There’s nothing to say about this that hasn’t already been said, but boy is this funny:
You can get your own here.
Articles by Tim Lee 
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Via PJ, here’s a great joke about programmers by Nathaniel Borenstein:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
While this is a whimsical example, I think it actually explains why geeks have such strong views on certain issues. For example, on software patents: one of the most common tricks in a programmer’s toolkit is to solve a specific problem by finding a way to solve a more general problem and then treat the particular problem as a special case. For example, VoIP just applies the general data-transmission capabilities of the Internet to one type of data, namely sound. It therefore strikes many programmers as perverse to grant a patent to the first person who happens to file for a patent on applying a widely-understood technology (such as TCP/IP) to a particular application (like voice).
Similarly, geeks tend to be strong support of network neutrality (the concept, if not the regulatory policy) because fundamentally, network neutrality is the principle of abstraction applied to network architecture.
You should check out the ongoing discussion with Cord Blomquist about the ethics of digging AACS keys. Cord’s core point seems to be this:
Copyright and patents aren’t contracts, they’re codified law, and it’s understandable why we’d prefer a common standard for such things. Imagine we had to sign a contract waving acknowledging that the seller retains the rights to reproduction every time we bought a book or magazine. This would be cumbersome and tedious. Yet even without a contract or another such explicit statement we all know that we can’t just post an article from a magazine on a site and put AdSense ads against it and call ourselves a legitimate web business. This would be copyright infringement and stealing. Take this idea a step further and we see that he 2nd or 3rd person to copy the material is equally liable for the copying if they know that the material is copyrighted.
How is this different from Digg hosting something that is copyrighted? Are we saying DRM and music copyrights don’t deserve the same respect because they are copyrights we don’t like?
The first thing to point out here is that Cord is lumping together two very different rights. I wholeheartedly agree with him that copyright law is a beneficial institution, and it’s entirely appropriate for the state to take action to protect peoples copyrights. If Digg’s users were posting copyrighted songs or films, I would certainly be a lot more critical.
But DRM is not the same thing as traditional copyright. Anti-circumvention rights are a brand new legal right that was invented from whole cloth by Congress in 1998. The question of whether those rights are legitimate are wholly separate from the question of whether the underlying copyright.
Cord continues:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Cord Blomquist also doesn’t approve of the Digg protesters:
Websters are calling the ‘revolt’ at Digg an online Boston Tea Party. This is offensive to anyone who knows the history of the Boston Tea Party. The Sons of Liberty destroyed someone else’s property, a very non-libertarian thing to do, but they did so to protest the unjust taxation of their own hard earned dollars and the tyrannical British rule. Besides, the British East India Company was nothing like what we would call a private enterprise. Before it was dissolved in the middle of the 19th century the East India Company had many governmental and military functions and virtually ruled India. The revolutionaries were against this kind of government granted monopoly and unjust use of power.
Digg users posting HD-DVD encryption keys is no Boston Tea party. These rogue digg users are referencing a proprietary code, which is not their property, and they’re using a private website, which is also not their property. This attack on private property is more like an online October Revolution. The people at Digg can exercise control over their own property, while the users claim that controlling a private site is equivalent to theft. (They should read What’s Yours is Mine). It all smacks of Marxism to me.
So in other words, it’s OK to destroy private property if you’re protesting a law Blomquist disagrees with, but it’s not cool to even “reference” private property if you’re protesting a law Blomquist likes.
Mark Blafkin has an puzzling take on this week’s Digg/AACS business:
The real story here is about the ephemeral nature of Web2.0 companies. When your value is based on the people you attract more than the value of any product or service you provide, your grasp on success is tenuous at best. You will always be at the mercy of 5-10 percent of your users that are most active and usually most crazy. Web2.0 has a lot of promise, but it also has some potential pitfalls. We’ve just seen one of them. When you’re relying on “mobs,” well, you’re relying on MOBS.
I’m at a loss what point Blafkin’s trying to make here. Let’s keep in mind that a “Web 2.0 business” is just a website whose contents are controlled by users rather than the site administrator. Or in other words, it’s a website that gives users the freedom to exchange information without having to first seek the permission of the authorities. As a libertarian, that seems to me as an almost unalloyed good.
If the DMCA effectively says that Digg had to choose between breaking the law or shutting down, that seems to me like evidence that there’s something wrong with the DMCA. Digg is not profiting from piracy the way Napster and Grokster were. They’re a legitimate news site whose users happen to have strong anti-censorship views.
Blafkin seems to have the opposite reaction: that if user-generated content is incompatible with the DMCA, then so much the worse for user-generated content. But libertarianism is not about slavishly obeying the law, regardless of the consequences. If copyright law starts effectively outlawing legitimate websites, then copyright law has gone too far.
The Miami Herald reports that Florida has passed legislation ditching touch-screen voting machines. The entire state will switch back to the tried-and-true technology of optical-scan paper ballots. Good for Florida
The rapid shift in the conventional wisdom is kind of stunning. Remember that the primary reason the nation adopted touch-screen voting machines in the first place was the widespread negative publicity surrounding “butterfly ballots” in Florida’s 2000 election. When the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, there were only a handful of people raising concerns about computerized voting, and they tended to be dismissed as cranks.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Although it will take some more work (either action by Congress or a lot more legislation at the state level) to replace all the touch-screen voting machines in the country, it’s starting to look like a matter of when, not if.
