Displacement of Concepts

Not Wanting to Bully, but Not Having That Choice

Cory's speech to Microsoft is getting lots of play. Good stuff there, and good discussion [in German, too]. Lessig's even gotten into the action.

What's interesting is some of the response we're starting to see from inside Microsoft. Let's look at what Robert Scoble has to say:

Cory wants us to bully the RIAA and push a format that is easily copyable (for music, at least). He says that's exactly what the VCR industry did (yes, he says, they got sued, and won, and were repaid hansomely in the marketplace). Interesting argument. I don't agree with Cory that that'd be a good thing for Microsoft to do. I want to see us avoid the courtroom if at all possible and avoid situations where we're bullying anyone.

But Scoble's take is just plain wrong. Microsoft, by including DRM in its technology and not providing the option to operate without it, is bullying consumers. Even in Scoble's own framework, it's not really a "bully or not bully" choice; it's a "who to bully" choice. Put (hopefully) a bit more articulately, it's a question of where Microsoft's own interests lie, and it seems in the eyes of most people, that they lie with the consumers (remember, the customer is always right).

But Microsoft people see this as bullying the RIAA, and in the interest of staying out of court, would rather bully consumers. And bullying them in a way that they have lots of trouble responding to. At least as a group. Because they're unorganized. Because they have trouble seeing their common interest. Because of all the problems of collective action.

Finding Stuff: Another Wrinkle

Brad DeLong is posting interesting stuff on being able to retrieve his own information. He blogs important stuff, which then lets him use Google to search for and retrieve the blogged information later. As Abiola points out [Google and Metadata], this works because other people (like me) link to DeLong's posts, and then Google can make better sense of them (though I wonder how Google handles my repeated use of "find more here" where the word "here" is the link word; maybe I'll stop doing that).

DeLong agrees with Abiola, and says he's going to think some more about the whole thing, no doubt while waiting for John Udell's next post on the topic -- it was, after all, a Udell post that started the discussion. Of course, according to Joel Spolsky, we know what we need, and that is for the OS to "search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973. [emphasis in original].

I'm writing here because part of DeLong's newest post made me wonder about how the human inconsistency factor fits in. Let me explain.

I wish I had said that

I don't spend a lot of space here posting links to things; I try to say something when I have something to say, and be quiet when I don't (sometimes I even stay quiet when I have something to say, because I don't always have the time to be as active, articulate, and lucid as I would like to be). That said, Cory Doctorow recently posted about a presentation he did at Microsoft, telling them why digital rights management is bad; sharp-minded Ernie Miller ironically noted that he thought Microsoft wouldn't get it; Wendy Seltzer but had already replied, saying (among other things):

The DRM moment has been left behind by science. Publishers were looking for pay-per-use and perfect price discrimination; DRM promised it to them. But DRM was backed by bad science. As long as we live in a world where we can still talk to our friends and still tinker with our tools, DRM is doomed to failure. And when it fails at its primary purpose, it succeeds only at driving potential customers to other sources.

Regardless of whether Ernie was being ironic (and I think he was), I really wish I had said what Wendy said. Because now that she's said it, all I can say is, "Ditto." So, ditto.

By the way, Cory's speech, posted in full here, is one of the prime reasons we should all be reading BoingBoing (in addition to the cool pictures and technological insights Cory and his cohort offer us). He's smart. Pay attention. 'Nuff said.

Go. Read.

The End of Spam? I don't think so . . .

The Industry Standard runs an article [Society set to kill off spam, academic says] on a presentation made by Ravi Sharma, identified as an adjunct associate professor at Nanyang Technical University (Singapore), though his web page says he's a senior fellow at Nanyang (a very solid university with some class people), at the "Asian Telecommunications Industry Exchange." Sharma predicts the end of spam within two years. What? Within two years? How? The answer is, essentially, because it has to be stopped. Hmmm . . .

"The spam problem will be fixed -- it must be fixed," he [Sharma] said . . .. "In society, you never have a majority suffering under an onslaught from an inconsiderate minority. An equilibrium will be achieved."

Although government initiatives have yet to show any signs of eliminating unsolicited e-mail, Sharma believes that the prevalence of spam will prove its downfall.

