Wired has an article presenting David Wagner and Ed Felten’s recommendations for more secure voting machines. Their specific proposals–voter-verified paper trails; simpler, publicly available source code; ditch removable memory cards–all sound sensible to me. But I think it’s striking that in summary, what they advocate is transforming voting machines into glorified printers:
Touch-screens are easy to use and are flexible enough to accommodate disabled voters and multiple languages. Optical-scan devices provide reliable paper trails.
We recommend a third alternative that combines the best attributes of both–a ballot marking machine, such as one made by Election Systems and Software.
These devices let voters make their choices on a touch-screen. But instead of directly recording the votes digitally onto a memory card, the machine prints the votes onto a full-size paper ballot. Voters or election officials then place the completed ballots onto an optical-scan reader (.pdf), where the votes are recorded digitally.
I suppose this would marginally reduce the error rate by ensuring that all paper ballots are marked clearly. But on the other hand, more complexity means more potential for failure. Printers jam, software has bugs, power cords get tripped over, etc. And even if the machines work flawlessly, it’s not clear to me that it would be worth spending millions of dollars just to save voters the trouble of marking their own ballots.
Update: Felten points out that these are Wired‘s recommendations after talking with Wagner and Felten, and so not all of the recommendations reflect Wagner or Felten’s personal views. My mistake.
Perhaps the most important misleading claim made in Bill Moyers’s informercial for Internet regulation is the notion that we’re in imminent danger of telcos using their control over the “last mile” to influence the direction of political debates. Moyers’s format didn’t allow him to go into the argument in much detail, but fortunately Yochai Benkler does on page 156:
[The network owner, D, has] the power to shape A’s information environment by selectively exposing A to information in the form of communications from others. Most commonly, we might see this where D decides that B will pay more if all infrastructure is devoted to permitting B to communicate her information to A and C, rather than any of it used to convey As message to C. D might then refuse to carry A’s message to C and permit only B to communicate to A and C. The point is that from A’s perspective, A is dependent on D’s decisions as to what information can be carried on the infrastructure, among whom, and in what directions. To the extent of that dependence, A’s autonomy is compromised. We might call the requirement that D can place on A as a precondition to using the infrastructure an “influence exaction.”
Sometimes, highly styized examples like this can illuminate important points by removing extraneous details. In this case, Benkler has done just the opposite: he’s abstracted away all the real-world characteristics of the web that are relevant to this issue. When we add them back in, it becomes obvious that this argument doesn’t work.
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Bill Moyers has an incredibly one-sided special on PBS tonight on telecom policy. So far, about halfway through the program, the anti-regulatory side has been represented by Mike McCurry and one Republican Congressman. McCurry was billed as a lobbyist for the telecom industry, and his every sentence was followed by a rebuttal from a pro-regulatory representative. The pro-regulatory side has gotten roughly a dozen representatives, none of whom were labeled as lobbyists for Google or Microsoft. They got lengthy interviews consisting mostly of softball questions.
Astonishingly, Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America cited the Interstate Commerce Act, which imposed nondiscrimination rules on the railroad industry, as a model for network neutrality regulation. As I explained in the New York Times back in August, they’d be wise to pick a different example:
After President Grover Cleveland appointed Thomas M. Cooley, a railroad ally, as its first chairman, the commission quickly fell under the control of the railroads, gradually transforming the American transportation industry into a cartel. By 1935, when it was given oversight of the trucking industry, the commission was restricting competition and enabling price increases throughout virtually the entire surface transportation industry. Decades later, in 1970, a report released by a Ralph Nader group described the commission as “a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.”
Of course, viewers of Moyers’s show didn’t hear that side of the story, as they didn’t bother to ask any critics of regulation to respond to Cooper’s arguments.
Jim DeLong analyzes Universal’s lawsuits against YouTube competitors Grouper and Bolt:
I bet that if one looked at the contracts between Google and Universal, one would find clauses binding the signatory states to undertake such copyright wars. Now that YouTube has built up its viewership, perhaps largely on the basis of a casual attitude toward copyright, it makes sense for it to pull up the ladder. No one is more vehement in support of property rights than a buccaneer who has gotten rich. Besides, as a simple matter of competitive balance against other deep pockets, such as Sony, if YouTube must incur the ongoing costs of carefully tiptoeing down the path of righteousness, then it has a strong interest in being sure that others must incur similar costs.
These developments will not prevent new sites from arising, but it means that such sites must start with pockets deep enough to engage in the monitoring necessary for compliance. They will also probably be forced to get licensed from the get-go for the inevitable violations
Legal compliance as a barrier to entry! Personally, I love it, because it is so wonderfully entrepreneurial.
I can think of a number of words to describe this strategy, but “entrepreneurial” isn’t one of them.
Related to my last post and Monday’s quote of the day, USA Today had an article on Monday headlined “closed systems leave song buyers out in the cold.” There’s little in the article that regular readers of TLF haven’t seen before, but the fact that a mainstream, lowbrow newspaper is starting to cover the issue indicates how far mainstream perceptions have shifted. Three years ago, when Apple launched the iTunes Store, the people warning that DRM would create compatibility nightmares for consumers were largely regarded as Chicken Littles. Now as Microsoft gets ready to release a third major DRM format that’s mutually incompatible with the previous two, the problem is becoming a practical headache for millions of consumers. If you’ve built up a music library at the iTunes Store, there’s no easy and legal way for you to become a Zune customers: you’ll have to download an illicit conversion program (which probably won’t be terribly user-friendly), burn all the songs to CD and re-rip them into Zune, or repurchase each and every song from the Zune store. None of those options are appealing to the busy professionals that are most likely to buy high-priced music devices. It’s only a matter of time before frustrations reach a boiling point.
