Miscellaneous

Bad Directions

by Andrew Grossman on January 4, 2008 · 0 comments

People will believe anything a GPS tells them:

Bo Bai, a computer technician from Sunnyvale who said he was merely trusting his car’s global positioning system when he steered onto the tracks, was cited for obstructing a railroad crossing, officials said this afternoon.
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“As the car is driving over the tracks, the GPS system tells him to turn right, and he turns right onto the railroad tracks,” said Brucker. “That’s how it happened.”

Brucker added, “He tried to stop the train by waving his arms, which apparently was not totally effective in slowing the train.”

Among the GPS-gullible, I include myself. Especially in unknown territories, I’ll try whatever the GPS tells me, that blanket warning and disclaimer at its startup notwithstanding. This seems to be a field ripe for litigation.

Credulity also opens opportunities for hacks, and that’s just what’s under development in Italy, it seems:

Two Italian hackers have figured out how to send fake traffic information to navigation systems that use a data feature of FM radio for real-time traffic information. Using cheap, off-the-shelf hardware, they can broadcast traffic data that will be picked up by cars in about a one-mile radius, the hackers said during a presentation at the CanSecWest event here.

“We can create queues, bad weather, full car parks, overcrowded service areas, accidents, roadwork and so on,” Andrea Barisani, chief security engineer at Inverse Path, a security company.

Perhaps a reason to be wary of bootlegged or discount map-data. Or wary of unlikely instructions from any electronic device.

Via Obscure Store, here is “The Office” segment where Michael trusts his GPS too much…

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Realistic Resolutions for the New Year

by Adam Thierer on January 3, 2008 · 0 comments

I’m tired of making new year resolutions that I can’t live up to. So, this year I’ve decided to set some realistic goals for myself so I can feel better about my accomplishments at year’s end. Thus, in 2008, I resolve to…

* drink more beer;

* eat plenty of fatty junk foods;

* play more video games;

* and waste even more time online surfing eBay and reading nerdy tech policy blogs.

OK, now I need to get busy living up to these goals. I feel good about my chances. I’m cracking open a Newcastle Nut Brown Ale right now and getting ready to sit down in front of the TV to play some Xbox with my kids. I think we’re splitting a bag of Doritos for dinner. Happy New Year!

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The Virtues of the WSJ’s Wall

by Andrew Grossman on January 3, 2008 · 0 comments

A Bear Stearns report examines at the economics of the Wall Street Journal knocking down its paid-subscription wall:

WSJ.com revenue is currently pegged at $78 million annually, based on an estimated 989,000 subscribers paying $79/year. Including non-subscriber traffic, the company claims 122.4 million monthly page views. Based on an estimated CPM of $6 and a few other assumptions about sell-through rate and ad impressions per page, Wang arrives at the 12x conclusion.

Still, as Joseph Weisenthal notes, “$78 million in revenue only accounts for an estimated 4 percent of Dow Jones revenue, so from a strictly financial stance, it doesn’t much matter either way to News Corp.,” the Journal‘s new owner.

Where I work, we’re very wary of static economic analyses: why should a huge change (e.g., raising tax rates) have no impact on behavior (e.g., hours worked)? Yes, certainly, lowering the cost of getting Journal content to $0 will undoubtedly bring a surge in readership–maybe 12X, maybe more, maybe less. That’s not the interesting question.

The big question for media watchers should be, how will the Journal react?

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Will Apple Make the Tablet Work?

by Andrew Grossman on January 3, 2008 · 2 comments

Popular Mechanics speculates that Apple is on the verge of announcing a breakthrough laptop-tablet device that’ll change computing as we know it (hyperbole deliberate):

So any Apple tablet would have to be, first and foremost, a laptop—not an über-iPhone.
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I’m also requesting that the MacBook Plus fall in the ultralight realm—a sorely neglected category for Apple. It could, and should, be 2.5 pounds or less. To achieve that, the tablet should offload heavy components such as the optical drive, making do with, say, a 32 GB solid-state drive rather than a hard-disk drive…. That would let it run a full Leopard OS while delivering long battery life—hopefully using a lightweightbattery. Plus, it could probably be passively cooled, meaning no noisy, bulky fans or hot spots on the lap.

Two thoughts on why an Apple tablet would be a big deal:

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Odds and Ends – Catching Up on My Reading

by Jim Harper on December 28, 2007 · 0 comments

Nothing like the holidays for catching up on one’s reading! Here, in no particular order, are things I should have pointed out to you already:

* The Fall 2007 Regulation magazine has some great articles. (Forgive me if they’ve been touted here already. I may have missed it.) “Considering Net Neutrality” is by TLF’s own Jerry Brito and his Mercatus colleague Jerry Ellig. “Antecedents to Net Neutrality” is another good one, by Bruce Owen of Stanford, who makes points similar to those Tim Lee has made.

Finally, there’s an article critical of Richard Epstein’s treatment of intellectual property as similar to physical property. I understand Professor Epstein will respond to “Intellectual Property and the Property Rights Movement” by Peter Menell in the next Regulation.

