tech in changing society

How patents ruined the Wright brothers

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

Nobody can deny that the Wright brothers were pioneers. Their use of a wind tunnel helped define the science of aerodynamics and had influence far beyond their time. But their secrecy and litigious nature held back the progress of flying, and eventually lost them their technical leadership. The Wrights flew in 1903. They made a small public announcement 100 years ago, then went silent until 1908 as they worked to solidify their patent position. While they continued to fly from pastures around Dayton, Ohio, the brothers generally did so in secret, waiting for patents to be issued.

When the Wrights finally appeared in public again five years later, first in Washington, DC, and later in France, the performance of their aircraft still astounded the world. But that was it. Once the brothers filed a patent infringement suit against rival Glenn Curtiss, their attention was totally turned to litigation and their aeronautical progress stopped. Curtiss and Wright eventually merged and built aircraft into the 1940s, but the creative energy by that time was all from Curtiss. By then, Wilbur had died and Orville was best known as the man who signed every pilot license. Though their patent was upheld, they didn’t in any sense control the industry they had invented.

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OmniPerception = facial recognition + smart card

From Technology Review‘s’ “Face Forward“:

To get around these problems, OmniPerception, a spinoff from the University of Surrey in England, has combined its facial-recognition technology with a smart-card system. This could make face recognition more robust and better suited to applications such as passport authentication and building access control, which, if they use biometrics at all, rely mainly on fingerprint verification, says David McIntosh, the company’s CEO. With OmniPerception’s technology, an image of a person’s face is verified against a “facial PIN” carried on the card, eliminating the need to search a central database and making the system less intimidating to privacy-conscious users. …

OmniPerception’s technology creates a PIN about 2,500 digits long from its analysis of the most distinctive features of a person’s face. The number is embedded in a smart card-such as those, say, that grant access to a building-and used to verify that the card belongs to the person presenting it. A user would place his or her card in or near a reader and face a camera, which would take a photo and feed it to the card. The card would then compare the PIN it carried to information it derived from the new photo and either accept or reject the person as the rightful owner of the card. The technology could also be used to ensure passport or driver’s license authenticity and to secure ATM or Internet banking transactions, says McIntosh.

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Smart World of Warcraft Trojan

From Information Week‘s’ “ Trojan Snags World Of Warcraft Passwords To Cash Out Accounts“:

A new password-stealing Trojan targeting players of the popular online game “World of Warcraft” hopes to make money off secondary sales of gamer goods, a security company warned Tuesday.

MicroWorld, an Indian-based anti-virus and security software maker with offices in the U.S., Germany, and Malaysia, said that the PWS.Win32.WOW.x Trojan horse was spreading fast, and attacking World of Warcraft players.

If the attacker managed to hijack a password, he could transfer in-game goods — personal items, including weapons — that the player had accumulated to his own account, then later sell them for real-world cash on “gray market” Web sites. Unlike some rival multiplayer online games, Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, bans the practice of trading virtual items for real cash.

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Projecting a murdered woman’s image on a building

From BBC News’ “Police go big with victim picture“:

Murdered Prostitute A 60ft high picture of a murdered prostitute has been projected onto a derelict block of flats in Glasgow.

Detectives hope it will help to turn up clues about the death of Emma Caldwell, whose body was found in woods in South Lanarkshire on 8 May.

The image was displayed for four hours on the multi-storey flats in Cumberland Street, Hutchesontown on Monday night.

Police said the site had been chosen as it was visible across areas frequented by Emma and other prostitutes.

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What’s a socio-technical system?

From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:

A socio-technical system is conformed of hardware, software, physical surroundings, people, procedures, laws and regulations, and data and data structures.

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Thoughts on tagging/folksonomy

From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:

This principle of distribution is at work in socio-technical systems that allow users to collaboratively organize a shared set of resources by assigning classifiers, or tags, to each item. The practice is coming to be known as free tagging, open tagging, ethnoclassification, folksonomy, or faceted hierarchy (henceforth referred to in this study as distributed classification) …

One important feature of systems such as these is that they do not impose a rigid taxonomy. Instead, they allow users to assign whatever classifiers they choose. Although this might sound counter-productive to the ultimate goal of organizing content, in practice it seems to work rather well, although it does present some drawbacks. For example, most people will probably classify pictures of cats by using the tag ‘cats.’ But what happens when some individuals use ‘cat’ or ‘feline’ or ‘meowmeow’ …

