tech in changing society

Tracking via cell phone is easy

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

What your salesman probably failed to tell you – and may not even realize – is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can calculate your coordinates to within a few yards by receiving signals from satellites. GPS technology gave U.S. military commanders a vital edge during Gulf War II, and sailors and pilots depend on it as well. In the E911-capable phone, the GPS chip does not wait until it senses danger, springing to life when catastrophe strikes; it’s switched on whenever your handset is powered up and is always ready to transmit your location data back to a wireless carrier’s computers. Verizon or T-Mobile can figure out which manicurist you visit just as easily as they can pinpoint a stranded motorist on Highway 59.

So what’s preventing them from doing so, at the behest of either direct marketers or, perhaps more chillingly, the police? Not the law, which is essentially mum on the subject of location-data privacy. As often happens with emergent technology, the law has struggled to keep pace with the gizmo. No federal statute is keeping your wireless provider from informing Dunkin’ Donuts that your visits to Starbucks have been dropping off and you may be ripe for a special coupon offer. Nor are cops explicitly required to obtain a judicial warrant before compiling a record of where you sneaked off to last Thursday night. Despite such obvious potential for abuse, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the American consumer’s ostensible protectors, show little enthusiasm for stepping into the breach. As things stand now, the only real barrier to the dissemination of your daily movements is the benevolence of the telecommunications industry. A show of hands from those who find this a comforting thought? Anyone? …

THE WIRELESS INDUSTRY HAS A NAME FOR SUCH CUSTOM-TAILORED HAWKING: “location-based services,” or LBS. The idea is that GPS chips can be used to locate friends, find the nearest pizzeria, or ensure that Junior is really at the library rather than a keg party. One estimate expects LBS to be a $15 billion market by 2007, a much-needed boost for the flagging telecom sector.

That may be fine for some consumers, but what about those who’d rather opt out of the tracking? The industry’s promise is that LBS customers will have to give explicit permission for their data to be shared with third parties. This is certainly in the spirit of the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999, which anticipated that all cellphone carriers will feature E911 technology by 2006. The law stipulated that E911 data – that is, an individual’s second-by-second GPS coordinates – could only be used for nonemergency purposes if “express prior authorization” was provided by the consumer. …

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Social network analysis by the NSA

law, politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From John Diamond and Leslie Cauley’s “Pre-9/11 records help flag suspicious calling” (USA TODAY: 22 May 2006):

Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials who were briefed about the program. …

The “call detail records” are the electronic information that is logged automatically each time a call is initiated. For more than 20 years, local and long-distance companies have used call detail records to figure out how much to charge each other for handling calls and to determine problems with equipment.

In addition to the number from which a call is made, the detail records are packed with information. Also included: the number called; the route a call took to reach its final destination; the time, date and place where a call started and ended; and the duration of the call. The records also note whether the call was placed from a cellphone or from a traditional “land line.” …

Calls coming into the country from Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Middle East, for example, are flagged by NSA computers if they are followed by a flood of calls from the number that received the call to other U.S. numbers.

The spy agency then checks the numbers against databases of phone numbers linked to terrorism, the officials say. Those include numbers found during searches of computers or cellphones that belonged to terrorists.

It is not clear how much terrorist activity, if any, the data collection has helped to find.

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Google’s data trove tempts the bad guys

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From “Fuzzy maths” (The Economist: 11 May 2006):

Slowly, the company is realising that it is so important that it may not be able to control the ramifications of its own actions. “As more and more data builds up in the company’s disk farms,” says Edward Felten, an expert on computer privacy at Princeton University, “the temptation to be evil only increases. Even if the company itself stays non-evil, its data trove will be a massive temptation for others to do evil.”

