Ars covers an FCC filing by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association concerning the uptake of CableCARDs. The CableCARD has not proven a hit with consumers, to put it charitably. So far, 200,000 have been deployed, out of 73 million households with cable TV service. That’s about a quarter of one percent.
This is not a surprise. CableCARDs incorporate two of my least favorite things–digital rights management and government technology mandates–so I might be biased, but I have trouble seeing why anyone would want one. The cards were mandated by the FCC as a way of creating a competitive market in set-top-box replacements. The cable industry likes its set-top boxes, resents the FCC’s attempts to abolish them, and so they’ve done everything they could to resist their roll-out. Their primary weapon has been foot-dragging. They released a first generation CableCARD spec that was were crippled by limited functionality. More than a year after the first generation was unveiled, it remains unclear when the second generation will become available.
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I hope the guys at Techdirt don’t mind me ripping off entire posts, because they’re too good, and too short, to excerpt:
Sometimes on the internet, things break. With so many pieces of network gear between a user, their ISP and a content provider’s servers, it’s not unreasonable that something goes down, gets misconfigured, or unplugged every once in a while. Something along those lines happened yesterday at Comcast, when a DNS server failed, temporarily blocking users from accessing Google and some other sites–and then the conspiracy theories started flying, with plenty of commenters fingering net neutrality even after the problem had been resolved, and the truth of the equipment failure had come out. The upshot of this isn’t to point out trigger-happy commenters ready to jump all over ISPs before the truth comes out, but rather that it illustrates just how difficult telcos have made it for themselves–should they ever actually go so far as to follow through on any of their inflammatory rhetoric about blocking or degrading the traffic of sites that won’t pay protection money. The tremendous amount of press this issue has gotten, fueled by the exaggerated and dishonest claims from people on both sides of the issue has made a lot of consumers hyper-sensitive and imagining “net neutrality violations” where they don’t exist. It’s seemed pretty clear all along that any telco stupid enough to block access to something like Google in the middle of this highly charged debate would be shooting itself in the foot; but these sorts of reactions to network outages and problems reiterate that even if telcos have the right to demand payments from content providers and block traffic, doing so would be commercial suicide.
I think this illustrates the virtues of the Felten thesis: threatening to enact new regulations may be more effective than actually enacting them. Even if the pro-regulatory side ultimately loses the legislative battle, the mere fact that we had a big debate about it means that a lot more people are now paying attention to the importance of network neutrality principles, and it’s likely to intensify the backlash should the telcos do anything shady in the future.
As I write this, Ed Felten is testifying before the House Administration Committee on e-voting. He recommends better physical security features, a voter-verified paper audit trail, and greater involvement of computer security experts. These are all good recommendations. One recommendation he doesn’t make, unfortunately, is that we consider scrapping e-voting altogether.
If there’s one message that comes through most clearly in his testimony, it’s “get the details right.” The word “detail” appears on every single page of the written testimony, and in five distinct cases he stresses the importance of paying attention to the implementation details of the security measures he recommends. He stresses that security measures that sound good in the abstract will be useless or worse if they’re implemented poorly.
I think he’s right, but here’s the problem: I don’t see any reason to think that the political process will
ever be able to get the details right. Politics proceeds by 30-second soundbites. Congress-critters are too busy to delve deeply into the minutia of voting machine design. And, frankly, the people who tend to volunteer to be poll workers are not, on average, very smart.
If you’ve got a policy proposal that depends on the political process getting a lot of complex technical details right, you should probably find a better proposal. Our political institutions should be as fault-tolerant as possible, so that even if a lot of people screw up, the system will still work.
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Yesterday I argued that computerized voting was dangerous because it makes the voting process more centralized and less transparent. Today I’ll argue that open source voting is clearly better than proprietary computerized voting, but that paper ballots is preferable to either.
Open source voting software doesn’t do a whole lot to address the centralization issue. True, the development of the software would be decentralized, but the process of manufacturing the machines and loading the software onto them would still likely be handled by a commercial company that would constitute a single point of failure. If someone at the manufacturing facility is unscrupulous, or if someone finds a vulnerability in the software or hardware, he’s going to be just as able to compromise a large number of open source machines as he would with closed-source ones.
