Presumably, everyone reading this post has purchased software at some point in the past 15 years. If you have, you may have agreed to a contract unwittingly. Breaking the seal of the shrinkwrap around the box might bind you to the terms and conditions contained inside. This is but one of many new ways you can be determined to agree to contractual terms you may have never seen.
In the last decade, Gateway came under fire for its means of doing business with consumers. A customer would order her computer over the phone, but when it would come, it would contain a list of terms including things like a mandatory abritration clause – and always stating that the customer was deemed to have accepted the terms by not returning the computer (at her expense) by some period of time. A number of court cases raised the question whether this practice really created a binding contract.
As libertarians, we are generally in favor of contracts. But a contract is a mutually consensual agreement. The critical question for shrinkwrap contracts and the like is whether both parties have really assented. In the Gateway cases, there are three main interpretations of what is going on: Continue reading →
So, I was just checking in online for a flight tomorrow and got this typical warning message.
It made me wonder: in the entire history of questions like these being asked by airlines, has anyone ever said “yes”? After all, if you’re an actual bad guy carrying these things, you’re going to lie about it. (As an aside, I notice that most airlines have stopped asking the questions: “Has anyone giving you anything to carry” and “Have your bags been in your possession the entire time”? Perhaps they just got tired of hearing the same answers over and over again. I always wanted to respond sarcastically with a line like: “Why yes, in fact, a very menacing-looking man just gave me a heavy package in a plain brown wrapper and asked me to carry it on the plane.” But I knew nothing good would come of that — probably result in a complete body cavity search or something like that — so I always chickened out.)
There’s a new poll out this week from some group called Break Media that is getting some attention because it finds that 69% of online males say they can’t live without the Internet, versus just 31% for television. That’s more (unsurprising) proof of the substitution effect at work in the media marketplace today, with many people moving their media consumption online and abandoning old, appointment-based, couch-potato media. (Shhh… don’t tell the boneheads in Washington who are still busily regulating TV and radio as if “Leave it To Beaver” was still on the air. They might shift their attention to regulating the Net instead.)
Anyway, what I found more interesting about the poll was the finding that 74% of men would rather have sex than surf the Web. Perhaps more importantly, 79% of men “would rather meet a woman out on the town than online.” And they say traditional values are dead!
Yesterday at an event on Capitol Hill, I had the opportunity to formally release a paper I co-wrote with my colleague Steve DelBianco called “Hardening the Security Stack.” The “stack” is a common sense concept, but one that seems to get lost in the rhetoric about Internet security.
The idea is that there is no monolithic thing called “Internet security,” nor any monolithic entity that can single-handedly provide it. Internet security relies an interdependent network of tools, technologies and behaviors; and succeeds or fails based on the efforts of a wide range of stakeholders, from infrastructure providers at the core of the Internet, to end users at the edge. Those stakeholders make up the security “stack.”
There is no silver bullet. It sounds simple enough, but when policymakers and members of the high-tech community get it in their heads that one tool — or one stakeholder group — has the silver bullet to solve all of our Internet security woes, it can lead to some unfortunate outcomes. The latest example of this has been the recent furor over DNS Security Extensions or “DNSSEC.” Continue reading →
Over at Ars Technica I have an article I’m particularly excited about: the second installment of my series on self-driving car technology. In the first installment, I surveyed the current state of technology and addressed some of the technical challenges that stood between us and fully self-driving cars. Today I assume that those technical hurdles can be overcome and speculate about what the world will look like when we get there. Some benefits of self-driving cars are obvious—less time spent behind the wheel and fewer accidents—but the consequences are likely to be much broader than that. Among the most intriguing are much greater use of taxis, more widespread use of smaller, more energy-efficient cars, the virtual elimination of parking lots, and a dramatic transformation of the retail sector. Please check it out.
Meanwhile, over at BloggingHeads, my friend Will Wilkinson interviews my advisor Ed Felten about his work. I haven’t had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but Will and Ed are two of the smartest and most interesting people I know, so it’s bound to be a great conversation.
Like a lot of people, I was surprised by the choice of Paul Krugman for the Nobel Prize in economics, but upon further reflections I agree with Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson that the award is well-deserved even if the timing is unfortunate. Krugman’s now-decade-old column in defense of free trade is my all-time favorite Krugman writing and among my favorite examples of popular writing on economics by any author. Recently Krugman’s columns have gotten a little too partisan and strident for my taste, but contra my esteemed co-blogger, Krugman is indisputably a first-rate economist who has done important theoretical work. There’s just no comparison to generic left-wing pundits.
As if the financial crisis and government bailout isn’t already a bit fishy to some taxpayers, now it’s the subject of a social engineering phishing exploit. The Federal Trade Commission issued a warning that
Phishers (pronounced “fishers’) may send attention-getting emails that look like they’re coming from the financial institution that recently acquired your bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. Their intent is to collect or capture your personal information, like your credit card numbers, bank account information, Social Security number, passwords, or other sensitive information. Their messages may ask you to “update,” “validate,” or “confirm” your account information.
October is Cyber Security Awareness Month and in celebration NetChoice will hold a lunch event at the Russell Senate Building on Thursday, Oct. 16 from Noon – 1:30pm. Panelists include:
- Ken Silva, Chief Technology Officer, VeriSign
- Michael Kaiser, Executive Director, National Cyber Security Alliance
- Steve DelBianco, Executive Director, NetChoice
If interested, let me know and come on by.
I’ve been re-reading Nicholas Negroponte’s brilliant and extraordinarily prescient 1995 book Being Digital this week, and I just came to the famous section in Chapter 12 about “The Daily Me.” It’s his visionary discussion of a future of personalized filters for all things digital to perfectly tune news and entertainment to your personal preferences. Here’s the key passage (again, remember that he wrote this in 1995, long before most of the digital things we take for granted today existed):
Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one. […]
Imagine a computer display of news stories with a knob that, like a volume control, allows you to crank personalization up or down. You could have many of these controls, including a slider that moves both literally and politically from left to right to modify stories about public affairs.
These cotnrols change your window onto the news, both in terms of size and its editorial tone. In the distant future, interface agents will read, listen to, and look at each story in its entirety. In the near future, the filtering process will happen by using headers, those bits about bits.
Well, that future came about sooner than even Negroponte could have predicted. We all have a “Daily Me” now; it’s called our RSS feed. And there are other components to the “Daily Me,” such as iGoogle and Google Alerts, which provide automated search results served up instantaneously. And there are many other digital tools and services out there today that help us personalize our media experience.
You really gotta hand it to Negroponte for being way ahead of the curve in foreseeing all of this at a time when most of us where still using Trumpet Winsock and 14.4 modems. Hell, Al Gore hadn’t even built the Internet yet!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