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iSee: online map of CCTVs in Manhattan

law, politics, security, tech in changing society / /

From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

One extralegal solution is a project called iSee. Launched several years ago, iSee is an online interactive map of the locations of surveillance cameras in Manhattan. To use iSee, you simply open the map of Manhattan and double-click on your point of departure and your destination. After a few moments of computation, iSee generates the “path of least surveillance.”

iSee can be accessed through the website of the organization which created it, the so-called Institute of Applied Autonomy. IAA is a collective of artists, engineers, and scientists who design technologies for the “burgeoning market” of “cultural insurrection.” The organization presents itself as a tech-savvy civil libertarian answer to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a shadowy R&D wing of the Pentagon. DARPA has recently been in the news for developing the Terrorist Information Awareness project, headed by John Poindexter, which would monitor the everyday transactions of American citizens. Whereas DARPA uses what IAA calls “tools of repression” to take your autonomy away, IAA answers with another set of tools that are intended to give you your autonomy back. …

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In Britain, you can see footage of you captured by CCTV

business, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

In London, a city even more intensively scrutinized by closed-circuit television cameras than New York, citizens can at least retrieve copies of footage taken of them through a provision in Britain’s Data Protection Act. Americans have no such legal recourse. …

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Notes on The Strength of Weak Ties revisited

social software, tech in changing society / /

From Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength Of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited” [Sociological Theory, Volume 1 (1983), 201-233.]:

The argument asserts that our acquaintances (weak ties) are less likely to be socially involved with one another than are our close friends (strong ties).Thus the set of people made up of any individual and his or her acquaintances comprises a low-density network (one in which many of the possible relational lines are absent) whereas the set consisting of the same individual and his or her close friends will be densely knit (many of the possible lines are present). …

The weak tie between Ego and his acquaintance, therefore, becomes not merely a trivial acquaintance tie but rather a crucial bridge between the two densely knit clumps of close friends. To the extent that the assertion of the previous paragraph is correct, these clumps would not, in fact, be connected to one another at all were it not for the existence of weak ties (SWT, p. 1363).

It follows, then, that individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where advancement can depend, as I have documented elsewhere (1974), on knowing about appropriate job openings at just the right time. …

The macroscopic side of this communications argument is that social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent. New ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavors will be handicapped, and subgroups separated by race, ethnicity, geography, or other characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus vivendi. …

In the evolution of social systems, perhaps the most important source of weak ties is the division of labor, since increasing specialization and interdependence result in a wide variety of specialized role relationships in which one knows only a small segment of the other’s personality. … the exposure to a wide variety of different viewpoints and activities is the essential prerequisite for the social construction of individualism. …

She relates this difference to Basil Bernstein’s dis- tinction between restricted and elaborated codes of communication. Restricted codes are simpler-more meanings are implicit and taken for granted as the speakers are so familiar with one another. Elaborated codes are complex and universal – more reflection is needed in organizing one’s communication “when there is more difference between those to whom the speech is addressed” (p. 256). …

At a more mundane level, I argued (SWT, pp. 1369-1373; 1974, pp. 51-62) that weak ties have a special role in a person’s opportunity for mobility-that there is a “structural tendency for those to whom one is only weakly tied to have better access to job information one does not already have. Acquaintances, as compared to close friends, are more prone to move in different circles than oneself. Those to whom one is closest are likely to have the greatest overlap in contact with those one already knows, so that the information to which they are privy is likely to be much the same as that which one already has” (1974, pp. 52-53). …

Administrative or managerial employees had a pattern very much like the one I reported: 35.5 percent using weak ties, 15.8 percent strong ones, and 48.7 percent intermediate. Professionals and office workers also were heavy users of weak ties (30.8 percent and 25.8 percent but, unlike managers, used strong ties even more frequently (51.0 and 44.4 percent). Semiprofessionals found only 13.1 percent of jobs through weak ties and blue-collar workers 19.1 percent; the former found 44.9 percent of jobs through strong ties, the latter only 19.1 percent. …

One set of results is of special interest, however. Ericksen and Yancey found that less-well-educated respondents were those most likely to use strong ties for jobs …

The argument of SWT implies that only bridging weak ties are of special value to individuals; the significance of weak ties is that they are far more likely to be bridges than are strong ties. It should follow, then, that the occupational groups making the greatest use of weak ties are those whose weak ties do connect to social circles different from one’s own. …

Consistent with this interpretation is the finding of Lin and col- leagues (1981) that weak ties have positive effects on occupational status only when they connect one to high-status individuals. For those of lower status, weak ties to those of similar low status were not especially useful, whereas those to high-status contacts were. In the latter case the status difference alone strongly suggests that the ties bridged substan- tial social distance. …

