Over at Ars, Ken, Jacqui, and Clint have written their magnum opus on the iPhone. On page 9 (yes, the review is more than 10 pages long), we get an interesting tidbit about the visual voicemail feature:
Visual voicemail is a new feature introduced by AT&T and Apple with the iPhone that currently only “works” over AT&T’s network. Instead of requiring the user to dial up the carrier’s voicemail number and listen to his or her voicemails in the order that they were received, visual voicemail lists each message out in visual format on the iPhone, almost like e-mail. It displays who the voicemail is from (and if it doesn’t recognize the number, it will analyze the area code and tell you what geographical area it’s from, which is helpful), and the user can tap whichever one in the list that he or she wants, no matter its position in the list. When the voicemail is playing, the user can pause it, scrub back and forth in the message, or skip.
The way it works is actually not as magical as AT&T might like you to believe, although the technology is still AT&T-specific. The iPhone actually downloads sound clips of the voicemail messages off of AT&T’s server, presumably over EDGE, and stores them in temporary files on the iPhone’s flash storage. This allows the iPhone user to select messages to listen to out of order, because all he or she is doing is listening to an audio file. This is also what enables the user to scrub with the touchscreen and listen to different parts of the message. It’s a nifty bit of technology, but really only required AT&T’s voicemail servers to tell the iPhone when to download a new message, and then the iPhone takes care of the rest. In our tests, visual voicemail worked as advertised, and we had no trouble with it. It is, however, a feature that we would be more than willing to sacrifice if we had the opportunity to use an unlocked iPhone on another network. That said, Ken believes that this is a very significant development in the world of voicemail, and he hopes and prays that this becomes standard everywhere.
This is a question we’ve discussed several times here: how much special support is required on the network side to make visual voicemail work? The answer seems to be “some, but not as much as you might think.” That is, the network does have to notify the phone of when new messages are available, provide them for download to the phone, and accept status change notifications from the phone when the user has listened to or deleted them. But there doesn’t need to be tight integration between the phone and the network when the user is actually listening to the messages.
Come to think of it, another advantage this approach presumably has is that you shouldn’t have to be connected to the network to listen to your voicemail messages. Once they’re downloaded to your phone, you should be able to listen to them anywhere, even if you’re in a location that doesn’t get good reception.
Please join me in welcoming the newest addition to the TLF roster. Cord Blomquist is a technology policy analyst and assistant to the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. You might remember our friendly disagreement over the DMCA and the Digg incident. He’s also written some smart stuff on other topics, such as video game ratings, and he appeared on our podcast a couple of weeks ago to discuss Google’s newfound interest in public policy. Welcome aboard, Cord!
Don Marti, a writer for LinuxWorld, describes “the other side” of the software patent debate:
To the “think tank” types [on the Technology Liberation Front], lawyers are basically free and software innovation is hard to get. Most of the think tanks are in Washington, DC, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a bunch of lawyers. To a think tank staffer, it’s just as obvious that you’d get a lawyer to patent your software idea as that you’d back up your files. Lawyers are background noise, and software innovation is something that you see on the cover of Wired and wonder “how did they do that?” (If there’s a breeze on Technology Liberation Front, it’s all the pro-software-patent posters hand-waving the transaction costs.)
To the people opposed to software patents, lawyers are expensive, and software innovation is abundant. As a working programmer with a white board, software innovation comes to you faster than you could actually get the software working, so software innovation might as well be free. The limiting factor in producing software value is debugging, testing and integration time, not patentable ideas.
In the real world, transaction costs around software patents—mainly the price of lawyers—matter way more than the think tankers are able to see, what with taking swarms of lawyers for granted. And software innovation, to most people, isn’t just a nusiance that leaves you with a stack of notes and half-baked programs, it’s actually rare.
Is this a fair criticism? One of the things I like about TLF is that we have a non-trivial number of both lawyers and geeks in our audience, so there’s some opportunity for these “two cultures” to become better acquainted with one another’s perspectives.
The podcast is taking the week off. In the meantime, check out the smart comments on last week’s episode. This one from john b. was particularly interesting:
Your discussion of discovery was a bit off. (1) Coca Cola actually *was* once required to divulge a formula in discovery. It refused to comply. Famous case in lots of CivPro casebooks. (2) The usual result of not divulging information requested in discovery is that all inferences are drawn against you that could be reasonably drawn from the evidence. In this case, the inference would have to be that the code was flawed and threw off the election results. Or, they could simply do what happens routinely in such matters and work with the judge and opposing counsel to keep the discovered material private and so on. Their choice.
We’ll be back next week with fresh content for your listening pleasure.
