Arrington reports that a G-mail archiver called G-Archiver, which backs up all of your Gmail emails to your hard drive, sends every user’s email address and password to the creator’s own email account, giving him access to all of their Gmail messages. And he observes:
That has led a number of experts to conclude that Google Apps can never be a real threat to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint. All of the sensitive business information of a company, if stored on Google’s servers, is just a password guess, or in this case what is effectively a phishing scam, away.
This reprises his
earlier observation (which I amplified
here) that “unauthorized document access is a simple password guess or government ‘request’ away.”
Looking down the horizon, I don’t see why it’s better to have computing and storage done remotely. Better security (for the corporation and individual alike) will come from owning and physically controlling your storage and computing. The winners won’t be the providers of computing in the cloud (think Google); it’ll be the ones who make the portable and easy-to-use devices (think Apple).
While I’m critiquing random aspects of my air travel experience, I have a question: why are airline attendants such control freaks? I’ve gotten used to the “seat backs and tray tables in their upright and locked positions” restrictions, which could have some safety implications in cases of turbulence. And it’s at least conceivable that the ban on cell phones could be necessary to avoid interference with air traffic control systems. But I’m totally baffled by the rule that was in force between the time we landed the plane and the time we reached the gate: cell phones were OK but other portable electronic devices were not. I can’t think of any plausible safety reason—scratch that, any reason at all—for this restriction, especially when the opposite rule is in force while the plane is at cruising altitude. Weirdest of all, the flight attendant announced, and then diligently enforced, the rule that window shades must be up during takeoff and landing. I’ve wracked my brain and I can’t think of any reason it would matter what position the window shade is in. Do flight attendants (or airline executives) get off on making up totally arbitrary rules to impose on their passengers?
I’m stuck in the Charlotte airport, and I wanted to give some kudos to the good people of Charlotte for making WiFi access available in their airport for free. In this case, I’m stranded in Charlotte for a couple of hours, so I probably would have plunked down the requisite $7.99 if they’d asked for it. But in the vast majority of cases, where I’m in the airport for an hour or less before my flight, the fee discourages me from using the connection. This is a pure deadweight loss for the world, denying Internet access to a lot of people in order to squeeze a few dollars out of the handful willing to pay an inflated price for access. It’s good to see Charlotte buck the trend, and I hope my own airport follows Charlotte’s lead.
An EFF release issued Thursday tells of another telecom employee who has revealed government access to Americans’ communications.
Babak Pasdar, a computer security consultant, has gone public about his discovery of a mysterious “Quantico Circuit” while working for an unnamed major wireless carrier. Pasdar believes that this circuit gives the U.S. government direct, unfettered access to customers voice calls and data packets. These claims echo the disclosures from retired AT&T technician Mark Klein, who has described a “secret room” in an AT&T facility.
Given the lack of information available to Congress on this and other allegations, three House Committee Chairmen have
written their colleagues arguing against a “vote in the dark” on FISA reform and telecom immunity.
At the Burton Group Identity Blog, Mark Diodati has a write-up of Microsoft’s acquisition of Credentica.
Microsoft’s Kim Cameron and Stefan Brands of Credentica are two people I know to be doing important work in the identity area. I featured Stefan in the final chapter of my book,
Identity Crisis. I believe both are working to make identity and credentialing systems that support secure transacting without promoting surveillance – no easy task.
Perhaps this summer, I will have time to translate the technical details of their work into libertarian English and report more about it.
Bret Swanson had a great post plugging Chris Anderson’s upcoming book Free, which I expect to be every bit as interesting as his first book. But he then concluded his post with what seems to me like a totally gratuitous swipe at Larry Lessig’s brilliant book, Free Culture, which he characterizes as “about the demonization of property and profits” and “imposing a radical new utopian and quasi-socialist agenda on our imperfect but highly productive and creative capitalist economy.”
