My brother Andrew is a programmer out on the left coast, and he’s released a web-based steganography program:
PicSecret encodes messages by subtly altering images in a way that’s nearly invisible to the naked eye. Unlike some other steganography programs, the advanced technology in PicSecret allows the image to be converted between image formats without destroying the hidden message. Only the picture itself, and not a particular image file, is needed to transmit a PicSecret message. In addition, PicSecret uses strong error detection and correction techniques to allow the secret message to survive format conversion, resizing, and other transformations that would destroy messages encoded using less sophisticated technology.
One of the cool things about the Internet (and which Tim Wu rightly points is lacking about today’s phone networks) is that absolutely anybody can launch a new software product for a tiny amount of money. All you need is a server, some bandwidth, and the time it takes to develop the software.
Anyway, below the fold you will find a picture of Snoop Dogg. Go here to decode it and read my secret message.
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Over at Ars, Jon Stokes has a story on the debate over allowing more high-skilled immigrants into the country:
In an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates argues yet again in favor of raising the cap on H1-B foreign worker visas from its present number of 65,000. Gates’ basic argument boils down to this: fewer students at American universities are opting for computer science degrees, which means that we need to raise the H1-B cap so that the software industry can import more foreign labor to fill those jobs that Americans–for whatever reason–don’t seem to be equipped for.
Of course, the fact that the importation of cheap foreign labor into the software industry job market hampers American programmers’ ability to compete and leads to depressed wages overall is never mentioned by Gates as a major reason why a computer science degree just isn’t that attractive any more to Americans. Who wants to spend four or five years getting a CS degree, only to be priced out of the job market by foreign programmers who are willing to work for less in exchange for a green card?
The rest of his article is about whether Bill Gates has been making misleading statements about how much Microsoft pays its immigrant employees. I don’t have anything to add to that debate, but I think the argument that Stokes makes above reflects a basic economic fallacy.
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Cnet News reports that BitTorrent (the company) is launching an online movie rental store today. As with Zudeo, a similar service from the creators of the Azureus bittorrent (the protocol) client, the movie files will reach viewers via tit-for-tat peer-to-peer networking. The question is whether consumers will bite at the chance to lend BitTorrent their bandwidth.
It’s one thing to download a movie or song directly to your computer from, say, Apple or one of the other online media stores. But bittorrent systems are different: They use your bandwidth to send the audio or video files to other computers. The result is less bandwidth fees for the movie store because it doesn’t have to pay for every byte sent to a customer.
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Over at my other blog, Brian Moore points out this article that looks back of the great off-shoring debate of three years ago:
Then-candidate John Kerry issued a statement denouncing what he called “Benedict Arnold CEOs” who shipped U.S. jobs overseas. The airwaves and cables fairly hummed with angry talk about offshoring.
And what happened next? Nothing.
Nothing, that is, like the massive outflow of jobs that many feared. Employment growth, which had been notably slow after the 2001 recession, picked up in the United States. (We’ve gained more than five million jobs since early 2004.) Recruiters who specialize in information-technology workers say they have more openings than they can fill…
Most economists who’ve looked at the issue rate the long-run economic impact of offshoring as either (1) minimal, or (2) positive. Using overseas workers to save money or boost productivity generally results in better or cheaper services, which in turn leads to more competition, more innovation, and growth.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to Scott Kirwin, who made a return appearance in December to Wired magazine. Things have changed. He shut down his anti-offshoring Web site in 2006 and has since found himself a better job in the software business. “I don’t view outsourcing as the big threat it was,” he told the magazine. “In the end, America may be stronger for it.”
I wonder if any of the pundits who excoriated Greg Mankiw in 2004 are ready to apologize yet.
Net neutrality being such a hot issue right now, we haven’t had a chance lately to agree with our friends at Public Knowledge. But when we do agree, we really agree. (Speaking for myself, that includes orphan works and fair use.) Today PK President Gigi Sohn blogs about the XM-Sirius merger and opposition to it by the NAB. The post is too good to excerpt only a piece, so here it is in its entirety–under a Creative Commons license, of course.
How is it that the National Association of Broadcasters, which is seeking regulatory relief from current media ownership caps, has the gumption to criticize the proposed merger of XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio? Their statement following the announced merger can be found here, but this is the part I like best:
When the FCC authorized satellite radio, it specifically found that the public would be served best by two competitive nationwide systems. Now, with their stock price at rock bottom and their business model in disarray…they seek a government bail-out to avoid competing in the marketplace.
If any industry knows how to “seek a government bail-out to avoid competing in the marketplace,” it is the broadcast industry. What is “must carry,” other than a government-granted cable-carriage easement for broadcasters? What is exclusive, free licensing of spectrum, other than government-granted protection from auctions and unlicensed uses of the public airwaves?
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Joe at Techdirt reports on some great news from India:
We’ve written in the past about various problems brewing at Indian outsourcing firms that are increasingly facing talent shortages and competition from lower-cost competition. Om Malik has an interesting roundup of a fresh set of articles all pointing to continued troubles at these firms. The big problem continues to be the shortage of labor, which is the result of a few different factors. Many employees who got their start at one of these outsourcers are now going to business school, hoping to move up to higher value work. Furthermore, these jobs aren’t viewed as highly by college graduates as they used to be. Increasingly, talented coders have the opportunity to work directly for the likes of Google and other international tech firms. And there remains a shortage of top-quality education opportunities, preventing many from getting trained and choking off the overall pool of labor. None of this necessarily spells doom for these companies. One way they can cope is by moving up the food chain, offering services of higher value than simple outsourcing or call-center work. And, of course, they don’t have to limit themselves to Indian employees, they can hire talent from the US as well.
