My favorite TLF reader points out this bizarre story about wireless “piggybacking,” over-zealous police officers, and (a lack of) child porn. It’s a safe bet that the police officers involved have better things to do than harass people using the WiFi connections of public libraries (!) from their cars. The notion that doing so would be criminal theft of service is absurd: presumably, no one would have thought twice if he’d accessed the network while physically inside the library building. It’s not clear how it suddenly becomes a crime once it’s outside.
It seems even more clear that the police were out of line in seizing the guy’s laptop and searching it for child pornography. No reasonable person would take the fact that someone is using the Internet from his car as evidence that child porn is being downloaded.
On the other hand, the trespassing charge isn’t crazy, especially if it happened more than once. Still, a proportionate remedy would have been to write the kid a ticket, not take his laptop.
Over at Ars, I expand on my recent post contrasting Brad Smith’s recent article defending software patents and Bill Gates’ 1991 memo warning that software patents threaten the software industry:
Gates’ memo suggests that in 1991, Microsoft still considered itself a relatively small company challenging entrenched incumbents. It was locked in a legal battle with Apple over the legal rights to the graphical user interface. It was in the midst of the OS/2 wars with IBM. And it was fighting to break Novell’s dominance of the networking market. In short, Microsoft feared the incumbents they were trying to displace would use the patent system to fortify their dominant positions in their respective markets. They thought their chances in the marketplace were better than their chances in the courtroom.
Continue reading →
I’ve got a new story at Ars about the DOJ inspector general’s damning report on the FBI’s use of “national security letters” :
The defenders of the Patriot Act have been quick to emphasize that the report found no evidence of malice or intentional lawbreaking in the use of NSLs. This is true. By all accounts, the problems OIG found were the result of honest mistakes on the part of FBI officials. No examples were found of FBI agents using NSLs to spy on their ex-girlfriends or blackmail their enemies.
However, OIG teams only audited 293 letters out of tens of thousands that have been issued since the Patriot Act has become law. It’s quite possible that a complete audit of NSLs would uncover deliberate lawbreaking. And given the inadequate record-keeping procedures, it’s far from certain that even a comprehensive audit would uncover unlawful behavior.
Continue reading →
Here’s an interesting glimpse into the attitudes of career law enforcement bureaucrats towards civil liberties:
Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has dispersed the authority to sign national security letters to more than five dozen supervisors — the special agents in charge of field offices, the deputies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and a few senior headquarters officials. FBI rules established after the Patriot Act allow the letters to be issued long before a case is judged substantial enough for a “full field investigation.” Agents commonly use the letters now in “preliminary investigations” and in the “threat assessments” that precede a decision whether to launch an investigation.
“Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports,” said Caproni, who is among the officials with signature authority. “The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn’t bother me.”
If agents had to wait for grounds to suspect a person of ill intent, said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, they would already know what they want to find out with a national security letter. “It’s all chicken and egg,” he said. “We’re trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn’t.”
I have no doubt he’s right that being able to demand peoples’ personal information virtually on a whim makes investigations go a lot more easily. But as the saying goes, only in a police state is a policeman’s work easy.
Matt does a sensible post on the merit of more liberal immigration policies for high-skilled workers, and receives a barrage of criticism from his readers. Some of them are just economic illiterates who believe that importing too many brown people will destroy America’s middle class. But the really galling comments are those from self-serving engineers like “Dave” who can’t stomach the thought of having to compete on a level playing field with people swarthier than themselves:
Because if you can’t trust business to only use H-1B visas only when there are no other qualified workers and not as a weapon to drive down salaries who can you trust.
As an engineer, I can tell you that when many more visas started to be issued in the late 90’s, engineering salaries stagnated. Even as were told that there was a labor shortage for skilled workers, I knew many engineers who were laid off and could not find jobs. At the same time, the company I worked for more or less stopped hiring American engineers in favor of H-1B applicants.
I’m really tired of someone who has zero chance of losing his job in favor of a cheaper labor lecturing those who are on what a wonderful world it would then be.
Poor baby.
Continue reading →
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly whittling down the tall stack of books I’ve been meaning to read. A lot of them are ponderous tech policy tomes that have been a chore to get through (I still haven’t finished this one), so I was happy to get to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters. It was given to me for Christmas over a year ago, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since, but it just now bubbled up to the top of the list.
I devoured it in two sittings over the course of about 3 days, and I’m not a particularly fast reader, so that’s saying something. It’s a delightful mix of philosophy, sociology, and hard core geekery. He explains why junior high sucks, why Lisp is the world’s best programming language, why web-based software is going to take over the software world, why geeks tend to be libertarians, how Bayesian spam filters work, why heresies are essential to a free society, and how to make great things.
Continue reading →
A judge has dismissed a lawsuit involving a bogus software patent I wrote up last year:
Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston denied a complaint by Skyline Software Systems that the Google Earth mapping software of Google’s Keyhole infringed Skyline patents.
The judge also denied motions from both parties on whether the patents in question were valid, but left the possibility for either party to reassert these issues if they do so before April 20. He canceled a planned trial date set for June.
In his ruling, Woodlock held that Google’s system does not attempt to render views of Earth’s terrain, a key claim of the patent held by Skyline, which is based in Chantilly, Va., and offers its own “fly through” three-dimensional software.
Hat tip: Google Copyright Blog, which doesn’t appear to be officially affiliated with Google, but has some good commentary.
Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, 2007: “Protection for software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs. In every industry, patents provide the legal foundation for innovation. The ensuing legal disputes may be messy, but protection is no less necessary, even so.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO, 1991: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”
It sure would be unfortunate if the giants were able to use software patents to squelch start-ups.
As promised, here is one of the places where I thought Wikinomics didn’t quite get it right. On page 190, they state:
In its current incarnation, mashups present a thorny problem—they provide pretty poor long-term incentives for innovators, and most lack protection for data owners. To illustrate, it’s worth taking a closer look at housingmaps.
Housingmaps has two key ingredients: a Google Map and the rental listings from craigslist. When Paul Rademacher mashed these services together he created something new—something neither Google nor craigslist has thought of, yet it was a clever and useful application. What did Rademacher do to leverage this popularity? He stepped back from it and took a job at Google.
When asked why he did not develop the tool further, and perhaps even create his own business, he offered two very salient points: 1) He did not own the data that was powering the application, and 2) The barriers to re-creating such an application were low, since his web site contained little in the way of unique intellectual property or user interface design, apart from a little bit of network code.
The first is a reasonable concern, but as I’ll argue below the fold, it’s silly to consider the second a problem.
Continue reading →
Tim Wu has an interesting (rough draft of a) short paper here that re-conceptualizes the network neutrality issue as a question of termination fees. He draws a little diagram showing you connected to eBay like this:
And Wu says:
What is notable is the lack of termination fees, or fees charged to reach customers. That is, your ISP, ISP1, doesn’t charge eBay an additional fee to reach you. Similarly, eBay’s ISP, ISP2, doesn’t charge you any money to reach eBay.
Viewed from this perspective, much of the current network neutrality debate can be cast as a debate over termination fees. The “priority-lane” proposals advanced by AT&T and others can be understood as proposals to begin charging a fee, not for transport, but to reach their customers.
That charging such a fee is possible as a matter of technology and economic power is clear. In our diagram above, in order to reach you, eBay must go through ISP1. In telecom jargon, ISP1 has a “termination monopoly” over you. Provided eBay wants to reach you, it would have to pay the termination charge ISP1 wants to charge. The diagram below shows this.
It seems to me that Wu makes precisely the same conceptual error that Yochai Benkler makes in The Wealth of Networks.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.