Weak ties provide people with access to information and resources beyond those available in their own social circle; but strong ties have greater motivation to be of assistance and are typically more easily available. …

Pool argues, for example, that the number of weak ties is increased by the development of the communications system, by bureaucratization, population density, and the spread of market mechanisms. Further, he suggests that average family size affects the number of weak ties, since where “primary families are large, more of the total contacts of an individual are likely to be absorbed in them” (p. 5). …

In my study of job finding, for example, I found that those whose job was found through strong ties were far more likely to have had a period of unemployment between jobs than those using weak ties (1974, p. 54). …

A number of studies indicate that poor people rely more on strong ties than do others. Ericksen and Yancey, in a study of Philadel- phia, conclude that the “structure of modern society is such that some people typically find it advantageous to maintain strong networks and we have shown that these people are more likely to be young, less well educated, and black” (1977, p. 23). …

Stack (1974) studied a black, urban American, midwestern ghetto … Stack: “Black families living in the Flats need a steady source of cooperative support to survive. They share with one another because of the urgency of their needs. . . . They trade food stamps, rent money, a TV, hats, dice, a car, a nickel here, a cigarette there, food, milk, grits, and children. . . . Kin and close friends who fall into similar economic crises know that they may share the food, dwelling, and even the few scarce luxuries of those individuals in their kin network. . . . Non-kin who live up to one another’s expectations express elaborate vows of friendship and conduct their social relations within the idiom of kinship” (1974, pp. 32-33, 40). …

At the same time, I would suggest that the heavy concentration of social energy in strong ties has the impact of fragmenting communities of the poor into encapsulated networks with poor connections between these units; individuals so encapsulated may then lose some of the advantages associated with the outreach of weak ties. This may be one more reason why poverty is self-perpetuating. Certainly programs meant to provide social services to the poor have frequently had trouble in their outreach efforts. From the network arguments advanced here, one can see that the trouble is to be expected. …

Furthermore, many cultural items never transmitted by the media are known throughout an extensive network: “Youth cultures offer excellent examples of subcultures which provide a set of communication channels external to the media. Much material which is common knowledge among young people – dirty jokes, sexual lore, aggressive humor . . . is not communicated by the adult-controlled media” (p. 9). …

What makes cultural diffusion possible, then, is the fact that small cohesive groups who are liable to share a culture are not so cohesive that they are entirely closed; rather, ideas may penetrate from other such groups via the connecting medium of weak ties. It is a seeming paradox that the effect of weak ties, in this case, is homogenization, since my emphasis has been the ability of weak ties to reach out to groups with ideas and information different from one’s own. The paradox dissolves, however, when the process is understood to occur over a period of time. The ideas that initially flow from another setting are, given regional and other variations, probably new. Homogeneous subcultures do not happen instantly but are the endpoint of diffusion processes. … Fine and Kleinman note that “culture usage consists of chosen behaviors. . . . Culture can be employed strategically and should not be conceptualized as a conditioned response. Usage of culture requires motivation and, in particular, identification with those who use the cultural items. Thus, values, norms, behaviors, and artifacts constitute a subculture only insofar as individuals see themselves as part of a collectivity whose members attribute particular meanings to these ‘objects'” (1979, pp. 12-13). …

The importance of this notion is clear. If “the innovativeness of central units is shackled by vested intellectual interests (or perspectives) then new ideas must emanate from the margins of the network” (p. 460). Furthermore, as I suggested in SWT for the case of high-risk innovations (p. 1367), Chubin points out that marginals, in science, can better afford to innovate; the innovations, if useful, are seized on by the center. …

Weimann finds also, however, that strong ties are not irrelevant in information flow-the speed of flow, credibility, and especially influence are all greater through strong ties and, in fact, “most of the influence is carried through strong ties” (1980, p. 12). He suggests a division of labor between weak and strong ties: Weak ties provide the bridges over which innovations cross the boundaries of social groups; the decision making, however, is influenced mainly by the strong-ties network in each group (p. 21). …

In the bureaucratic solution, the ties are hierarchical; in the democratic clinics, many of which have reacted against the formal model, “tena- cious ties provide a matrix of close primary group relations unifying the entire structure. These strong ties strikingly resemble patterns observed in small communities, summer camps, and Jesuit monastic orders” (p. 20). …

In their analysis Breiger and Pattison studied three types of ties in the two communities-social, community affairs, and business- professional-and found that social ties function as strong ties, that business-professional ties are weak, and that community-affairs ties are strong in relation to business ties but weak in relation to social ones (1978, pp. 222-224). …

I have not argued that all weak ties serve the functions described in SWT-only those acting as bridges between network segments. Weak ties are asserted to be important because their likelihood of being bridges is greater than (and that of strong ties less than) would be expected from their numbers alone. This does not preclude the possibility that most weak ties have no such function.

