At The American, David Robinson reviews Andrew Keen‘s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, and finds it wanting.
Technology, Business & Cool Toys 
This very fine Ars story on the emergence of contactless payments is a terrific opportunity to spot examples of people minding other people’s business.
Example 1, Federal Reserve minding consumers’ business: “The Federal Reserve sets rules for receipts, and last week the Feds said that purchases of $15 or less don’t even require a receipt now, let alone a signature.”
I’m sure the Federal Reserve cares, and I’m sure they’ve done a careful job, but I really think that the need for, and content of, receipts can be hashed out among buyers and sellers. I now wonder how many billions of receipts are handed out each year because of this “protection.” (If it’s one billion more than consumers actually want and need, think paper, ink, print mechanism, and a second or two of people’s time x 1,000,000,000 – costs all borne by consumers directly, or indirectly in the form of higher prices, without a commensurate benefit.)
Example 2, Security researchers minding credit card companies’ business: “Security researchers independent from credit card companies are sounding alarms, while the credit card companies themselves believe that they have the right balance of security and functionality.”
The researchers care, and they want the best possible system, but they’re security researchers. Almost by definition, they are going to overweight security.
Payment systems are actually supposed to balance many competing interests, security being just one. Others include convenience, level of repudiability, privacy, and so on. So long as the credit card associations bear the risk of loss (and in these low-dollar transacations, they do), security is the credit card associations’ problem.
(Yes, the costs of insecurity are also passed to merchants and consumers. The solution that will keep these costs in check, yet in balance with other demands on the system, is competition among credit card associations and among payment systems for both kinds of customers. The job of each credit card association is then to constantly tweak the mix of interests its products serve. With each tweak, it aims to bring more customers on board than it loses.)
If the researchers convince the Fed to hold up experimentation with RF payments, that’s two busy-bodies getting together to run transactions for which consumers, merchants, and credit card associations are supposed to be responsible.
When lines of authority break down, results suffer. No one is better positioned to balance risks than self-interested parties.
Very nifty demonstration of binary logic:
Based on my hazy recollection from the one computer architecture class I took, this is very close to how addition in real computers works, only the rockers are replaced by a sequence of NAND gates.
Hat tip to Cord Blomquist, who doesn’t appear to believe in permalinks.
More details here.
Awesome:
Once the natural language processing people get with the program, we’ll be able to build C-3PO. More here.
One of the most exciting things about technological progress, from a libertarian perspective, is that as technologies get cheaper, they get harder and harder for the state to regulate. The prolific Chris Anderson has the latest example: he’s built an unmanned aerial vehicle for under $1000. He explains his motivations here:
The main aim of this project is to both make the world’s cheapest full-featured UAV and the first one designed to be within the reach of high school and below kids, as a platform for an aerial robotics contest. Like the Lego FIRST league, but in the air.
But there is another aim, which I ended being asked about a lot at Maker Faire. At the moment the FAA regulations on UAVs are ambiguous (we believe that by staying below 400 feet and within line-of-sight we’re within them). But there is a good deal of concern that as small and cheap UAVs become more common, the FAA will toughen the rules, making activities such as ours illegal. I hope this project will illustrate why that approach won’t work.
By creating a UAV with Lego parts and built in part by kids, we haven’t just created a minimum UAV, we’ve created a reductio ad absurdum one. If children can make UAVs out of toys, the genie is out of the bottle. Clear use guidelines (such as staying below 400 feet and away from tall buildings) would be welcome, but blanket bans or requirements for explicit FAA approval for each launch will be too hard to enforce. The day when there was a limited “UAV industry” that could be regulated are gone.
Government regulation almost always works by controlling intermediaries—usually large companies. As more and more technologies come within reach of individuals, using off-the-shelf parts, it will be harder and harder for the government to control them. I say bring it on.
My buddy Julian is miffed that the Apple store told him his iPod was a glorified paper weight when, in fact, it took him all of half an hour to fix it:
Well, I was futzing around this evening and pulled it out of that drawer. And I figured: “What the hell, it’s bricked and out of warranty, I’ve got nothing to lose by tinkering with it.” So I grabbed a tiny screwdriver, pried it open, and started sniffing at the innards. It took all of a minute to notice that there was a tiny piece of ribbon circuitry at the base of the thing that had come unmoored from its connector, so I grabbed a tweezer and wedged it back in, then snapped the casing closed again. Voila, good as new!
Once I got over my pleasure at having a working iPod back with so little effort, though, I got a bit annoyed. It had been obvious when the problem first appeared (after I tried resets and other such things) that it was basically sound, but that there was some sort of hardware issue with the clickwheel. I almost just popped it open to check for loose connections back then, but I figured it was better to go ask the experts, on the off chance I could make it worse by poking about. And I suppose, like an ass, I assumed that it couldn’t possibly be that simple, because the experts were talking about sending it back to the plant for costly repairs. But now I find myself thinking: If these guys were remotely competent or informed about their gadgets, surely they must have known that there was a high probability this was a simple loose connection that could be solved with the five-minute surgery I just performed, and would have done for myself a while ago if I hadn’t deferred to the local Genius. So I want to register a minor WTF here: Have they decided that once it’s out of warranty, there’s no reason suggesting incredibly simple and obvious procedures that might fix an expensive piece of gadgetry if you look as though you might be willing to buy another, newer expensive piece of gadgetry?
This is obviously a borderline case, where the Genius probably could have done what Julian did and fixed the problem. But as a matter of general policy (remember that Apple runs dozens of stores and has to try to treat everyone equally), it’s not obvious that what Julian is suggesting is feasible. Labor is relatively expensive, and in the grand scheme of things, an iPod really isn’t.
Outside the tech policy area, but I just had to vent . . . .
In a blog post from Found|Read titled Dangers of a Threesome – (clever) – hapless Kevin Wolf writes of bringing two equal partners into a company formed around a business idea of his. He is distraught because the two partners recently fired him. His third conclusion from this episode – third! not first – is “If the idea for the business originated with you, consider keeping a controlling voting interest in the company.”
No shit. (‘Scuse my French.)
Found|Read is part of the impressive GigaOM network of online news sources and blogs, which produces a wide array of interesting information and thinking. But I wouldn’t listen very long to a running coach, sitting on the ground with skinned knees, who advised me that I should lace my shoes.
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.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.