When the Lou Dobbses of the world complain about globalization, they like to paint a picture of an inexaustible supply of cheap labor overseas. This is bad for two reasons, we’re repeatedly told: it’s unfair to the overseas workers who are “forced” to work for low wages, and it’s unfair to American workers who can’t compete against foreign competition.
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Ezra Klein shrugs at the decline of the traditional American daily:
Newspapers currently expend a fair number of resources doing certain things very poorly, or replicating the efforts of other organizations. That was fine when the information junkie had few alternatives. It’s less so when the world offers limitless avenues for data accumulation.
But all this really means is that newspapers will begin following magazines and specialty newspapers (like The Wall Street Journal) and seeking to make themselves indispensable to certain audiences. Some of those audiences may be ideological, and you’ll see campaigning newspapers akin to the British Guardian or Fox News. Some will be professional, and you’ll see dedicated foreign bureaus that do nothing save in-depth reporting on global issues, in much the way National Journal does for Congress. All will be, in their way, more relevant. The bloodless, fearful paradigm of “objective” reporting has alienated all while informing none, and it will likely come to a close.
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I hope every TLF reader is also a Techdirt reader, but in case some of you missed it, I wanted to point out that Mike Masnick is doing a fantastic series on post-scarcity economics. Here’s a taste:
Throw an infinity into the supply of a good and the supply/demand curve is going to toss out a price of zero (sounds familiar, right?). Again, the first assumption is to assume the system is broken and to look for ways to artificially limit supply.
However, the mistake here is to look at the market in a manner that is way too simplified. Markets aren’t just dynamic things that constantly change, but they also impact other markets. Any good that is a component of another good may be a finished good for the seller, but for the buyer it’s a resource that has a cost. The more costly that resource is, the more expensive it is to make that other good. The impact flows throughout the economy. If the inputs get cheaper, that makes the finished goods cheaper, which open up more opportunities for greater economic development. That means that even if you have an infinite good in one market, not all the markets it touches on are also infinite. However, the infinite good suddenly becomes a really useful and cheap resource in all those other markets.
So the trick to embracing infinite goods isn’t in limiting the infinite nature of them, but in rethinking how you view them. Instead of looking at them as goods to sell, look at them as inputs into something else. In other words, rather than thinking of them as a product the market is pressuring you to price at $0, recognize they’re an infinite resource that is available for you to use freely in other products and markets. When looked at that way, the infinite nature of the goods is no longer a problem, but a tremendous resource to be exploited. It almost becomes difficult to believe that people would actively try to limit an infinitely exploitable resource, but they do so because they don’t understand infinity and don’t look at the good as a resource.
Of course, the concern is that information resources only become infinite after the first copy is produced, and that first copy might not be produced absent artificially constrained supply. But I expect Mike will argue that this condition occurs less often than the standard economic model suggests–that people can show surprising ingenuity in finding ways to profit from their intellectual creations even without the benefit of a legal monopoly.
Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal has a fun piece in today’s paper about the amazing gains that have been made in the field of digital storage technology. He notes that we reached another amazing milestone in the computing business with the annoucement of several terabyte-capacity disk drives from Hitachi, Seagate and others. (I saw some of these at CES this year. Very cool stuff.) The last time we reached a major storage milestone like this, he points out, was back in 1991 when we crossed the gigabyte threshold.
I’ll never forget when those first 1-gig drives came out how I thought to myself “Geez, who in the hell would ever need that much capacity?” What an idiot I was. Of course, I could not have envisioned the explosion of so much downloadable digital content, the rise of digital photography / camcorders, and the coming of storable HD video. I recently maxed out an old 100-gig hard drive on a PC at my house and started stacking external hard drives to store all my digital content. And my wife and I have been holding off on upgrading to an HD camcorder because we fear we don’t have enough storage space for all the home movies of the kids.
But hopefully that will now change for me. As Gomes points out, back when those old 1-gig drives where announced, they were priced in the $2000 range. By contrast, the new 1-terabyte drives are hitting the market at just $400 bucks. This means that, on a cost-per-byte basis, the old 1-gig models were 5,000 times as expensive as the newer models.
You gotta love capitalism!
I’ve got a new article up at The American about the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight:
The two camps, each desperate to avoid Betamax’s fate, held dueling press conferences. The more bullish of the two was the Blu-Ray camp, which declared its “victory as the premiere high definition DVD format of choice,” touting broad support from both Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry. But backers of HD-DVD were unbowed, announcing plans for hundreds of new titles in the next year.
Predicting the winner of this battle has become a popular pastime among technology pundits. But there’s a real risk that the combination of consumer confusion and the rapid improvement of Internet-based distribution technologies will doom both formats to niche status.
This article doesn’t have too much of a policy angle to it. When I started on the article, I had planned to discuss the various irritations created by digital rights management restrictions, but I concluded that although those are likely to annoy consumers, they probably won’t be the deciding factor in the success or failure of the formats. The HDCP format gives the movie publisher the right to decide which restrictions on playback will apply to each movie. In theory, a studio can disallow playback entirely on devices that don’t meet HDCP standards. But given that there are thousands of HDTVs out there that were sold before the HDCP standard was finalized, my guess is that they’ll never turn that “feature” on. Hollywood may shoot itself in the foot from time to time, but I doubt they’re so suicidal as to cripple one of their most lucrative revenue streams.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.