Longtime TLF readers may recall the Great Shopping Cart Debate of 2006, in which Jim Delong, Jim Harper, myself, and others made increasingly strained analogies between DRM and those wheel locks you find on shopping carts.
At the time, the debate was entirely theoretical, since the shopping cart cartel had succeeded in keeping a tight rein on the supply of shopping cart circumvention devices. Well no longer. Slashdot reports that some troublemakers have reverse-engineered those shopping cart wheel locks:
The two major shopping cart theft prevention systems are called CAPS and the GS2. From our escapades, we have found the GS2 system is far more effective at actually stopping carts on smooth ground. It also has a longer range (!) and a more sophisticated locking and unlocking signal. Best of all, it can be reset remotely, meaning double the fun as you play “red light/green light” with unsuspecting customers.
The picture below is of the GS2 wheel, found only at your finer supermarkets.
Discussion topic for the day: it appears that such a device could be used to steal shopping carts, at least the type of cart that can be reset remotely. If that’s true, should these “circumvention devices” be illegal? Should information about them be illegal? If someone wrote software that could be installed onto software-defined radio to perform the same function, should that software be illegal?
Over at Ars, Ryan Paul has a great article that analyzes Microsoft’s contention that free software firms are refusing to facilitate interoperability with Microsoft’s products:
Echoing similar statements already made by Mandriva CEO Francois Bancilhon and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of engineering, tells eWeek that his company is still very eager to pursue interoperability collaboration and “solve real customer problems without attaching any unrelated strings, such as intellectual property.”
Microsoft’s senior vice president for server and tools, Bob Muglia, denies that intellectual property issues are unrelated to interoperability. Although Muglia concedes that there are still ways to achieve interoperability without indemnification agreements, he thinks that Linux distributors “haven’t actually solved the customer’s interoperability problem unless [they] have also solved the licensing issue.”
Continue reading →
Ed Felten and Tim Wu both have interesting posts on the release of the iPhone. In a sense, they make precisely the same technical observation—that more open wireless networks would be good for innovation—but Felten is an optimist about it, while Wu is a pessimist. First, here’s Wu:
the iPhone is locked, as is de rigueur in the wireless world. It will work only with one carrier, AT&T. Judged by the standards of a personal computer or electronics, that’s odd: Imagine buying a Dell that worked only with Comcast Internet access or a VCR that worked only with NBC. Despite the fact that the iPhone costs $500 or so, it cannot yet be brought over to T-Mobile or Verizon or Sprint. AT&T sees this as a feature, not a bug, as every new iPhone customer must commit to a two-year, $1,400 to $2,400 contract.
If Apple wanted to be “revolutionary,” it would sell an unlocked version of the iPhone that, like a computer, you could bring to the carrier of your choice. An even more radical device would be the “X Phone”—a phone on permanent roam that chose whatever network was providing the best service. Imagine, for example, using your iPhone to talk on Sprint because it had the best voice coverage in Alaska, while at the same time using Verizon’s 3G network for Internet access. Of course, getting that phone to market would be difficult, and Apple hasn’t tried.
Continue reading →
Via Luis, I don’t know if there’s a specific policy angle, but this talk by Eben Moglen at Google is interesting:
The really interesting thing about this talk, from my perspective, is that it illustrates the extent to which the free software community is driven by informal norms and the power of reputation. Moglen’s basic argument is that Google’s image in the free software community is important to its long-term success as a company, and that it is therefore in Google’s self-interest to voluntarily give back code over and above what the GPL requires as a way to build social capital.
I’m not sure if this argument is right, but if it is, I think it suggests why the hand-wringing over the specific terms of GPL v3 are probably overblown. The GPL is as much a social contract as a legal document. Going to court is an important backstop for its terms, but the primary enforcement mechanism are pressures from the hacker community. This is why hackers cared so much about making an example of Novell when it signed the patent agreement with Microsoft: they want to make sure that companies that violate the spirit of the GPL pay a high price. When the primary enforcement mechanisms are social rather than legal, the exact legal terms aren’t that important: if you behave in a way that’s contrary to the spirit of the GPL, you’ll have the same problems Novell did, regardless of what the letter of the license says.
By the same token, it is likely to be in Google’s interest to give non-essential code back to the free software community even though the GPL doesn’t specifically require them to as a way of building the social capital within the free software community. As the free software community grows, the exact terms of free software licenses may become less and less important as a robust set of social norms emerge that pressure companies far more effectively than a legal document possibly could.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Hance Haney of the Discovery Institute, Radley Balko of Reason magazine, and Ryan Paul of Ars Technica. Topics include,
- Congress considers repealing the Internet gambling ban,
- Frontline proposes open access rules for the 700 MHz band, and
- a judge rules that trade secrets prevent source code disclosure.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.