Awesome:
‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’
Articles by Tim Lee 
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Want to know why copyright lobbyists never seem to have any real arguments? Because they describe those of us who defend the traditional contours of copyright law—including “limited terms”—as “copyright opponents.”
I mean, really.
I’ve got an article in the print edition of Reason about Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to make the DMCA look ridiculous. It’s now available online. One of the hazards of writing about technology for a publication with a months-long publishing process is that articles sometimes end up out-of-date before they hit newsstands. That happened in this case: I wrote the article in May, shortly after Microsoft announced it would shut down the licensing servers for MSN Music customers. Then Microsoft flip-flopped in June, too late to re-write the article.
James Grimmelman has a great short paper called “The Google Dilemma” that discusses the social implications of search engine results. Check it out.
After resisting the iPhone siren song for a year, I’ve finally surrendered and joined the 3G bandwagon. Getting a functional iPhone required three store visits and a combined 4 hours of waiting, but I think it was worth it. I’ll warn you in advance that this is going to be a bit of unabashed Apple-fanboyism.
As a long-time Mac user, I was expecting to like the iPhone quite a bit, but I’ve still been pleasantly surprised by the user interface. Apple’s UI engineers pay attention to detail to a degree that no other technology company can match. Most technology products—especially relatively new ones— tend to have a significant number of rough edges: places where the engineers got the feature working so it could be added to the marketing checklist, but clearly didn’t put in a ton of effort beyond that point. In contrast, consider the following random anecdotes:
Pity the poor musician:
The Times quotes, Herbie Flowers, who played bass on Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side and David Bowie’s Space Oddity: “The term of protection for performers has not kept up with life expectancy and it is high time it was changed. I played on a couple of very successful tracks, and it would be unfair for me to stop receiving income for these performances after 50 years — probably just at the time when I will need it the most.”
I wonder if he realizes that the vast majority of people “stop receiving income” from their jobs the moment they stop doing them. You can be sure, for example, that I won’t be continuing to pay my dry cleaner 50 years from now for the pants he cleaned last month.
Hat tip: Rob Hyndman
My colleague Will Wilkinson has a great commentary on Marketplace where he points out that more H1-B visas means less inequality:
Increases in wage inequality over the past few decades is primarily a story of the supply and demand of skilled labor together with the effects of technological innovation. Wage increases tend to track improvements in the productivity of labor and gains in productivity tend to be driven by innovations that help workers do more in less time. But in recent decades, technical innovation has increased the productivity of more highly-educated workers faster than it has for less-educated workers. These growing inequalities in productivity have helped create growing inequalities in wages.
But that’s not the whole story. The American system of higher education produces skilled workers too slowly to keep up with the demand. This scarcity in the supply bids up the wages of the well-educated even more, further widening the wage gap. If we raised visa quotas on skilled labor, that would help bring supply in line with demand and reduce the wage gap between more and less skilled workers.
These days, almost everybody but their beneficiaries think agricultural subsidies are a lousy idea. They benefit a few already relatively wealthy American farmers and agribusiness firms to the detriment of poor farmers around the world. But H-1B visa restrictions are subsidies that benefit relatively rich domestic workers over their poorer foreign peers, and so it turns out many of us liberal-minded college grads are enjoying our own protectionist boost.
In this case, it seems the moral outrage is… well, we seem to be keeping it to ourselves.
Will is spot on. And he’s greeted with a cacophony of condemnation from commenters who either don’t seem to have grokked Will’s basic argument, or who make nakedly self-serving arguments of the form: I have an advanced degree, and I don’t make as much money as I’d like, therefore we need to keep the brown people out to push up my wages. This has the virtue of candor, if nothing else, but normally when people advocate positions that benefit themselves at the expense of people less fortunate than themselves, they at least have the decency to pretend that’s not what they’re doing.
What virtually all of the commenters seem to be missing is that the costs of protectionism for high-skilled Americans falls not only on immigrants who are unable to make better lives for themselves, but also on less-skilled Americans who are forced to pay higher prices for goods and services produced by high-skilled workers. That I take to be Will’s point, and hardly any of the commenters seem to have even taken note of it, much less offered a coherent response.
Of course, this isn’t terribly surprising. People are rarely rational when their own self-interest is involved. No matter how wealthy or successful you are—and the people who are effected by H1-B increases are overwhelmingly among the better-compensated workers in the wealthiest country on Earth—it’s always possible to feel beleaguered. By world and historical standards, a software engineer making $80,000 a year is obscenely wealthy. Yet apparently many such workers feel it a grave imposition to be asked to compete on a level playing field with foreign-born workers, few of whom grew up with the privileges and luxuries that most middle-class Americans enjoy as a birthright.
I’m reading yet another book about eavesdropping, Diffie and Landau’s Privacy on the Line, which covers privacy and surveillance debates from a crypto-focused standpoint. This is not surprising given that one of the co-authors, Whitfield Diffie, is one of the most famous names in cryptography research.
One of the cases it discusses, which I didn’t previously know about, is Phil Karn’s challenge to the Clinton administration’s silly export-control restrictions on cryptography software. The government required a license before cryptographic software could be exported. Karn applied for, and recieved, a license to export Bruce Schneier’s famous Applied Cryptography, a textbook on cryptography that included the source code to many important cryptographic algorithms. The government ruled, reasonably enough, that books were protected by the First Amendment and he could export Schneier’s tome.
Karn then typed the source code to one of the crypto algorithms printed in Schneier’s book, saved it on a floppy disk, and applied for permission to export that. This time the answer was different: the floppy disk was a “munition,” and could not be sent out of the country. Karn sued, and the case dragged out in federal courts through 2000, when the Clinton administration finally relented and stopped trying to control the export of cryptography software.
Continue reading →
There’s an interesting contrast between Bamford’s book about the NSA and Theoharis’s tome on the FBI. Theoharis documents an agency that was, at least under J. Edgar Hoover, basically criminal. Between World War II and Watergate, it put legitimate criminal investigation on the back burner while it focused on Hoover’s personal priorities of blackmail, voyeurism, and political manipulation. In contrast, Bamford, writing in 2001, portrays the NSA as a basically law-abiding agency that has yet to seriously abuse its massive powers. In some cases, such as Project SHAMROCK, the NSA did things that were technically illegal, but as Bamford tells it they were nonetheless scrupulous about obeying the spirit of the law, suppressing information about US persons if they were not directly related to legitimate intelligence-gathering or law-enforcement activities.
As we see on pp. 450-1, Bamford in 2001 saw the threats from the NSA as largely theoretical:
NSA’s major push into law enforcement came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. “Because the Soviet Union was no longer a threat,” said Baker, “some of the resources devoted to extracting its secrets could be turned to other tasks, to other foreign targets. But some of those foreign targets had a domestic tinge. As topics like international narcotics trafficking, terrorism, alien smuggling, and Russian organized crime rose in priority for the intelligence community, it became harder to distinguish betweeen targets of law enforcement and those of national security.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.