Articles by Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.


The Be Very Afraid Tour

by on May 16, 2007 · 26 comments

An excellent explanation by Eben Moglen about why geeks are so outraged about Novell’s agreement with Microsoft:

Our friend Mark Blafkin objects that free software partisans have often claimed that Microsoft patents were a threat to free software when it suited them. This is true, but it’s kind of beside the point. The problem with Microsoft’s behavior isn’t what they say about their patents. The problem is the implicit threat their statements embody.

When Microsoft says “Linux infringes 245 patents and they’d better pay up,” that’s entirely different from a potential litigation target saying “Linux infringes 245 bogus patents and so we’d better change patent law to make sure we don’t get sued.” It’s kind of like the difference between a shopkeeper saying “I’m worried the Mafia breaking my store’s windows so we need increased police protection” and a Mafia don saying “that’s a nice shop you’ve got, it would be a shame if something happened to it.”

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Television Destroys Society, Again

by on May 15, 2007

Over at my other blog, Brian Moore points out that government idiocy is an international standard. According to a story on Bhutanese officials worrying that their subjects will become restive after seeing a more affluent life on their TV screens:

“Advertisements create desires, which cannot be satisfied by people’s current economic position,” wrote Phuntsho Rapten of the Centre for Bhutan Studies. “Crimes and corruption are often born out of economic desires.”

I can’t top Brian’s retort:

Do you know what else causes desires which cannot be satisfied by people’s current economic position? Being in a really crappy economic position. Gosh, I wonder why those 31.7% of Bhutanese below the poverty line have so many desires? How crass and materialistic of them.

It certainly would be terrible if all those enticing images caused peasants to get restive for political and economic reforms.

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Happy Big Brother Day

by on May 14, 2007 · 2 comments

Bob Hagen from Global Crossing reminds us that as of today, the ISPs are legally required to help the government spy on you, although (so far) only with a court order:

On March 10th, 2004, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and the Drug Enforcement Agency submitted a petition to expand the scope of CALEA to include communications that traverse the Internet (again, at the carriers’ expense). The proposed changes to CALEA were approved in August 2005.

To those law abiding citizens that view this as an Orwellian infringement of their civil liberties, there are tools available that you can use to preserve your privacy and anonymity on the Internet. Since CALEA only addresses the interception of data, it does preclude the use of encryption to transform that data into gibberish. Here are some free tools that utilize strong encryption and are devoid of hierarchical trust models such as PKI:

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In Defense of Online Anonymity

by on May 14, 2007 · 6 comments

Julian gives a much-deserved thrashing to this ridiculous op-ed in the Washington Post attacking anonymity on the Internet:

What’s most bizarre about this piece is how incredibly superfluous it seems. Like the idea of accountable discussion forums, where every idea is linked to a verifiable real name? Well, there are plenty of those already. Worried about people “hate-mongering” or calling each other “the vilest names”? There’s no reason a site can’t limit that behavior while preserving pseudonymity, and indeed, so long as there are some people who don’t care about being hateful under their own names, that seems like a better way to address the problem. And the author’s imagination is so grossly impoverished that the only legitimate reason he can imagine to permit the use of a nom de Net is for the protection of whistleblowers, for whom he’ll grant sites ought to make exceptions on a “case-by-case basis.”

Fortunately, this sort of “transparency” has precisely no chance of becoming the general rule, for precisely the same reason the op-ed misapprehends the problem from the outset. Pseudonymous speakers are not “elevated to the podium”—note how the passive voice obfuscates as well as any handle—we elevate or ignore them when we decide what to read, how much credence to give it, and whose views to link and propagate in our own writing. Indeed, the “podium” metaphor—as though the Internet were a big room in which we all sit and listen to whomever’s got the mic for the next five minutes—is a pretty good early warning signal for the cluelessness that pervades the piece. Fora for anonymous speech are common because lots of people like them, because the annoyance of filtering out the boors is, for many of us, dwarfed by the benefit of having the freedom to air your views without worrying about what Bob in HR or Aunt Hortense would think if they came across them on Google. And even though some of the more prominent formerly-pseudonymous bloggers—Jane Galt and Atrios, say—have since ditched their masks, I’d bet theres a significant proportion of both their daily readers who wouldn’t even recognize the names “Megan McArdle” or “Duncan Black.” Why? Because when you’re making a cogent argument based on verifiable facts, supported by links, and with equal openness for others to poke holes in the argument or link contradictory information, the names of the people, names just don’t matter a whole lot. When the ideas and arguments are transparent, identities don’t need to be.

Quite so. One of the things I find odd about these sorts of articles is it’s never clear what we’re supposed to do about them. There are lots of different websites on the Internet, and if there was widespread annoyance over anonymous speech, one assumes that consumers would begin gravitating toward sites with stricter policies. It’s not obvious what’s served by hashing the issue out in the pages of the Washington Post.

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Competition is a Feature, not a Bug

by on May 14, 2007

Reading through the comments on this post on the economics of open source, I was surprised to find the following comment by Tony Healy of the Institute for Policy Innovation:

Clearly, free software is a big boon to Google and every other large corporation, just as low wages are. But neither provide benefits to programmers. Many advocates of open source actually have explicit open source lobbying roles with corporates, but misrepresent their claims as being in programmers’ interests. That is, their job is to lobby for free inputs.

Unfortunately the progamming profession is young and has no awareness of its own interests, nor consciousness of labour market disciplines that are part of the structure of older professions. Also, the lack of access barriers removes the consciousness of their own value that is implicitly taught to people entering other professions.

I would be fascinated to know what “labor market disciplines” and “barriers” he’s referring to, and which “older professions” he thinks programmers should be emulating. Maybe he thinks programming should be more like the medical profession? Or the real estate industry?