I’m starting to think that my prediction of a DRM-free music industry by 2020 was pessimistic. I wouldn’t be surprised if a customer backlash forced the majors to start offering music in open online formats before the end of the decade.
We’ve all heard that the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It seems to me that Hollywood is going through a similar process with respect to the slow-motion train wreck that is digital rights management. When I started writing about DRM policy a couple of years ago, we were somewhere between the denial (“sure, CSS got cracked in a matter of months, but MovieLink and CinemaNow will save us!”) and anger (“If we tighten the screws a little bit more, those damn consumers will pay up!”) stages. Now, we’re starting to see signs that they’ve moved to the bargaining stage. Techdirt notes an article that suggests MPAA CTO Brad Hunt at least recognizes that they’ve got a problem:
During a question and answer session after the talk, Hunt conceded that many people already are frustrated at having to buy multiple copies of the same content to use on different commercial devices.
“I understand that if we frustrate the consumer, they will simply pirate the content,” he said. “The issue we face today is that consumers are buying content that uses specific DRM and that, in turn, is gradually creating a world of separate DRM systems.”
Hunt said the MPAA recognized the need to create an interoperability DRM solution (or, a DRM ecosystem as he described it) and said that “the consumer, if he or she has already purchased licensed material, should certainly be able to transfer that content to any other new or old device.”
So they’re in the bargaining stage: “OK, consumers hate the current crop of DRM, but if we roll out a kinder, gentler DRM with better interoperability, then consumers will jump on board!” The problem, of course, is that the lack of interoperability in the current generation of DRM formats isn’t a fluke. As I’ve argued before, interoperable DRM is a contradiction in terms. DRM technologies will always be plagued by compatibility problems, because they’re designed to restrict compatibility to approved devices.
Still, recognizing that you have a problem is the first step toward fixing it. It will probably take Hollywood a few more years to realize that all DRM is bad–that companies promoting “open” DRM schemes are selling snake-oil–but at least they’re taking the problem seriously. It’s only a matter of time before they move onto the stages of depression and, finally, acceptance. Then, maybe they’ll finally start tackling the difficult job of building online video systems that cater to the needs of their paying customers rather than treating them like criminals.
Via Amanda, who as a medical student sees the value of organ transplants on regular basis, the Washington Post has a sensible editorial on reforming our organ donation system:
All state governments and the District have tried to encourage donations by asking people to sign up when they apply for a driver’s license. But not enough people respond to this prompting, so it’s time to consider extra incentives. Three types of incentives merit attention. The decision to pledge organs could be linked to the chance of receiving one: People who check the box on the driver’s-license application when they are healthy would, if they later fell sick, get extra points in the system used to assign their position on the transplant waiting list (other factors include how long you have waited and how well an available organ would match your blood type and immune system). Another sort of incentive is financial: Georgia has experimented with a $9 discount on its driver’s-license fee. A final reform would shift from opt-in organ donations to an opt-out system: Unless you went out of your way to check a box on your driver’s license application to indicate that you did not want to give organs, you would be considered a potential donor.
These strike me as common sense and frankly rather timid steps toward increasing the supply of organs for transplant. I find it depressing that these proposals are likely to be considered controversial among “bioethicists.”
Here’s Yochai Benkler’s take on the evolution of the telecom sector, from page 152 of The Weatlh of Networks:
Throughout most of the 1990s and currently, communications and information policy around the globe was guided by a wish to “let the private sector lead,” interpreted in large measure to mean that the various property and property-like regulatory frameworks should be strengthened, while various regulatory constraints on property-like rights should be eased. The drive toward proprietary, market-based provisioning of communications and information came from disillusionment with regulatory systems and state-owned communications networks… In the United States, this model translated into efforts to shift telecommuniations from the regulated monopoly model it followed throughout most of the twentieth century to a competitive market, and to shift Internet development from being primarily a government-funded exercise, as it had been from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, to being purely private property, market based. This model was declared in the Clinton administration’s 1993 National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action, which pushed for privatization of Internet deployment and dvelopment. It was the basis of that administrations’s 1995 White Paper on Intellectual Property, which mapped the most aggresssive agenda ever put forward by any American administration in favor of perfect enclosure of the public domain; and it was in those years when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first implemented spectrum auctions aimed at more thorough privatization of wireless communications in the United States…
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The Register reports that Wal-Mart has failed to gain control of boycottwalmart.com:
The panel ruled that Wal-Mart’s case could not stand because nobody finding the website boycottwalmart.com would imagine that the site belonged to the retailer.
“This panel is of the view that members of the public wishing to find a website associated with the Complainant would not be confused as to whether the Complainant owned or operated the website at ‘www.boycottwalmart.com’,” said its decision. “It would be perfectly clear to anyone who recognized the Complainant’s trademarks that the disputed domain name would not resolve to a site used by the Complainant to promote its own goods or services.”
“Accordingly, the Panel finds that ‘boycottwalmart.com’ is neither identical nor confusingly similar to the trademark “Wal-mart” nor any proven variants of that mark,” it ruled.
This seems like a sensible decision. This is a recurring issue in Internet governance. Perhaps the most famous example was the eToys/etoy dispute of the dot-com era. It was strangely appropriate when eToys subsequently went down in flames, while etoy appears to be alive and kicking (I have to admit I have no idea what etoy actually does).
“The notion that a track I buy in DRM is protected and one without DRM isn’t is a fallacy. It’s all nonsense. Music is never going to be protected, and anybody who tells you that is not being honest. Yes, you can put up speed bumps, but the people who really want to steal music are going to steal it. So you’re just making it hard for people who want to do the right thing to get the music they legitimately purchased on the devices and services that they want.”
—Yahoo Music general manager David Goldberg
Hat Tip: EFF
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.