This left me wondering if we’d read the same book. Lessig of course criticizes large companies who have lobbied for changes in copyright law that benefit themselves at the expense of consumers. But I would regard that as “criticizing rent-seeking,” not “demonizing profits.” When Cato attacks corporate welfare, nobody thinks that’s anti-capitalist.
And I have absolutely no idea what “radical new utopian and quasi-socialist agenda” Lessig is advocating, or upon whom Swanson thinks it would be “imposed.” The changes Lessig advocates would mostly undo the changes to copyright law that the content industries have pushed over the last three decades: longer terms, abandonment of formalities, anti-circumvention rights, harsher penalties, erosion of fair use. For the most part, Lessig’s “radical new utopian and quasi-socialist agenda” is also known as “American copyright law circa 1975.”
Now, Lessig certainly has some ideas I disagree with. Some of them might even be characterized as anti-property or anti-profit. But the ideas in
Free Culture certainly aren’t among them. To the contrary, as the Wall Street Journal‘s review of Free Culture pointed out, the central theme of Free Culture is something conservatives normally celebrate: reducing the role of government and lawyers into Americans’ ordinary lives. Over the last quarter century, the regulatory regime that is copyright law has intruded on more and more aspects of our daily lives. While there may very well be good policy arguments for some of these changes, as Swanson’s own colleagues have forcefully argued. But there’s certainly nothing unlibertarian about worrying that increased government involvement in peoples’ lives will have negative consequences.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, and Thomas W. Hazlett, all of whom weighed in on Lessig’s side in the Eldred decision, a case Lessig discusses extensively in Free Culture. Listen to noted libertarian scholar Richard Epstein, who agrees with Lessig that copyright law has been applied too aggressively to documentary filmmakers. Free culture is about what its title suggests: freedom. One can (and Swanson’s colleagues have) make a coherent argument that the freedoms Lessig champions are less important than the need to create incentives for the production of creative works. But it’s inaccurate to describe a book about freedom as “utopian and quasi-socialist.”
Via Julian, diarist at Daily Kos has repeated the complaint that libertarians have been AWOL on FISA. This is beyond silly. Let me offer a quick timeline:
Feb 1: Cato’s daily podcast features me discussing the FISA debate. And on Cato’s blog, I debunk the idea that telecom immunity is about trial lawyers.
Ben Worthen has a post looking at restrictions on the use of consumer technologies in businesses. Apparently, a lot of corporate IT departments have found it necessary to ban a lot of consumer applications like Skype, webmail, and the iPhone from their networks because they’re required to monitor and record all of their employees’ communications, and it’s hard to do that with applications that aren’t specifically designed with employer monitoring in mind. This strikes me as profoundly stupid. If the goal is to prevent employees from leaking confidential information, this kind of ad hoc monitoring isn’t going to get the job done. Employees will always be able to find some application that lets them transfer files (the IT manager Worthen interviewed admits that there are some additional sites she’d like to block but hasn’t yet). And even if the computers are totally locked down, they can still write down confidential information with a pen and paper and carry it out of the office. The bottom line is that an employee determined to violate his employer’s trust will find a way to do so no matter what the IT department does.
Apparently, though, this is what securities law requires. So you can’t really blame the IT departments for complying with the law. But it’s worth noting that this is more a quirk of a few regulated industries (health care is another where information-disclosure is tightly controlled) rather than a general property of American business. If your company isn’t in one of these industries, it probably doesn’t make sense to impose these kinds of draconian restrictions. And Congress might want to re-think regulations that require companies to behave this way.
Via the always carefully inoffensive ValleyWag, Psychology Today has a post about a study of the motivations of open source programmers and other participants in collaborative online projects. The study finds that “software contributors placed a greater emphasis on reputation-gaining and self-development motivations, compared with content contributors, who placed a greater emphasis on altruistic motives.”
We’ve discussed here before how open source projects often represent a more efficient way of producing information goods than firms. Some are eager to class open source as “non-market” (read altruistic) behavior, but I think it’s better considered as market behavior that happens to trade in human capital, reputation, self-satisfaction, etc. rather than money.
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