As for transparency, open source voting machines clearly enhance transparency in the sense that more people are able to study and criticize the design of the voting software. And that would certainly enhance security. It’s widely accepted among security professionals that openness and peer review is the best way to ensure a system’s security. If Diebold made the source code to its voting machines publicly available, it’s certain that security experts would have long since pointed out those the flaws Felten discovered and Diebold (I hope) would have fixed them.
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Businessweek reports that CinemaNow has delivered the Holy Grail of the online movie business: a mainstream movie (although, it must be said, not a very good movie) that consumers can purchase for $10 and burn to a DVD that can be played on an ordinary DVD player.
Well, sort of.
BusinessWeek mentions in passing that they licensed technology “from a German company” to copy-protect the DVDs. That made me skeptical, as the technical problem involved was quite challenging. As has been discussed on this site before, the copy-protection on DVDs works by putting the encryption keys for the DVD in a part of the disc that can’t be written to on the type of DVD-R media that’s available to the general public (known as “G” media). That means that if a PC tries to copy a DVD, it can read the keys, but it can’t write them to the new disk.
But what that really means is that home computers can’t create
any encrypted DVDs that will play on DVD players, because the only encryption scheme those players support is the one that requires “A” media, which isn’t available to ordinary consumers. All a PC can do is generate an unencrypted movie. And that, Hollywood believes, would be an unacceptable piracy risk. So, I thought, this magical German technology must be awfully sketchy to do what it claims to do.
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Legislation to whitewash President Bush’s spying programs has moved another step closer to passage, as three of the Republican holdouts accepted a “compromise” that EFF’s Derek Slater says will still undermine civil liberties.
The most objectionable thing about the Specter bill, from my perspective, was the fact that it would have made FISA review optional for spying programs. So even if the Bush administration promises to get a warrant for this program, that still would have set a bad precedent for future administrations, who may opt not to get a warrant with Congress’s imprimatur. The Post article suggests that that language has been strengthened a little bit, but not very much:
According to the lawmakers, a second major change would clarify that a decision by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court upholding the warrantless surveillance program’s legality would not give blanket authorization for the president to pursue wiretaps without court approval.
It’s not clear to me what this means, but it certainly doesn’t sound like what’s needed–a clear statement from Congress that surveillance of Americans without a court order is illegal. And given the sorry track record of recent moderate Republican “compromises” over civil liberties issues, color me skeptical that this one is any better.
Techdirt notes that peer-to-peer network Limewire is returning fire in its battle with the RIAA:
Last month, the RIAA sued Limewire after Limewire wouldn’t agree to simply roll over and pretend the RIAA’s interpretation of the Supreme Court decision in the Grokster case was actually what the Supreme Court said. The court actually said that services could be found liable, if they were shown to actively induce infringement. The RIAA and the MPAA pretended this meant that any file sharing network that had unauthorized content was flat-out illegal. Of course, that’s a bit of a stretch. So, it already seemed like it would be an interesting case, but now Limewire has hit back even harder with counterclaims accusing the RIAA of antitrust violations, consumer fraud and other misconduct. Specifically, they seem to be making the case that the RIAA only wants to shut down Limewire because it is a competitive distribution mechanism that they cannot control, which helps compete with their monopolistic control on traditional distribution. It’s an interesting claim that does make some sense, though the RIAA will simply try to paint Limewire as a tool for “thieves.” As with many of these types of cases, there’s probably a decent chance that the sides will settle before any decision is made, but in this case, it would be very interesting to see the actual outcome of any lawsuit–both on the issue of whether or not simply running a file sharing network is inducement and on whether or not there really is an antitrust claim here. If the case does go forward and the RIAA loses on the antitrust issue, it could have a big impact on the traditional labels, and could actually be a catalyst towards forcing them to accept the changing nature of the market. This is becoming a case well worth watching.