It seems that while most people might not be motivated to contribute to a pre-established system of classification that may not meet their needs, or to devise new and complex taxonomies of their own, they are quite happy to use distributed systems of classification that are quick and able to accommodate their personal (and ever changing) systems of classification. …

But distributed classification does not accrue benefits only to the individual. It is a very social endeavor in which the community as a whole can benefit. Jon Udell describes some of the individual and social possibilities of this method of classification:

These systems offer lots of ways to visualize and refine the tag space. It’s easy to know whether a tag you’ve used is unique or, conversely, popular. It’s easy to rename a tag across a set of items. It’s easy to perform queries that combine tags. Armed with such powerful tools, people can collectively enrich shared data. (Udell 2004) …

Set this [an imposed taxonomy] against the idea of allowing a user to add tags to any given document in the corpus. Like Del.icio.us, there needn’t be a pre-defined hierarchy or lexicon of terms to use; one can simply lean on the power of ethnoclassification to build that lexicon dynamically. As such, it will dynamically evolve as usages change and shift, even as needs change and shift. (Williams, 2004)

The primary benefit of free tagging is that we know the classification makes sense to users… For a content creator who is uploading information into such a system, being able to freely list subjects, instead of choosing from a pre-approved “pick list,” makes tagging content much easier. This, in turn, makes it more likely that users will take time to classify their contributions. (Merholz, 2004)

Folksonomies work best when a number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked wikipedia (http://del.icio.us/url/bca8b85b54a7e6c01a1bcfaf15be1df5), each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular. (Wikipedia entry for folksonomy, retrieved December 15, 2004 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy)

Of course, this approach is not without its potential problems:

With no one controlling the vocabulary, users develop multiple terms for identical concepts. For example, if you want to find all references to New York City on Del.icio.us, you’ll have to look through “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.” You may also encounter the inverse problem — users employing the same term for disparate concepts. (Merholz, 2004) …

But as Clay Shirky remarks, this solution might diminish some of the benefits that we can derive from folksonomies:

Synonym control is not as wonderful as is often supposed, because synonyms often aren’t. Even closely related terms like movies, films, flicks, and cinema cannot be trivially collapsed into a single word without loss of meaning, and of social context … (Shirky, 2004) …

The choice of tags [in the entire del.icio.us system] follows something resembling the Zipf or power law curve often seen in web-related traffic. Just six tags (python, delicious/del.icio.us, programming, hacks, tools, and web) account for 80% of all the tags chosen, and a long tail of 58 other tags make up the remaining 20%, with most occurring just once or twice … In the del.icio.us community, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor via http://del.icio.us/popular. Links noted by enough users within a short space of time get listed here, and many del.icio.us users use it to keep up with the zeitgeist. (Biddulph, 2004) …

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Bring down the cell network with SMS spam

From John Schwartz’s “Text Hackers Could Jam Cellphones, a Paper Says“:

Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today.

Such an attack is possible, the researchers say, because cellphone companies provide the text-messaging service to their networks in a way that could allow an attacker who jams the message system to disable the voice network as well.

And because the message services are accessible through the Internet, cellular networks are open to the denial-of-service attacks that occur regularly online, in which computers send so many messages or commands to a target that the rogue data blocks other machines from connecting.

By pushing 165 messages a second into the network, said Patrick D. McDaniel, a professor of computer science and engineering at Pennsylvania State University and the lead researcher on the paper, “you can congest all of Manhattan.”

Also see http://www.smsanalysis.org/.

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The difficulty of recovering from identity theft

From TechWeb News’s “One In Four Identity-Theft Victims Never Fully Recover“:

Making things right after a stolen identity can take months and cost thousands, a survey of identity theft victims released Tuesday said. Worse, in more than one in four cases, victims haven’t been able to completely restore their good name.

The survey, conducted by Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., found that 28 percent of identity thieves’ marks aren’t able to reconstruct their identities even after more than a year of work. On average, victims spent 81 hours trying to resolve their case.

According to the poll, the average amount of total charges made using a victim’s identity was $3,968. Fortunately, most were not held responsible for the fraudulent charges; 16 percent, however, reported that they had to pay for some or all of the bogus purchases.