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A short explanation of moral rights in IP

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From Betsy Rosenblatt’s “Moral Rights Basics“:

The term “moral rights” is a translation of the French term “droit moral,” and refers … to the ability of authors to control the eventual fate of their works. An author is said to have the “moral right” to control her work. … Moral rights protect the personal and reputational, rather than purely monetary, value of a work to its creator.

The scope of a creator’s moral rights is unclear, and differs with cultural conceptions of authorship and ownership, but may include the creator’s right to receive or decline credit for her work, to prevent her work from being altered without her permission, to control who owns the work, to dictate whether and in what way the work is displayed, and/or to receive resale royalties. Under American Law, moral rights receive protection through judicial interpretation of several copyright, trademark, privacy, and defamation statues, and through 17 U.S.C. §106A, known as the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA). VARA applies exclusively to visual art. In Europe and elsewhere, moral rights are more broadly protected by ordinary copyright law.

In the United States, the term “moral rights” typically refers to the right of an author to prevent revision, alteration, or distortion of her work, regardless of who owns the work. Moral rights as outlined in VARA also allow an author of a visual work to avoid being associated with works that are not entirely her own, and to prevent the defacement of her works. …

Under VARA, moral rights automatically vest in the author of a “work of visual art.” For the purposes of VARA, visual art includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographs, existing in a single copy or a limited edition of 200 signed and numbered copies or fewer. In order to be protected, a photograph must have been taken for exhibition purposes only. VARA only protects works of “recognized stature;” posters, maps, globes, motion pictures, electronic publications, and applied art are among the categories of visual works explicitly excluded from VARA protection. …

Moral rights are not transferrable, and end only with the life of the author. Even if the author has conveyed away a work or her copyright in it, she retains the moral rghts to the work under VARA. Authors may, however, waive their moral rights if do so in writing.

What constitutes infringement of moral rights?

VARA grants two rights to authors of visual works: the right of attribution, and the right of integrity. The right of attribution allows an author to prevent misattribution of a work, and to require that the authorship of the work not be disclosed (i.e. remain anonymous). The right of integrity bars intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of a work if that distortion is likely to harm the author’s reputation, and prevents the destruction of any work of recognized stature.

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Brin’s Transparent Society explained, briefly

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Big Brother Logs On“:

In his 1998 book The Transparent Society, which is well known in the privacy advocacy community, science fiction author and technology watcher David Brin argues that society inevitably will have to choose between two versions of ubiquitous surveillance: in one, only the rich and powerful use and control the system to their own advantage; in the second, more democratic future, the watchers can also be watched. Brin concedes that the latter version would mean everybody’s laundry hung out in public view, but the transparency would at least be mutual. Rent a porn video and your wife knows it; but if she drives to your best buddy’s house four times a week while you’re at the office, you’ll know that also.

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Surveillance tools to detect drowning swimmers

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Big Brother Logs On“:

Consider the benefits of the “computer-aided drowning detection and prevention” system that Boulogne, France-based Poseidon Technologies has installed in nine swimming pools in France, England, the Netherlands and Canada. In these systems, a collection of overhead and in-pool cameras relentlessly monitors pool activity. The video signals feed into a central processor running a machine perception algorithm that can effectively spot when active nonwater objects, such as swimmers, become still for more than a few seconds. When that happens, a red alarm light flashes at a poolside laptop workstation and lifeguards are alerted via waterproof pagers. Last November, a Poseidon system at the Jean Blanchet Aquatic Center in Ancenis, Loire-Atlantique, France, alerted lifeguards in time to rescue a swimmer on the verge of drowning. Pulled from the water unconscious, the swimmer walked away from a hospital the next day.

