Just in time for the holidays, British officials have announced that Santa will no longer be the only one who can find out if you’ve been naughty or nice. The Independent reports the imminent creation of a nationwide network of road, convenience store and other cameras that will be tied into a central database equipped with license plate reading technology. The movements of all cars will be recorded and stored for a period of two years. The ostensible purpose is to gather intelligence and fight terrorism, of course. Truly frightening.

Though I haven’t read Steven Johnson’s book, I know he makes the argument that the complexity of plotlines in modern-day televison is a significant departure from the simplistic shows of the past, and as a result, our brains must work harder to digest today’s shows. In other words, the television of today is “smarter” than that of yesteryear. That’s all well and good and may be a satisfactory answer to the question of whether TV rots your brain. Answer: not anymore.

But, new research by a couple of fellows at the University of Chicago suggests that the answer might be: it never did. Certainly, too much of anything can be bad for us, but Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro contend that the presence of television in American life has actually raised our IQs, especially in homes where English was a second language. I had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Shapiro this past weekend at an IHS-sponsored event. He explained that he and Gentzkow’s research compared standardized test scores for children in certain areas before and after television was introduced. Conclusion: scores rose after the introduction of TV. Read the whole thing here.

So, let me get this straight, if I own a broadband cable network, I don’t have to allow competitor’s access to my network, but, on the other hand if I own a home on a desirable plot, I not only have to allow those competing for the use of that resource (my home and land) onto my land, but have to essentially give it to them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the Court upheld property rights in Brand X, But I’m curious why they didn’t apply the same rationale as they did in Kelo. As Adam notes below, the rationale in Kelo could have easily been applied to other property, such as cable networks. Open access advocates have made that very case for years.

Indeed, the “common carrier” doctrine holds that offering a service to the public constitutes a standing offer that anyone, including a competitor, can accept, so that a common carrier like a railroad or a hotel must offer service to everyone at the same rates. This doctrine has had disastrous economic consequences for many network industries (though many of them received subsidies or protection in return), but I can’t see why the Court would choose not to extend common carriage requirements to cable, when a reasonable case (at least under existing jurisprudence) could be made that such a regulation was reasonable, while a few days earlier the justices chose the much more radical path of stripping the “for public use” clause of the 5th Amendment of any meaning.

Does this make any sense to anyone else?

Forbes has an interesting column on how to lower your mobile phone taxes by changing your area code to a lower tax jusrisdiction. Though this loophole will likely be plugged quickly, it illustrates the difficulty of jurisdictional controls in an increasingly borderless world and the increasing absurdity of regulations based on mere physical location. It also demonstrates the benefits of tax competition among the states.

Adam co-authored an excellent paper on the benefits of tax competiton a couple of years ago, which is worth a read.

When I saw this article yesterday about agents from DHS shutting down a BitTorrent site, I thought that there’s no way anyone could be suggesting that copyright infringement and terrorism are related. Turns out, that’s exactly what some folks in law enforcement think.

According to Conan O’Brien.

Via Hit & Run.

No longer just a place for “conservatarian” icons to smoke pot or a hunting ground for modern-day pirates, the international waters (just off the shore of California) will soon harbor an innovative software engineering firm, according to a great post over at CNet’s News.com. Due to ridiculous limits on H1-B visas and other regulatory hurdles, the entrepreneurs at SeaCode did what freedom-loving businessmen have done for centuries, exploit loopholes in the law. SeaCode will employ 600 software engineers from all over the globe and house them on a boat 3.1 miles off the coast of California, just over the line into international waters. The programmers will all be registered as “seamen” with the Bahamas and will be able to take advantage of shore leave without H1-Bs. Not only will SeaCode offer wages of around $1,800 a month compared to about $500 a month in India, they’ll also not have to pay U.S. payroll taxes. Sounds like a win-win situation for the programmers, SeaCode and their clients.

I’m strongly resisting the urge to make a nautically- or piratically-themed joke.