Other results posted by the survey were just as dispiriting. More than half of the victims discovered the theft on their own by noticing unusual charges on credit cards or depleted bank accounts, but that took time: on average, five and a half months passed between when the theft occurred and when it was spotted.

Only 17 percent were notified by a creditor or financial institution of suspicious activity, a figure that’s certain to fuel federal lawmakers pondering legislation that would require public disclosure of large data breaches.

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Laws & enforcement in virtual worlds

From James Grimmelmann’s “Life, Death, and Democracy Online“:

… The necessity of a ‘Quit’ option is obvious; no adventure game yet invented can force an unwilling player to continue playing. She can always give the game the three-finger salute, flip the power switch, or throw her computer in the junk heap. …

Banishment is the absolute worst punishment any multi-player online role-playing game can impose on a player. Which is to say that a painless execution is the absolute worst punishment any game society can impose on the characters who are its citizens. Torture is not an option. Imprisonment and fines can be imposed, true, but as soon as the player behind the character finds that these punishments are too onerous, she can simply terminate her account and stop logging in; the rest of the deterrent value of the punishment evaporates. It’s hard to hold characters accountable.

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A game completely controlled by the players

From Ron Dulin’s “A Tale in the Desert“:

A Tale in the Desert is set in ancient Egypt. Very ancient Egypt: The only society to be found is that which has been created by the existing players. Your mentor will show you how to gather materials and show you the basics of learning and construction. These are the primary goals in the game–you learn from academies and universities, and then you use what you’ve learned to build things, such as structures and tools. As your character learns new skills, you can advance. …

Higher-level tests are much more complex and require you to enlist lower-level characters to help you complete them. Players are directly involved in almost all aspects of the game, from the introduction of new technologies to the game’s rules to the landscape itself. With a few exceptions, almost every structure you see in the game was built by a player or group of players. New technologies are introduced through research at universities, which is aided by players’ donations to these institutions. Most interestingly, though, the game rules themselves can be changed through the legal system. If you don’t like a certain aspect of the game, within reason, you can introduce a petition to have it changed. If you get enough signatures on your petition, it will be subject to a general vote. If it passes, it becomes a new law. This system is also used for permanently banning players who have, for some reason or another, made other players’ in-game lives difficult. …

The designers themselves have stated that A Tale in the Desert is about creating a society, and watching the experiment in action is almost as enjoyable as taking part.

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Computer commands as incantations

From Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society“:

After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

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10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful

From Dan Gillmor’s “10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success“:

1) Make it all work on top of existing networks.

2) Use packets, not circuits.

3) Create a ‘routing’ function.

4) Split the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) …

5) The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the University of California-Berkeley, to put TCP/IP into the Unix operating system originally developed by AT&T.

6) CSNET, an early network used by universities, connects with the ARPANET … The connection was for e-mail only, but it led to much more university research on networks and a more general understanding among students, faculty and staff of the value of internetworking.

7) The NSF requires users of the NSFNET to use TCP/IP, not competing protocols.

8) International telecommunications standards bodies reject TCP/IP, then create a separate standard called OSI.

9) The NSF creates an “Acceptable Use Policy” restricting NSFNET use to noncommercial activities.

10) Once things start to build, government stays mostly out of the way.

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Early attempts to control phone usage

From R. W. Kostal’s Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (quoted in Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“):

In Britain in 1889, postal officials reprimanded a Leicester subscriber for using his phone to notify the fire brigade of a nearby conflagration. The fire was not on his premises, and his contract directed him to confine his telephone “to his own business and private affairs.” The Leicester Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Trade Protection Society all appealed to the postmaster-general, who ruled that the use of the telephone to convey intelligence of fires and riots would be permitted thenceforth.

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Flat local calling rates in US helped grow the Net

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

Moreover, flat rates for local calling played a key role in the rise of the Internet, by promoting much faster spread of this technology in the U.S. than in other countries. (This, as well as the FCC decisions about keeping Internet calls free from access charges, should surely be added to the list of “the 10 key choices that were critical to the Net’s success,” that were compiled by Scott Bradner [28].)