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CCTV in the UK deters crime

law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Big Brother Logs On“:

In many ways, the drama of pervasive surveillance is being played out first in Orwell’s native land, the United Kingdom, which operates more closed-circuit cameras per capita than any other country in the world. This very public surveillance began in 1986 on an industrial estate near the town of King’s Lynn, approximately 100 kilometers north of London. Prior to the installation of three video cameras, a total of 58 crimes had been reported on the estate. None was reported over the next two years. In 1995, buoyed by that success, the government made matching grants available to other cities and towns that wanted to install public surveillance cameras – and things took off from there. …

And not many argue about surveillance’s ability to deter crime. Recent British government reports cite closed-circuit TV as a major reason for declining crime rates. After these systems were put in place, the town of Berwick reported that burglaries fell by 69 percent; in Northampton overall crime decreased by 57 percent; and in Glasgow, Scotland, crime slumped by 68 percent. Public reaction in England has been mixed, but many embrace the technology. …

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From P2P to social sharing

business, law, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Clay Shirky’s “File-sharing Goes Social“:

The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA’s waves of legal attacks driving experimentation with decentralized file-sharing tools, file-sharing networks have progressively traded efficiency for resistance to legal attack. …

There are several activities that are both illegal and popular, and these suffer from what economists call high transaction costs. Buying marijuana involves considerably more work than buying roses, in part because every transaction involves risk for both parties, and in part because neither party can rely on the courts for redress from unfair transactions. As a result, the market for marijuana today (or NYC tattoo artists in the 1980s, or gin in the 1920s, etc) involves trusted intermediaries who broker introductions.

These intermediaries act as a kind of social Visa system; in the same way a credit card issuer has a relationship with both buyer and seller, and an incentive to see that transactions go well, an introducer in an illegal transaction has an incentive to make sure that neither side defects from the transaction. And all parties, of course, have an incentive to avoid detection. …

There are many ways to move to such membrane-bounded systems, of course, including retrofitting existing networks to allow sub-groups with controlled membership (possibly using email white-list or IM buddy-list tools); adopting any of the current peer-to-peer tools designed for secure collaboration (e.g. Groove, Shinkuro, WASTE etc); or even going to physical distribution. As Andrew Odlyzko has pointed out, sending disks through the mail can move enough bits in a 24 hour period to qualify as broadband, and there are now file-sharing networks whose members simply snail mail one another mountable drives of music. …

The disadvantage of social sharing is simple — limited membership means fewer files. The advantage is equally simple — a socially bounded system is more effective than nothing, and safer than Kazaa. …

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Good description of Fair Use & 1st Sale

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From Scott Kleper’s “An Introduction to Copyfighting“:

I think a lot of people incorrectly assume that Copyfighters are people who believe that copyright should be abolished and that everything should be free. Copyfighters aren’t saying that all media should be freely distributed. We are saying that as consumers of media (film, television, software, literature, etc.) we have certain rights that we would like to protect. One of these rights is Fair Use. Fair Use means that you can reuse copyrighted work without permission as long as you are commenting on it, or copying/parodying the original. Fair Use is what allows you to quote song lyrics when writing a review of a new CD. Another right is First Sale. First Sale means that when you buy something, you own it and are thus entitled to sell it to someone else. First Sale is what allows you to buy a book, read it, then sell it on half.com for someone else to enjoy.

Most of all, we simply want the right to use the products we buy in the way that we see fit. We don’t want to be sued by a manufacturer for opening up a product to see how it works or sued by a media company for moving a file from one device to another. We believe that when we buy a CD, we should be able to convert it to another format to play on another device. We shouldn’t have to pay again to turn it into a ring tone. …

Songs bought on the Apple iTunes music store can be played only on a fixed number of devices that you have unlocked with your iTunes ID. Sounds reasonable, but after a few system reinstalls, maybe a replaced motherboard, a change of jobs, etc., all of a sudden, you no longer have access to any of your “authorized computers” and you have to get Apple to remove them all so you can start again. You can’t play iTunes purchased music on your non-Apple portable music player and you can’t play Windows DRM files on your iPod. Consumers are supposed to understand and care about this?