Or so says some guy in an article on the latest bipartisan efforts to extend broadcast speech restrictions to cable and satellite TV. It’s up over at AFF’s Brainwash online mag.

Deep link.

Sen. Brownback is on a crusade to rid the ‘Net of pornography. According to this article, members of a panel organized by Brownback compare pornography addiction to heroin or crack. As Reason Magazine Senior Editor Jacob Sullum has pointed out in his book Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use and elsewhere such comparisons are geared to to instill fear about one thing by comparing it to something the reader already believes is extremely harmful, thereby obviating the need to prove that the first thing is harmful.

The demonization of porn and referring to consumers as addicts by Brownback and others also serves to eliminate personal responsibility for porn consumption and the adverse effects that may have in some people’s lives. One panelist said as much when she advocated that police search for pornography at crime scenes. Maybe the presence of porn could be made an aggravating factor for certain crimes, like we do with guns used in crimes.

Or, perhaps we should use common sense and hold people responsible for their actions. I know that’s a crazy idea, but it used to work pretty well. If you think you have a problem with porno or anything else for that matter, by all means seek help, but don’t try to make the rest of us pay for your problems by making certain forms of speech illegal.

Freedom of Speech?

Even Brownback acknowledges that congressional efforts to restrict Internet porn face a pretty large obstacle: the First Amendment. Whether you like it or not, free expression includes content that many find offensive or disgusting. Trying to restrict speech just because you don’t like it makes the law into an enforcer of subjective preferences rather than an objective standard designed to protect the rights of all.

Former Catoite and GMU law student Jerry Brito notes that the LOC will be hosting a lecture series on “Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context.” The series starts tonight and runs through March. C-SPAN will broadcast each lecture.

And taxpayers foot the bill.

John Borland over at CNET laments the fact that telecommunications providers and “golf-themed” community developers in the suburban Houston area are tapping into $2.2 billion in federal giveaways designed to fund rural broadband deployment. The Houston developments receiving the sweet, sweet subsidies also happen to be in Tom DeLay’s district.

The article also bemoans the fact that very few rural communities are ponying up to the Bush broadband trough to fund broadband investment in rural and “underserved” areas. One telling sentence near the end frets: “This is money that could literally save rural towns from extinction.”

A few quick thoughts:

1. Who can’t give away $2.2 billion?

2. After years of waste by government and abuse of “well-intentioned” federal programs by corporations and others suckling on the federal sow’s teat, why would anyone be shocked or appalled at such corruption in Bush’s rural broadband plan or at DeLay taking advantage of his position to benfit his home district, especially since tech and telecom pork is the hip thing to do on Capitol Hill? How else can Congressmen show that they are concerned and relevant except by throwing subsidies at technology?

3. If the only thing standing between your town and extinction is a subsidy for broadband development, maybe you should just let your town die.

4. The only way to stop abuse and corruption in federal subsidy programs is to end federal subsidy programs. I know that we in the U.S. have romantic notions of the family farm and living out in the wilderness, but that pastoral vision shouldn’t be propped up artificially, especially when it costs the rest of us billions.

Check out these previous posts on tech pork and the inevitable waste and misallocation that giving away loads of taxpayer “scrilla” engenders:

http://www.techliberation.com/archives/cat_tech_pork.php

Techdirt has a blurb on the inevitability of RFID technology and another on why that’s a good thing, making the point, as Declan McCullagh does here, that a precautionary approach to technological innovation can deprive consumers, and society in general, of tremendous benefits. In other words, the mere possibility of some harm resulting from the development or widespread use of a technology should not preclude that development or use. Rather, a comparison of potential costs and benefits is required. As Declan points out, the potential benefits of RFID are tremendous while the costs, though not completely negligible, are easily managed through technological safeguards and consumer-driven accountability.