* From the homeland/national security data gathering front, I was very interested in a letter to the editor of Foreign Policy magazine commenting on a recent article called “How to Make a Spy,” by Tim Weiner, and the author’s further gloss on his work. In his letter, Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive John Prados points out insightfully:

Technological mechanisms have been seductive because they pull in vast amounts of data and can be planned for and budgeted. But they are indiscriminate and generate more raw intelligence than we can process, even as they fail to provide the key intelligence from inside the enemy camp.

I’ve often thought that spooks like mass surveillance because it means they don’t have to get out of their chairs and put boots on the ground in dangerous places. But don’t underestimate the closely related urge to work on a stable program whose budget situation is under control.

Responding to other comments, the author of the article says the following:

The lower the public image of the United States abroad, the harder it will be to recruit foreign spies who will divulge secrets out of a shared respect for human values.

Think of water-boarding as cutting one head off a hydra.

* The Boston Globe had an article the other day examining the presidential candidates’ views on executive power. Nothing to do with tech policy, but very important.

* In small ways, we continue to see the market respond to privacy demands. None of these steps alone are sufficient to protect privacy, but each is important progress that carries none of the costs of regulation and legislation.

* Finally, next Christmas, I want a spectrum analyzer that will reveal RFID readers!

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Missouri Possible: Show Us the Way to Best Deal with Internet Harassment

by Braden Cox on December 19, 2007 · 5 comments

Here’s your assignment: you’re a state governor who’s up for re-election, and your state is still reeling in the wake of a high-publicity suicide by a teenage girl brought upon by inflammatory statements communicated through a popular social networking website.

What do you do? Panic and quickly push through a reactive new law, (maybe even sock it to the social networking industry), or do you study the issue to come up with a sound approach? If you’re the Governor of Missouri, you create a multi-disciplinary task force to review current law and enforcement related to Internet harassment and recommend changes to better protect the citizens of your state.

Yesterday I was in Jefferson City to participate in this task force, which included representatives from the law enforcement, nonprofit, academic, mental health, and business communities. The task force met to specifically create the new crime of cyber-harassment in response to Megan Meier’s suicide almost a year ago, but still newsworthy and on the minds of many people as this New York Times article from last week shows.

Cyber-harassment can be devastating and dangerous to victims. Due to the ease of sending electronic communications, harassment that occurs online can be instant, frequent, anonymous, and permanently public. Cyber-harassers can easily impersonate their victims and even encourage third parties to unwittingly "flame" and harass a victim.

Tina Meier, Megan’s mom, opened up our task force meeting by recounting the tragic story of her daughter’s death. Megan was a 13 year old girl that had befriended what she thought was a boy on MySpace but turned out to be an adult neighbor that lived next-door.

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Technology to inject competition into religion?

by Sonia Arrison on December 14, 2007 · 2 comments

Here’s a column I just wrote on life extension technologies and religion. And here’s a snippet:

Professor Ron Cole-Turner of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary discussed how life extension could benefit many religious orders. “Technology will inject competition into religion and force religious authorities to clarify what they mean by immortality.” This is important, according to Cole-Turner because “there is currently a lot of evasiveness about what immortality means.”

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Does “the public” really communicate with the FCC?

by Adam Thierer on December 13, 2007 · 8 comments

Matt Lasar has put together a very entertaining article illustrating how “Faux Celebrity FCC Filings [are] on the Rise.” What he’s referring to is the fact that just about anyone can file comments with the FCC, even fake celebrities or dead historical figures.

The whole process has become a complete joke. Some of my research on the FCC’s indecency complaint process has illustrated how one group–the Parents Television Council (PTC)–has essentially been able to stuff the complaint ballot box at the FCC by filing endless strings of computer-generated complaints from its website. The PTC then fires off letters to the FCC and Congress that essentially say, “Look! Millions of Americans out outraged by the content on TV and are clamoring for regulation!” In turn, that nonsense gets included in the congressional record when legislation is introduced, and politicians claim “the American people have spoken” and are overwhelming in favor of regulation.

It’s all nonsense, of course, because the vast majority of those “complaints” were just the same PTC form letter. But the same games are at work in the debates over media ownership policy and Net neutrality regulation. Jerry Brito and Jerry Ellig have shown that, in the FCC’s Net neutrality proceeding, “Close to 10,000 comments were submitted to the FCC, yet all but 143 were what the FCC calls “brief text comments,” many of which were form letters generated at the behest of advocacy groups.” The same thing is at work in the media ownership debate. A couple of radical anti-media activist groups stuff the ballot box with computer-generated complaints. And the Washington Post recently ran a piece raising questions about how the public filing process is potentially being abused in the XM-Sirius merger fight.

But Matt Laser documents how truly absurd this process has become when the likes of Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Joseph Stalin, and even Jesus Christ end up submitting “comments” for the “public record.” Here’s some of the highlights from Lasar’s writeup:

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Cato’s Cavalcade of International Web Sites

by Jim Harper on December 12, 2007 · 4 comments

My employer, the Cato Institute, believes that the promotion of the classical liberal ideals of liberty, free markets and peace is an essential effort.

Accordingly, today Cato is launching six innovative foreign-language Web sites. These new sites will publish in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Persian, Kurdish, and for African audiences in English and Swahili. These join three other highly-successful sites in Spanish, Arabic and Russian.