The worst part is that these schemes end up only hurting the people who are trying to be good. If you use a commercial downloading service, like iTunes Music Store, it means that you have rejected the dubious legality and poor user experience of the “illegal” services. You have paid your 99 cents and been handed something that is less valuable than what you could have gotten for free. You get a file with complex and arbitrary restrictions in a proprietary format. Meanwhile, the people who decided to keep on infringing aren’t suffering — they get unrestricted files.

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Developing nations stand up to US/UN bullying on copyright

law, politics, tech in changing society / /

From “Statement by India at the Inter-Sessional Intergovernmental Meeting on a Development Agenda For WIPO, April 11-13, 2005” (emphasis added):

“Development”, in WIPO’s terminology means increasing a developing country’s capacity to provide protection to the owners of intellectual property rights. This is quite a the opposite of what developing countries understand when they refer to the ‘development dimension’. The document presented by the Group of Friends of Development corrects this misconception – that development dimension means technical assistance.

The real “development” imperative is ensuring that the interest of Intellectual Property owners is not secured at the expense of the users of IP, of consumers at large, and of public policy in general. …

The legal monopoly granted to IP owners is an exceptional departure from the general principle of competitive markets as the best guarantee for securing the interest of society. The rationale for the exception is not that extraction of monopoly profits by the innovator is, of and in itself, good for society and so needs to be promoted. Rather, that properly controlled, such a monopoly, by providing an incentive for innovation, might produce sufficient benefits for society to compensate for the immediate loss to consumers as a result of the existence of a monopoly market instead of a competitive market. Monopoly rights, then, granted to IP holders is a special incentive that needs to be carefully calibrated by each country, in the light of its own circumstances, taking into account the overall costs and benefits of such protection. …

The current emphasis of Technical Assistance on implementation and enforcement issues is misplaced. IP Law enforcement is embedded in the framework of all law enforcement in the individual countries. It is unrealistic, and even undesirable to expect that the enforcement of IP laws will be privileged over the enforcement of other laws in the country. Society faces a considerable challenge to effectively protect, and resolve disputes over, physical property. To expect that the police, the lawyers and the courts should dedicate a sizable part of society’s enforcement resources for protecting intangible intellectual property, is unrealistic. …

In conclusion, it is important that developed countries and WIPO acknowledge that IP protection is an important policy instrument for developing countries, one that needs to be used carefully. While the claimed benefits of strong IP protection for developing countries are a matter of debate – and nearly always in the distant future – such protection invariably entails substatial real an immediate costs for these countries. In formulating its IP policy, therefore, each country needs to have sufficient flexibility so that the cost of IP protection does not outweigh the benefits.

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Copyright stupidity: arguments & numbers

business, commonplace book, law, politics, tech in changing society / /

From Financial Times” “James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity“:

Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. …

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. …

We need to deconstruct the culture of IP stupidity, to understand it so we can change it. But this is a rich and complex stupidity, like a fine Margaux. I can only review a few flavours.

Maximalism: The first thing to realize is that many decisions are driven by honest delusion, not corporate corruption. The delusion is maximalism: the more intellectual property rights we create, the more innovation. This is clearly wrong; rights raise the cost of innovation inputs (lines of code, gene sequences, data.) Do their monopolistic and anti-competitive effects outweigh their incentive effects? That’s the central question, but many of our decision makers seem never to have thought of it.

The point was made by an exchange inside the Committee that shaped Europe’s ill-starred Database Directive. It was observed that the US, with no significant property rights over unoriginal compilations of data, had a much larger database industry than Europe which already had significant “sweat of the brow” protection in some countries. Europe has strong rights, the US weak. The US is winning.