Of course try telling that to the folks at CASPIAN, whose spychips.com site (the name says it all) puts them squarely in the luddite/technophobe camp. What CASPIAN fails to realize is that privacy means different things to different people and that just because their privacy threshold is very high doesn’t mean that everyone else should have to live with that level. Rather, privacy, like everything else, is about tradeoffs. If you want more of a good or service, you go out and buy it, but this means that you have less to spend on something else. If you are comfortable with less of a thing, you sell it or refrain from buying more. You personally bear the cost or receive the benefit of your choice. Groups like CASPIAN find tradeoffs intolerable. Instead, they propose that everyone else, regardless whether they want to, subsidize their high privacy preference by foregoing the many benefits that personal information trading can bring. Mandatory privacy levels strip consumers and producers of the freedom to choose and is a threat to future technological innovation.

Though Adam already linked to it in a previous post, Jim Harper’s excellent paper on this subject provides a helpful framework for thinking about privacy issues and RFID technology.

A couple of days ago, the Post had an article detailing the strategy shift that politicians are using to “reach out” to voters. Rather than the old, and very expensive, method of sending voters junk mail, politicians are now buying very detailed e-mail lists in order to spam registered voters in targeted ways. This trend should be of no surprise to anyone. When CAN SPAM passed last year, it only “banned” commercial e-mail. Apparently, political messages are so vital that spamming voters with them is ok.

Frankly, though I would prefer no spam at all, I’d much rather see some of the fairly creative pleas to visit online pharmacies or invitations to take advantage of financial opportunities in Nigeria than receive any more messages from any candidate about how everything is going to change for the better if I’ll just go cast my vote.

Hat tip: Tad DeHaven, NTU policy analyst

In other spam news, it appears that spammers are adopting sender authentication faster than everyone else.

Via techdirt Also, see my earlier post about how the spam wars can spur technological innovation.

There’s a very interesting article over at ZDNet about the unintended benefits of the continuing spam wars. The author makes the point that the war between spammers and filter designers has sparked new interest and innovation in the field of AI (artificial intelligence). In order to distinguish between spam and legitimate e-mail, filters must become increasingly “intelligent” as spammers continually find new ways to slip by them. The ongoing adaptation of these machines may one day make them sophisticated enough to pass a Turing test, where a human interviewer blindly interviews two subjects (one human, one computer) and is unable to tell the difference between the two. As the author concludes, “If the evil of spam leads to a renaissance of well-funded research into fundamental knowledge systems–nothing else will do–it could be the final kick we need to create truly intelligent machines.”

This contention mirrors Adam’s point in an earlier post regarding DRM, where he notes that the technological arms race between commercial content producers and those who find ways to defeat their electronic barbed wire is good for all of us in the long run. The dynamic back and forth of building better digital content protection and then watching as a teenager from Norway, for example, defeats that protection, encourages investment into technological innovation which will likely prove to have useful applications for other fields just as the spam wars are for AI development.

Wayne Crews penned a study on the pitfalls of trying to legislate spam out of existence and points out that market-based technological solutions to spam are much more successful and flexible in the long run than legal fixes.

I’d have sworn this was an Onion article if I hadn’t seen it in the Washington Post. According to the article, the Chinese government is going to get rid of all Internet pornography in the country by October 1st, in what it’s calling a “people’s war against electronic pornography.” As if the futility of that wasn’t funny enough, the name of the man tasked with leading the porno crusade, China’s Information Industry Minister, is Wang Xudong. (Yes, I’m still in fifth grade.)

Robert Corn-Revere wrote an excellent paper on Internet censorship for Cato not too long ago. He points out that Saudi Arabia routes all of its net traffic through a single chokepoint where it is reviewed by censors. Obviously China is too large and has too many servers for such a system to be effective there, but the government might try to bully ISPs into doing the censoring for it, a tact that Australia is also considering.

The BBC reports on a new effort by ISPs in Great Britain to rid their networks of spam: pull the plug on the sites using spam to advertise, or “spamvertise”. Though this policy may result in some collateral damage and is unlikely to stop spam from sites outside of the UK, it shows that private, self-help measures are possible and may prove to be quite effective. If successful, it will be interesting to see if ISPs in other countries follow suit.

Via /.