"It (the elimination of spam) will happen within one or two years, simply because it is so intolerable," he said.

Sharma said that the best immediate solution is tracking down IP (Internet protocol) addresses from where spam originated and blacklisting them.

This is a press story, so I was hoping there was something more to the presentation that the reporter didn't get. What is there is so simplistic that it's a little scary, but the presenter has confirmed that the reporter has accurately represented the remarks made at the conference. So that leaves me having a bit more to say . . .

Open Source Licenses

eWeek runs an interesting article on open source licensing that does a pretty solid job of running through the GPL, BSD, and related licenses (eWeek, "The Ins and Outs of Open-Source Licensing"). Written against the backdrop of why a business might want to release a software product under the GPL, it provides a good if not a bit simplistic review of the various licenses, including implications for allowing "derived works to be returned to proprietary form." I'm not a licensing expert, but overall it looks pretty accurate to me.

That said, I am puzzled by the complete lack of any mention of the Creative Commons movement or its attendant licenses. While maybe not central to the article's theme (software products), it should have at least been noted, especially as it starts to be used for things like studying software use and developing software manuals [more here]. It would be one more way for a software development company to get people working on and excited about its products, even if those people aren't themselves software developers . . .

Procedural Stuff

Over at one of my must-read blogs, Ernie the Attorney, there seems to be some confusion over the new U.S. Supreme Court decision [pdf] -- or more properly "non-decision" -- relating to the words "under god" in the pledge of allegiance. The post starts with an Ambrose Bierce story about how when asked by a traveler if it would be legal to use a boat, the owner (a U.S. Supreme Court justice) says yes. The boat sinks, and when asked why he didn't tell the traveler it would sink, the judge replies, "The matter of the boat's condition was not brought before me." The post then goes on to note, in relation to the U.S. Supreme Court pledge decision, that another way to avoid making a decision is to "conclude that the court has no standing."

What's strange about this is that the story doesn't fit what the Supreme Court did, and in addition, the use of the term "standing" is a little confusing. Let's look at standing first. The Supreme Court has certainly overturned a lower court decision that found that the inclusion of those words violated the U.S. Constitution's Establishment Clause. It did so on the basis that the plaintiff in question did not have standing. Standing is something parties have or do not have; it is not something courts have (courts have or do not have jurisdiction, and here the Supreme Court also concluded it did not have jurisdiction, based on the plaintiff's lack of standing).

In addition, the Supremes did not say, as in the Bierce story, "I wasn't asked about this." They said, "You're not the right person to ask about this." They often do this, or something similar along the lines of "It's too soon to talk about this" or "It's too late to talk about this." Not unusual, and something that some people think is probably the best outcome in this case, at least for now.

New Form of Life, er, Comment Spam

I noted with interest a post by Michael Froomkin about a new form of comment spam. Here's a quote:

I’m getting a series of comments that are like classic comment spam—a vague phrase, out of context, stuck seemingly at random on old posts (e.g. “charity begins at home”). Usually these are just a cover to link to some site that is trying to raise its googlerank. What’s odd about these is that all the “author” links are to pages of the form nohomepage.domain.com where “domain” is a domain that is not registered. So those links don’t work.

The comments also have a ‘hidden’ link to a second domain (usually the period is hyperlinked). But those domains don’t resolve either.

I've deleted seven of these over the last two days; the first two were linked to Disney and came from the same IP address. Today's linked to nothing (like Froomkin's) and came from varied IPs. We don't get enough comments here that I can't easily pick them out, but I guess I should probably set my comments to "close" after a week or two. I just don't know how to automate that, and going in individually and doing it is just a furry pain the neck . . .

Thinking about this, I wonder if perhaps there is some flaw in MT that allows this kind of post to "do something" that otherwise couldn't be done. Guess it's time to check the error pages and related "under the hood" details a bit more thoroughly.

If anybody cares to let me in on what is actually going on, I'm all ears.