Did this lead the committee to wonder for a moment whether Europe should weaken its rights? No. Their response was that this showed we had to make the European rights much stronger. …

Authorial Romance: Part of the delusion depends on the idea that inventors and artists create from nothing. Who needs a public domain of accessible material if one can create out of thin air? But in most cases this simply isn’t true; artists, scientists and technologists build on the past. …

An Industry Contract: Who are the subjects of IP? They used to be companies. You needed a printing press or a factory to trigger the landmines of IP. The law was set up as a contract between industry groups. This was a cosy arrangement, but it is no longer viable. The citizen-publishers of cyberspace, the makers of free software, the scientists of distributed data-analysis are all now implicated in the IP world. The decision-making structure has yet to adjust. …

Fundamentally, though, the views I have criticised here are not merely stupidity. They constitute an ideology, a worldview, like flat earth-ism. …

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What can we use instead of gasoline in cars?

politics, science, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Popular Mechanics‘ “How far can you drive on a bushel of corn?“:

It is East Kansas Agri-Energy’s ethanol facility, one of 100 or so such heartland garrisons in America’s slowly gathering battle to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. The plant processes about 13 million bushels of corn to produce approximately 36 million gal. of ethanol a year. “That’s enough high-quality motor fuel to replace 55,000 barrels of imported petroleum,” the plant’s manager, Derek Peine, says. …

It takes five barrels of crude oil to produce enough gasoline (nearly 97 gal.) to power a Honda Civic from New York to California. …

Ethanol/E85

E85 is a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. … A gallon of E85 has an energy content of about 80,000 BTU, compared to gasoline’s 124,800 BTU. So about 1.56 gal. of E85 takes you as far as 1 gal. of gas.

Case For: Ethanol is an excellent, clean-burning fuel, potentially providing more horsepower than gasoline. In fact, ethanol has a higher octane rating (over 100) and burns cooler than gasoline. However, pure alcohol isn’t volatile enough to get an engine started on cold days, hence E85. …

Cynics claim that it takes more energy to grow corn and distill it into alcohol than you can get out of the alcohol. However, according to the DOE, the growing, fermenting and distillation chain actually results in a surplus of energy that ranges from 34 to 66 percent. Moreover, the carbon dioxide (CO2) that an engine produces started out as atmospheric CO2 that the cornstalk captured during growth, making ethanol greenhouse gas neutral. Recent DOE studies note that using ethanol in blends lowers carbon monoxide (CO) and CO2 emissions substantially. In 2005, burning such blends had the same effect on greenhouse gas emissions as removing 1 million cars from American roads. …

One acre of corn can produce 300 gal. of ethanol per growing season. So, in order to replace that 200 billion gal. of petroleum products, American farmers would need to dedicate 675 million acres, or 71 percent of the nation’s 938 million acres of farmland, to growing feedstock. Clearly, ethanol alone won’t kick our fossil fuel dependence–unless we want to replace our oil imports with food imports. …

Biodiesel

Fuels for diesel engines made from sources other than petroleum are known as biodiesel. Among the common sources are vegetable oils, rendered chicken fat and used fry oil. …

Case For: Modern diesel engines can run on 100 percent biodiesel with little degradation in performance compared to petrodiesel because the BTU content of both fuels is similar–120,000 to 130,000 BTU per gallon. In addition, biodiesel burns cleaner than petrodiesel, with reduced emissions. Unlike petrodiesel, biodiesel molecules are oxygen-bearing, and partially support their own combustion.

According to the DOE, pure biodiesel reduces CO emissions by more than 75 percent over petroleum diesel. A blend of 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent petrodiesel, sold as B20, reduces CO2 emissions by around 15 percent.

Case Against: Pure biodiesel, B100, costs about $3.50–roughly a dollar more per gallon than petrodiesel. And, in low temperatures, higher-concentration blends–B30, B100–turn into waxy solids and do not flow. Special additives or fuel warmers are needed to prevent fuel waxing. …

Electricity

Case For: Vehicles that operate only on electricity require no warmup, run almost silently and have excellent performance up to the limit of their range. Also, electric cars are cheap to “refuel.” At the average price of 10 cents per kwh, it costs around 2 cents per mile. …

A strong appeal of the electric car–and of a hybrid when it’s running on electricity–is that it produces no tailpipe emissions. Even when emissions created by power plants are factored in, electric vehicles emit less than 10 percent of the pollution of an internal-combustion car.

Case Against: Pure electric cars still have limited range, typically no more than 100 to 120 miles. In addition, electrics suffer from slow charging, which, in effect, reduces their usability….

And then there’s the environmental cost. Only 2.3 percent of the nation’s electricity comes from renewable resources; about half is generated in coal-burning plants.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth, forming part of many chemical compounds. Pure hydrogen can be made by electrolysis–passing electricity through water. This liberates the oxygen, which can be used for many industrial purposes. Most hydrogen currently is made from petroleum.