Limewire’s point about the
Grokster is an important one. The Supreme Court did not rule that peer-to-peer file sharing is illegal per se. What they said was that there was ample evidence (from advertisements, internal company emails, etc) that Grokster intended to make a business of copyright infringement, and so the courts didn’t have to reach the question of whether running a peer-to-peer network, as such, constitutes secondary copyright infringement. Frankly, I think Limewire probably still deserves to lose, but they should at least have the opportunity to persuade the judge that unlike Grokster they legitimately expect to make money through more legitimate channels.
I don’t find the antitrust angle very compelling. There are lots of alternative music distribution services that aren’t being sued. eMusic and MySpace come to mind. Those services have been making a good-faith effort not to facilitate piracy, and as a result the RIAA has left them alone. If Limewire is guilty of secondary copyright infringement, then it certainly shouldn’t trigger antitrust scrutiny for the RIAA to enforce its members’ rights under the law.
A couple of weeks ago, Luis Villa had an excellent comment about the merits of open source voting. I had expressed the opinion that open source voting machines would be preferable to the status quo, but that the ideal outcome would be not to use computers in voting machines at all. Louis responded:
I think you’re discounting how corruptible the current system is, and focusing only on what the current generation of e-voting machines do or don’t do, security-wise. Well done e-voting (particularly including the printing of a reliable paper trail) could be much more reliable than the current mishmash of paper technologies, which as any resident of Florida, Ohio, or Chicago will tell you is deeply insecure already.
This is a good point. Paper ballots clearly aren’t perfect, and so when we’re evaluating the merits of computerized voting, it’s important not to hold them to a standard of perfection that’s not attainable with any technology. But I still think we’d be better off dispensing with computers entirely, as I’ll explain below the fold.
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I was pleasantly surprised to see sanity slowly creeping back into airport security rules, as the TSA allows liquids on airplanes:
The new rules, which will go into effect Tuesday, allow travelers to carry liquids, gels or aerosols in containers of 3 ounces or less, as long as they all fit into a clear 1-quart plastic bag that can be screened at the security checkpoint. Drinks and other items purchased in the secure part of the airport, beyond the checkpoint, will also be allowed onto planes.
The new regulations will apply to all domestic and international flights departing from United States airports, the agency said.
It’s good to know that travelers will face the minor inconvenience of placing their liquids in a zip-lock bag, rather than the major inconvenience of having to check their luggage. I fear, however, that this is as far as the TSA will go in the direction of sanity. The TSA appears to have singled out shoes and liquids for extra scrunity solely because a terrorist happened to try to use those items in terrorist plots in the past. But as they say in the investment business, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Chances are, the next terrorist will use a
different approach. It’s a little silly to automatically place an item on the heightened scrutiny list–forever–every time a terrorist even attempts to blow up an airplane with it.
So bravo to the TSA for relaxing a silly rule. Let’s hope that it’s the first of many such decisions. I’m not going to hold my breath, though.
Ars has an interesting story about three California colleges that have decided to ban Skype from its campus. The school administrators have what strikes me as a puzzling attitude toward the service, describing it as a “potentially illegal waste of resources,” without explaining what might be illegal about it. Perhaps they’ve somehow gotten the erroneous impression that there’s something inherently illicit about “grid-computing-like” network applications.
Aside from legal concerns, the other issue seems to be bandwidth:
according to the Office of Information Technology, the chief problem comes when a Skype client acts as a “supernode” and makes itself available to relay calls made by other users. Having numerous supernodes on a school network increases bandwidth consumption and has a detrimental impact on connectivity, according to the memo. Anecdotal reports from individual Skype users reveal that bandwidth consumption can increase by as much as an entire gigabyte per month for a single Skype client when it acts as a supernode.
If my math is right, 1 gigabyte per month is roughly 3 kilobits per second, a trivial amount of bandwidth on a modern campus network. Even if the bandwidth is concentrated in shorter bursts–say, if the whole gigabyte is transmitted in a single hour–that’s still a rate of only 2.2 megabits per second–roughly the bandwidth of a typical DSL line. This is not a particularly abusive use of the network.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.