It’ll be interesting to see how many other states follow Florida’s lead. My guess is that Florida is unique, since they’re the state that had the biggest problems this year, and they’re already sensitive to the issue after the debacle in 2000. But I’m sure people in at least some other states are paying attention. Avi Rubin has been following a paper ballot bill making its way through Maryland’s legislature, so hopefully they’ll be joining Florida in the near future.
Over at Cato@Liberty, I’ve got a post making the slightly obvious point that Digg is a microcosm of the Internet as a whole. Digg, like the Internet as a whole, is an automated and decentralized information-processing system. And just as Digg ultimately faced a choice between allowing the AACS key to be on the site or shutting the site down, we face the same basic choice as a society: unless we want to shut down the Internet (or radically redesign it, which could amount to the same thing) we’ve got little choice but to allow some level of illicit content to be traded.
This seems to me to be a nice illustration of a point that I’ve often tried to make about the network neutrality debate, because it seems to me that the telcos face a similar challenge with regard to their management of their networks. Many of the horror stories pro-regulatory types tell about a post-neutrality future assume that the telcos have fine-grained control over what kind of content flows over their networks. That they’re censor liberal blogs, or shut down particular categories of new innovative applications, or sign exclusive deals where (say) one sports website is the official sports website, and all the others are blocked or degraded.
But an ISP attempting to implement such a fine-grained, coercive strategy on a user base numbering in the millions is likely to find their users reacting in creative ways that confound the scheme. Tech-savvy users will immediately start running services on non-standard ports or tunneling their connections over encrypted links. They’ll find ways to camouflage one category of traffic as another, such as making a VoIP session look like a World of Warcraft game. Soon you’d start seeing user-friendly applications available for download to allow moderately tech-savvy users to use the same tricks. And applications developers will start integrating these tricks into their applications, so that the application will automatically detect whose network they’re on and use the appropriate countermeasure.
(Geeky aside: it’s possible to imagine open source networking libraries that do this automatically and transparently, presenting an API that allows the application developer pretend he’s on a normal, open network. Indeed, I bet you’d end up with a situation similar to the situation we saw with open source instant messaging libraries a couple years ago: the telco would introduce new routing polices in an effort to break unauthorized applications. The creators of the circumvention libraries would find a new work-around, publish it, and all the application developers would have to do would be to download the new library and recompile.)
Of course, the telcos could always go for the nuclear option and block all traffic it can’t validate as “approved,” effectively converting the open network into a closed one But that would come at a very high price, because there’s a long tail of content and along tail of applications. An Internet that only does the things on your ISP’s approved list is dramatically less useful than an open Internet, just as Digg would be a dramatically less successful site if it only featured stories that had been pre-vetted by the telco’s employees.
So while telcos may have formal control over their pipes, they probably have less practical control over Internet content than is generally assumed. An open network is much more useful to users (and will therefore generate more revenue) than a closed one, but once you have an open network it’s very hard to limit how it’s used.
I mostly agree with Tom Lee’s point here, but I think he’s being a little bit unfair in his characterization of Ed Felten’s post on the AACS/Digg incident. Tom says:
I’m no fan of DRM, and I think the AACS LA’s actions are pointless and stupid. But Doctorow and Felten are being disingenuous — they’re simply too smart not to see the problem with this argument. Namely, that any type of data, sampled at a chosen level of precision, can be represented as a number. Consequently, if you believe that one or more types of information deserve legal protection — as Felten seems to, when he refers to songs & movies — then the argument that “it’s just a number!” becomes ridiculous.
Sixteen bytes is probably too short to merit a copyright. But that’s not the right that the AACS LA is asserting: they’re calling the code a “circumvention device” under the DMCA. And even if you don’t recognize the DMCA’s validity, there are other forms of intellectual property protection that may apply — there are laws related to trade secrets, for example. If you just think about it a little, it should be obvious that even a very short piece of data can enjoy some kinds of legal protection. Sixteen bytes is more that enough room to encode the words “Coca-Cola”, after all.
The thing is, geeks like to pretend that the legal system is some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption, easily foiled by their unparalleled cleverness. Sadly, this isn’t the case. All the IANAL-prefixed prattling on Slashdot about quick & easy ways to make yourself legally bulletproof when the cops/MPAA/interpol come knocking are little more than wishful thinking. It’s like holding your finger an inch from your sibling’s face and yelling, “I’m not touching you!” over and over. Your parents weren’t dumb enough to fall for that, and neither is the legal system.
He’s right about the Rube Goldberg thing. As a matter of law, the fact that something is “just a number” won’t help you if you’re guilty of violating copyright law. Moreover, the position that anything that’s “just a number” should never be restricted is obviously ridiculous. I’m perfectly comfortable with restricting (say) numbers that are JPEG representations of child pornography or PDFs of sealed grand jury testimony. Clearly some “numbers” ought to be legally restricted.
Here are two new data points in a discussion Jerry and I had back in September: will the Internet kill TV, and if so what will Internet-based TV look like?
First, Matthew Ingrahm points out Prom Queen a web-only soap opera that’s released in daily 90-second segments and has apparently racked up 5 million total viewers over the last month.
Second, Rob Hyndman points to the TEDTalks video series. As Hyndman points out, there is a long tail of video content out there: shows that individually couldn’t attract a large enough audience to secure a spot on a traditional cable lineup but that collectively could generate significant traffic. As the Internet eliminates the artificial bottlenecks now imposed by the need to organize our video watching into “channels,” the number of different things people watch is poised to explode.
My guess is that our children will have as much trouble imagining a world with only 100 channels as we do imagining a world with only 3. And there’s a good chance our grandchildren won’t even know what a “channel” is.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.