the Real ID Act.
This is a welcome look at Real ID. It’s known by civil libertarians as a dramatic step forward for our national ID system, but CAGW points out that it will also be a huge expense, costing the average driver around $90.
Would you pay $90 to be even more subject to government surveillance?
Kudos to CAGW for recognizing the privacy issues while it exposes the huge costs involved in the Real ID Act.
What’s the best way to savage the U.N., E.U., etc.? With humor.
Over on CircleID, there’s a great post illustrating the combined hubris and stupidity of the European bureaucrats who are making a project of ‘Internet governance.’
(The phrase ‘Internet governance’ can only be put in single quotes because it’s nonsensical. The Internet is not a thing.)
. . . When it’s regulated!
TechDirt has a post and (first) comment about FCC reform yesterday afternoon that epitomizes a problem with debates about regulation: Speaker complains of practices in a particular industry, posits increased regulation as the solution. Existing regulation is ignored, while “the market” is blamed for problems. Because of various beefs with telecommunications service (today, under regulation), the consensus (of two people, anyway) on TechDirt is that there should be more telecommunications regulation.
Gang, it’s sort of definitional that, in heavily regulated industries, regulation predominates over market forces. Where there is little or no regulation, market forces predominate. Take medical marijuana in San Francisco which, due to differences of opinion among the local, state, and federal governments, is about as little-regulated a market as we know of. There is plentiful, high-quality product with a variety of providers in friendly competition. No one is getting ‘screwed’ and, in fact, the providers of medical marijuana are as committed as patients and care-givers to providing palliative care. Elsewhere in the country, where marijuana (medical and otherwise) is very heavily regulated, to the point of prohibition, people are getting screwed: high prices and low quality (on down to bunk) – and they’re getting robbed, shot, and stabbed sometimes too.
Verizon has called for real FCC reform, under which, perhaps, market forces will predominate. The argument against, as I pointed out on TechDirt, is: We’re unhappy with the status quo so we want more of the same.
P.S. I don’t smoke pot – so save it.
. . . paying attention to the Supreme Court nomination of Judge John Roberts or decrying the foremath and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – or perhaps dissecting the latest draft telecommunications regulation – Congress has been not doing its work.
October 1st is the start of the federal government’s new Fiscal Year, and Congress has not passed most of the spending bills for the year. More than $14,000 per U.S. family will be allocated by Congress hastily and ad hoc. Again.
The U.S. State Department is proposing to use RFID in passports. Bad idea.
Much has been made of the privacy and security risk, by such sites as RFIDKills.com. Yes, “RFID Kills” is waaaay over-the-top, and will certainly sully the technology overall, but it’s with a purpose.
My comments to the State Department deal just as much with the practical question. What good does RFID do in a passport?:
If chips save significant time over optical character readers, the choice of a contactless RFID chip over a contact chip is not explained. This particularly needs justification in light of the security and privacy concerns that come with RFID chips that would store personal information unencrypted.
The configuration of the RFID chip and reader at border crossings would apparently require the chip to be brought within four inches of the reader, meaning that RFID holds a four- inch advantage over a contact chip. If the Department believes that not having to move passports four inches to make contact with a reader will alleviate congestion at international borders, it should say so. If it does not believe this, it should select a non-RFID chip at most, and perhaps withdraw the proposal entirely, sticking with optical character recognition.
The Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland has released the 2004 Technology Readiness Survey. The headline they’ve chose for it is National Survey Finds 22.9 Million Hours a Week Wasted on Spam.
The headline should be National Survey Finds How Badly You Can Mess Things Up By Asking Consumers To Self-Report Online Behavior.
The methodology was to ask 1000 people various questions, including how many spam e-mails they receive and how much time they spend deleting e-mails. The average person reports receiving 18.5 e-mails, and the average person reports spending 2.8 minutes in a typical day deleting spam.
Now do the math.
According to this survey, the average person spends 9.08 seconds deleting each spam they receive.
Try looking at a spam e-mail for nine seconds. You can’t do it. You know it’s spam in the first second – the first two if you’re slow. You can delete it in another second – another two if you’re slow.
My guess – just a guess, not the product of expensive, useless survey research – is that they have overestimated the impact and cost of spam by at least 100%.
Until they come up with a more reliable survey method, we know nothing more about the cost of spam than we did before this survey was done.
I recently reviewed a book called The Open Society Paradox: Why the 21st Century Calls for More Openness – Not Less. It’s not a good book and I said so.
The author has taken umbrage. I have no doubt that it stings to have something you’ve worked hard at openly criticized, but I feel no obligation to pull punches on a book with many weaknesses even if its author is a nice person.
His response to my review does say that the truth eventually comes out. In that spirit, I encourage all to read the review and the response . . . if not the book.
And they’re off! It’s a race between technology and law to see who can control spyware.
In Lane 5, the U.S. Congress is again considering anti-spyware legislation.
In Lane 6, Microsoft has just introduced an anti-spyware program that rivals Ad-Aware and SpyBot, according to one writer’s first impression.
Who’s in Lanes 1-4? Oh, it’s the anti-spyware tools that are already out there: Ad-Aware, SpyBot Search & Destroy, PestPatrol, and all the others.
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen! If you backed CAN-SPAM, here’s a chance to make your money back – or double your losses.
The family of a soldier killed in Iraq wants access to his e-mail. Yahoo! says no. Yahoo! is right. Their Terms of Service don’t allow them to give family access to an account after a user dies. Period. And there’s no “really sympathetic requester” exception. Stick to your guns, Yahoo!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