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Monopolies & Internet innovation

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

The power to price discriminate, especially for a monopolist, is like the power of taxation, something that can be used to destroy. There are many governments that are interested in controlling Internet traffic for political or other reasons, and are interfering (with various degrees of success) with the end-to-end principle. However, in most democratic societies, the pressure to change the architecture of the Internet is coming primarily from economic concerns, trying to extract more revenues from users. This does not necessarily threaten political liberty, but it does impede innovation. If some new protocol or service is invented, gains from its use could be appropriated by the carriers if they could impose special charges for it.

The power of price discrimination was well understood in ancient times, even if the economic concept was not defined. As the many historical vignettes presented before show, differential pricing was frequently allowed, but only to a controlled degree. The main con- cern in the early days was about general fairness and about service providers leveraging their control of a key facility into control over other businesses. Personal discrimination was particularly hated, and preference was given to general rules applying to broad classes (such as student or senior citizen discounts today). Very often bounds on charges were imposed to limit price discrimination. …

Openness, non-discrimination, and the end-to-end principle have contributed greatly to the success of the Internet, by allowing innovation to flourish. Service providers have traditionally been very poor in introducing services that mattered and even in forecasting where their profits would come from. Sometimes this was because of ignorance, as in the failure of WAP and success of SMS, both of which came as great surprises to the wireless industry, even though this should have been the easiest thing to predict [55]. Sometimes it was because the industry tried to control usage excessively. For example, services such as Minitel have turned out to be disappointments for their proponents largely because of the built-in limitations. We can also recall the attempts by the local telephone monopolies in the mid-to late-1990s to impose special fees on Internet access calls. Various studies were trotted out about the harm that long Internet calls were causing to the network. In retrospect, though, Internet access was a key source of the increased revenues and profits at the local telcos in the late 1990s. Since the main value of the phone was its accessibility at any time, long Internet calls led to installation of second lines that were highly profitable for service providers. (The average length of time that a phone line was in use remained remarkably constant during that period [49].)

Much of the progress in telecommunications over the last couple of decades was due to innovations by users. The “killer apps” on the Internet, email, Web, browser, search engines, and Napster, were all invented by end users, not by carriers. (Even email was specifically not designed into the ARPANET, the progenitor of the Internet, and its dominance came as a surprise [55].)

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Railroads & tolls

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

Railroads were the dominant industry of the 19th century. … Early railroad charters, in both England and the U.S., were modeled after canal and turnpike charters, and almost uniformly envisaged that railroad companies would not be carriers themselves. Instead, they were expected to offer their facilities for use by carriers that would carry goods and passengers in their own wagons over the rails. Still, these charters specified tolls that varied greatly depending on the nature of the cargo. … For example, the very first parliamentary act for a railway was enacted in 1801. (Previous railways had been on private property, but in this case, as in subsequent ones, promoters were asking for the right of eminent domain to acquire the necessary land.) Between the endpoints of the railway, “chalk, lime and other manures were charged at the rate of three-pence per ton per mile; coals, corn, potatoes, iron and other metals, fourpence; and all goods not specified, sixpence” (p. 45 of [13]). …

Although some railroads did operate with other companies’ equipment on their rails for decades (and modern ones do so extensively), there was a relatively quick shift in the 1830s and 1840s towards railroads being exclusive carriers. There were technical reasons promot- ing such a shift (safety was jeopardized with multiple operators and primitive technology), but there is evidence that desire for greater control over pricing by railroads was also a major consideration [64]. Once railroads became carriers, they could engage in much more extensive price discrimination than allowed by the toll structure in their charters. And, propelled by the economics of their industry, with high fixed costs, railroads did engage in massive price discrimination, including personal discrimination. The result was massive political movements leading to government regulation [62,65].

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Turnpikes, roads, & tolls

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

British turnpikes were a controversial response to a serious problem. Traditionally, the King’s Highway was open to all. The problem was how to keep it in good condition. As commerce grew, the need to maintain roads became acute. At first, in Elizabethan times, laws were enacted compelling all able-bodied commoner males to devote several days a year to labor on the highways. (See [1,66,80] for references for the background information as well as other items below that are not attributed otherwise.) The inequitable distribution of the burden this imposed and the lack of effective control mechanisms by the central government led to many complaints. As a result, in 1663, the first turnpike was authorized. A local group was authorized to create a turnpike trust that would borrow money to improve a section of a road, and then collect tolls from travelers for passage over that section of the road. This venture was set up (as were all subsequent turnpikes) as an ostensibly non-profit trust. (There were opportunities for profits there, for example in payment of above-market fees and other abuses, but those were illicit, and in any case were not the high profits that other, more private, enterprises, such as lighthouses and canals, offered.) The reason for the non-profit nature of turnpikes was presumably to allay concerns about a violation of the ancient principle that the King’s Highway was open to all. Still, this turnpike was very controversial (as were many later ones). Apparently largely for that reason, it took until 1695 before the next turnpike was set up [2].