It’s absolutely true that increased competition often drives down the wages of producers in a particular industry. It may very well be that by eliminating barriers to entry in the software profession, free software is exerting downward pressure on wages in the software industry. (although it also makes them more productive, so my guess is that it will actually lead to higher wages in the long run) In either case, it’s bizarre to see somebody from a nominally free-market organization citing the intensely competitive nature of the market for programmers as a problem that needs to be solved. As he himself notes, competition among producers means lower prices for consumers. If that’s the effect free software has on the software industry, isn’t that something we should be celebrating?

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Microsoft’s Shell Game

by on May 13, 2007 · 42 comments

Roger Parloff of Forbes Fortune reports that Microsoft is continuing to lay the groundwork to use the patent system as a weapon against the free software movement. Overall, Parloff does a good job of summarizing the dispute, but like most journalists, he lets Microsoft get away with exploiting the public’s ignorance of how the patent system works to create a misleading impression about the conflict:

But now there’s a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it’s being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500). The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents…

It’s a breathtaking number. (By comparison, for instance, Verizon’s (Charts, Fortune 500) patent suit against Vonage (Charts), which now threatens to bankrupt the latter, was based on just seven patents, of which only three were found to be infringing.) “This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement,” Gutierrez asserts. “There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed.”

The impression Microsoft wants to give here is that free software is of high quality because it’s copied from Microsoft’s own software. Of course, that’s not true, and I don’t think Microsoft has ever claimed otherwise. But if free software was developed independently, then i’s a non-sequitur to cite free software’s patent infringement as a reason for its high quality.

The problem is that most readers aren’t aware that software patents often cover broad concepts like “wireless email” and “one-click shopping.” And so when they read that free software infringes Microsoft’s patents, they assume that means that the code has somehow been stolen from Microsoft. And Mr. Gutierrez, of course, deliberately exploits that confusion. To anyone who has actually looked at a significant number of software patents, and who’s aware that there are hundreds of thousands of them on the books, it’s not at all implausible that you could infringe 200 patents by accident. But the general public has a wildly romanticized concept of how the patent system works, and so Gutierrez can get away with those kinds of misleading statements.

His claim that the infringement can’t possibly be accidental is also belied by the fact that Microsoft refuses to disclose which patents free software infringes. If Microsoft’s patents are valid, and if free software developers have been infringing them deliberately, then it’s hard to see what the harm would be in publicly revealing which patents are infringing.

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New Euphemism Needed

by on May 11, 2007 · 12 comments

I assume most of TLF’s readers are already reading Ed Felten, but just in case some of you weren’t, I thought today’s post on HBO’s Bob Zitter’s suggestion that we come up with a new euphemism for DRM was particularly good:

The irony here is that “rights management” is itself an industry-sponsored euphemism for what would more straightforwardly be
called “restrictions”. But somehow the public got the idea that DRM is restrictive, hence the need for a name change.

Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.

Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV. I understand why HBO might want this. But they ought to be honest and admit what they are doing.

I can think of several names for their strategy. “Consumer Enablement” is not one of them.

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House Waters Down Open Voting Requirements

by on May 11, 2007 · 2 comments

Over at Ars, I’ve got a story about the version of the Holt e-voting bill that was passed out of committee on Tuesday. In addition to making more money available to comply with the law’s requirements, the legislation significantly weakens the previous strong source code disclosure rules. The original Holt bill required that the source code be available to anyone who asked. Although the new version does make it available to a lot of people—including parties to election litigation and security researchers—it adds some red tape that’s likely to substantially reduce the number of people who are willing and able to jump through the relevant hoops.

Although I’ve said before that open source voting is no panacea, I find it hard to see an argument against requiring the disclosure of the source code for voting machines. It’s essential that all aspects of an election be transparent and accountable, and the source code of a voting machines is as much a part of the election process as the election judges’ handbook or the rules for recounts. Moreover, voting machines are almost entirely purchased by large institutions, so it’s not like there’s any risk of the disclosed source code showing up in someone else’s voting machine. The only reason I can think of to keep the source closed is to protect voting machine vendors from public scrutiny, which is obviously a reason not to allow them to keep it closed.

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Google and Patents Again

by on May 10, 2007 · 4 comments

You might not know it from my frequent ranting about the DMCA and software patents, but generally speaking I’m actually pro-copyright and pro-patent. There are, in fact, some good arguments for both copyright and patent law. (Although I wish people would stop lumping two very different legal regimes under the misleading heading of intellectual property)

But this article from CNet’s Michael Kanellos is full of cringe-worthy (and in some cases unintentionally hilarious) arguments for “intellectual property.” In fact, in a number of places, the arguments wind up coming across as unintentionally hilarious.

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Vonage’s “Workaround”

by on May 10, 2007 · 4 comments

Bloomberg is reporting that Vonage is working on a “workaround” for its patent infringement. I put “workaround” in scare quotes because, as I wrote last year about the NTP-RIM battle, the problem in these kinds of cases is that no one has the foggiest idea what the patents cover. So when a judge rules that your current product infringes some patent, you respond by re-configuring aspects of your product at random in the hopes that you can convince the judge that the new configuration does not infringe your adversary’s “technology.”

Now, I should acknowledge that I haven’t been able to get my hands on either Verizon’s complaint or the judge’s ruling. But according to this ZDNet post from a few weeks back, the key claim is this one:

26. A method comprising:

receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;

translating a name included in the request into a destination telephone number associated with a name included in the request; and

transmitting a reply containing both the destination telephone number and a packet data network address of a telephone gateway coupled between the public packet data network and a telephone network through the public packet data network to a calling device.

27. A method as in claim 26, wherein the address is an Internet Protocol address.

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