The FTC and Patent Abuse (but not I.P. Abuse)

My colleague and fellow blogster Arvind Thattai sent me a link to this BBC story from earlier this week (it's made /. as well). It says the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking at abuses of the patent system. The FTC has been on this boat for awhile (the BBC article doesn't mention it, but the FTC, the NSF and the Berkeley Center for Technology and Law co-sponsored a conference in April 2004 looking at possible patent system redesign, after issuing a report [pdf] in October 2003 [press release]).

There's lots of coverage of this new story in the blogosphere: look here or here or here (or here or here). Lots of good stuff to be said about this. It's probably good news. It even fits somewhat with what appears to be the trend in Europe (I'm being optimistic here).

But here's what's got me wondering: why just patent law? Why is it that the FTC is only concerned with the anticompetitive effects of patents? Why is there no concern with copyright abuse that results in anti-competitive effects? I must admit, I don't have an answer for this one. I can only point out the apparent inconsistency. So here goes . . .

[note: because of time constaints, this piece is lighter in links than I would hope; my apologies]

Killing the FCC softly, with his words

Declan McCullagh has a piece out on ZDNet advocating abolishment of the FCC [Boing Boing links to it here]. His general point is that the FCC has been bad at its job, is still bad at its job, and is likely to be bad at its job in the future. In its place we should use the property model: if one person interferes with the "property" rights held in spectrum by another, then the one being interfered with sues them. In his own words:

What if disputes over s 1000 pectrum arose? The answer is simple. Whoever owned the rights to that slice of virtual real estate would locate the illicit broadcaster, march into the local courthouse and get a restraining order to pull the plug on the transmitter. Trespass is hardly a new idea, and courts are well-equipped to deal with it.

He relies heavily on Peter Huber's 1997 book, " Law & Disorder in Cyberspace: Abolish the FCC and let Common Law Rule the Telecosm." It's an interesting idea, but I've never bought Huber's faith in the market's ability (as supported by the courts) to make efficient use of the radio-frequency spectrum.

Look at what faith in the market is doing in relation to another "intangible good," as in, property rights in information. Entrenchment of existing rights, supported by additional legal entitlements for existing owners, and greater power to threaten and punish. Why is it market advocates fail to acknowledge that leaving something to a property regime still requires government intervention (at least in setting the initial entitlement, if not further extending those rights)? Still, Huber's idea has hung around for awhile, and is likely to continue hanging around.

There are some problems with this, though, in addition to the need to set the initial entitlement.

Tracking Wild RAM

New Scientist recently reported that information stored in RAM may be traceable over long periods of time. Of course, most people don't know this. Lots of people -- myself included -- know that "deleting" files doesn't actually delete them, that there is still data on erased drives, that temporary Internet files (aka cache) and history have lots of information about your web browsing, and that lots of applications -- most notably MS Word -- retain potentially embarassing data unless you watch your settings. I also know that RAM is often shifted to the Windows "swap file" on the hard disk (Windows does this as part of its memory management function, using it as "virtual memory"). But it never occurred to me to put this all together. I never realized that the system's use of the swap file could lead to data from RAM "staying around" for extended periods of time, the way "regular" files do. It makes sense, but it hadn't occurred to me.

Well, as the New Scientist piece points out, this data is still potentially sitting there, having been swapped out of memory and to the hard drive. Stuff on the hard drive sticks around. If it's not directly overwritten (and even if it is), it could sit there for a long, long time. And unlike standard application and system file deletion, where you can find a tool to obliterate them as well as possible, you don't even know they are there.

What kind of data are we talking about? All kinds. Anything that appears on your computer screen, whether you put it there or not. The New Scientist piece mentions things like passwords and personal details. Anything you've typed into a browser window, for example, needs to sit in RAM. If it sits long enough, or if Windows is aggressively managing memory, it might shift to the hard drive. And who knows how long it will sit there?

Who could get access? Some potential examples are hackers, computer techs, your boss, your kids, your spouse, someone who buys your computer. The solution is for systems to be designed so that this doesn't happen. But for now, I don't even know if there is anything that can be done (other than setting the swap file size to zero, which would cause most computers to function very, very poorly).

But even if we can't fix it just yet, it shows us that computers are inherently insecure beasts, and it makes you wonder what other little things we've overlooked . . .