Case For: Though hydrogen can fuel a modified internal-combustion engine, most see hydrogen as a way to power fuel cells to move cars electrically. The only byproduct of a hydrogen fuel cell is water.

Case Against: … And, despite the chemical simplicity of electrolysis, producing hydrogen is expensive and energy consuming. It takes about 17 kwh of electricity, which costs about $1.70, to make just 100 cu. ft. of hydrogen. That amount would power a fuel cell vehicle for about 20 miles.

What can we use instead of gasoline in cars? Read More »

Malware focused on theft above all

law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From AFP’s “70 percent of malicious software aimed at theft: survey“:

Seventy percent of malicious software being circulated is linked to various types of cybercrime, a study by security firms Panda Software showed. …

The survey confirms a shift from several years ago, when malicious software was often aimed at garnering attention or exposing security flaws.

“Malware has become a took for generating financial returns,” the report said. …

About 40 percent of the problems detected by Panda was spyware, a type of malicious code designed for financial gain, primarily through collecting data on users’ Internet activities.

Another 17 percent was trojans, including “banker trojans” that steal confidential data related to bank services, others that download malicious applications onto systems.

Eight percent of the problems detected were “dialers,” malicious code that dials up premium-rate numbers without users’ knowledge; “bots,” a scheme involving the sale or rental of networks of infected computers, accounted for four percent of the total.

The e-mail worm, which was recently considered a major Internet threat, made up only four percent of the total.

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Clay Shirky on why the Semantic Web will fail

language & literature, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:

What is the Semantic Web good for?

The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where “…certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.” [Organon]

The canonical syllogism is:

Humans are mortal
Greeks are human
Therefore, Greeks are mortal

with the third statement derived from the previous two.

The Semantic Web is made up of assertions, e.g. “The creator of shirky.com is Clay Shirky.” Given the two statements

– Clay Shirky is the creator of shirky.com
– The creator of shirky.com lives in Brooklyn

you can conclude that I live in Brooklyn, something you couldn’t know from either statement on its own. From there, other expressions that include Clay Shirky, shirky.com, or Brooklyn can be further coupled.

The Semantic Web specifies ways of exposing these kinds of assertions on the Web, so that third parties can combine them to discover things that are true but not specified directly. This is the promise of the Semantic Web — it will improve all the areas of your life where you currently use syllogisms.

Which is to say, almost nowhere. …

Despite their appealing simplicity, syllogisms don’t work well in the real world, because most of the data we use is not amenable to such effortless recombination. As a result, the Semantic Web will not be very useful either. …

In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic. …

Syllogisms sound stilted in part because they traffic in absurd absolutes. …

There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web’s philosophical argument — the world should make more sense than it does — is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.

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The structure & meaning of the URL as key to the Web’s success

commonplace book, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:

The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting adults, and makes no requirements in this regard whatsoever: sports.yahoo.com/nfl/ is a valid URL, but so is 12.0.0.1/ftrjjk.ppq. The fact that a URL itself doesn’t have to mean anything is essential — the Web succeeded in part because it does not try to make any assertions about the meaning of the documents it contained, only about their location.

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The 1st software patent

business, history, law, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Robert X. Cringely’s “Patently Absurd: Why Simply Making Spam Illegal Won’t Work“:

Software patents have become inordinately important for something that 25 years ago we didn’t even believe could exist. After several software patent cases had gone unsuccessfully as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, the general thinking when I got in this business was that software could not be patented, only copyrighted. Like the words of a book, the individual characters of code could be protected by a copyright, and even the specific commands could be protected, but what couldn’t be protected by a copyright was the literal function performed by the program. There is no way that a copyright could protect the idea of a spreadsheet. Protecting the idea would have required a patent.

Then on May 26, 1981, after seven years of legal struggle, S. Pal Asija, a programmer and patent lawyer, received the first software patent for SwiftAnswer, a data retrieval program that was never heard from again and whose only historical function was to prove that all of the experts were wrong — software could be patented. Asija showed that when the Supreme Court had ruled against previous software patent efforts, it wasn’t saying that software was unpatentable, but that those particular programs weren’t patentable.

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