In the early 18th century, the turnpike movement took off in earnest. Although there were frequent protests (sometimes violent, as in the burning of the toll gates around Bristol in 1727 and 1735), by mid-1830s there were over 20,000 miles of turnpikes in England. …

Tolls were usually doubled on Sundays for ordinary commercial traffic, but were eliminated for travel to or from church. They also “were never levied on foot passengers, and were thus unfelt by the labouring poor” (p. 124 of [80]). There were also options in many cases for a flat fee for annual access. Still, there were countless controversies about the toll, “the collection of which led to endless evasions, inequalities and favouritisms of all kinds, arbitrary exactions, and systematic petty embezzlements” (p. 136 of [80]). …

… road tolls are coming back as a result of growing congestion and improved technology. Unlike telecommunications, where technology is increasing capacity of fiber, coax, and radio transmissions, building new roads is increasingly difficult, and making existing ones carry more traffic can only be done to a limited extent. At the same time, electronic means for monitoring traffic and collecting tolls are improving, and we see central business districts in Norway, Singapore, and London imposing tolls. Most of these systems do raise privacy issues, too, since they are centralized ones with information about users, or at least cars. Still, there is a strong tendency to introduce ever more detailed monitoring of traffic, often with the explicit goal of charging users according to their level of activity (whether by governments or by insurance companies).

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Canals & tolls

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

The modern canal era can be said to start with the Duke of Bridgewater’s Canal in England. Originally it was just a means of connecting the Duke’s colliery to Manchester. The parliamentary charter (which enabled him to take over private property, with appropriate compensation) obliged the Duke to carry cargo to Manchester at a maximum charge of 30 pence a ton, and to sell his own coal in Manchester for no more than 80 pence a ton, about half the price that had prevailed before [38,68]. Parliament was determined to obtain substantial benefits for the public from the grant of government powers to the Duke. …

The great financial success of the Duke of Bridgewater’s Canal led to widespread attempts to emulate it. In the early 1790s, there was a canal mania, with a burst of construction that was never to be replicated in Britain. (The U.S. had its canal mania some decades later, following on the great success of the Erie Canal.) The charters of those canals show a general trend towards greater price discrimination. …

Similar toll schedules depending on cargo were also common in the United States. As an example, when parts of the still incomplete Erie Canal were opened in 1820, there was a long list of tolls, concluding with “All articles not enumerated, one cent, per ton, per mile” (Chapter 2 of [81]). The enumerated articles (among those that were measured by the ton) were charged tolls ranging from salt and gypsum at 0.5 cents per ton per mile, to 1 cent for flour, to 2 cents for merchandise, and nothing for fuel to be used in the manufacture of salt (so that it was necessary not only to know the nature of the cargo, but its ultimate use). …

While canal operators were trying to squeeze carriers (who were trying to squeeze merchants, in ways similar to those described below for turnpikes), carriers often attempted to evade tolls. They bribed toll-collectors, misrepresented what the cargo was, or how much there was of it, and in some cases even hid cargo with high toll charges under commodities such as sand for which the fees were low. The countermeasures, just as they are today, and would likely be in the future with electronic communications, were based on both technology and law. Measurements were taken (in many cases there were books available to canal operators, listing canal boats, and the weight of cargo aboard as a function of how deeply in the water they lay), and there were punitive penalties for evasion.

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Big companies & their blind spots

From Paul Graham’s “Are Software Patents Evil?“:

Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial. If you take the trouble to attack them from an oblique angle, they’ll meet you half-way and maneuver to keep you in their blind spot. To sue a startup would mean admitting it was dangerous, and that often means seeing something the big company doesn’t want to see. IBM used to sue its mainframe competitors regularly, but they didn’t bother much about the microcomputer industry because they didn’t want to see the threat it posed. Companies building web based apps are similarly protected from Microsoft, which even now doesn’t want to imagine a world in which Windows is irrelevant. …

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