NSA and Edward Snowden

Today saw the unveiling of the NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, a highschool dropout that worked his way through sheer capabilities as a programmer. To me this guy is pretty amazing. He cares about the people that he could have put in harms way, he made sure that he did not release any information that would put anyone in harms way, even though he had the capabilities. He learned from Bradley Manning and worked to ensure there would be no risks of physical injury. He felt that these actions violated the constitution and decided to expose these deeds to the public even though he knew his life was over. He believes he's likely to be targeted by the US government or an agent, such as a member of the Triad gang (he's in Hong Kong), to be executed.

Not only he is clearly concerned, but the media seems to think that this is also true. My roommate was watching ABC news with Diane Sawyer and during one segue she mentioned that he may have left because he feared for his life and was likely in danger. Think about it. It's publicly acknowledged by our press, that it's likely a whistleblower might be killed by the US government. This is a US citizen that has a family history of serving (father a member of the coast guard and mother a legal clerk) the US government. He is afraid for his life because he believes that the US government would murder him. If he dies and his body is found the blame will automatically fall upon the government. Edward will not be able to answer phone calls, call anyone, and is essentially on his own to make it to a country that has no extradition treaty with the US. This is a travesty - the fact that many people believe this man is going to die within the next few weeks - killed by his own government without his right to a trial.

Why does what he said matter? A lot of people are talking about it being only Metadata - here's an excellent article explaining what would have happened if the British had meta data during the revolutionary war. It would have ID'd Paul Revere as a likely revolutionary based on his association. Knowing nothing else about him other than a few clubs he and 254 other people in Boston were members of it was possible to deduce the entire social network and who was at the center of the networks.

As I mentioned in my last blog post this network analysis would have caused the changes in my Facebook network to raise some red flags. I suddenly move to Europe (I didn't list Eindhoven has my city of residence it would have been inferred from my friends), some of my first connects in Europe on Facebook were 2 Colombians, 2 Pakistanis, an Iranian, and a Turk. These changes represented a major shift in my circle of friends. I had few non-americans as friends and no Iranians or Pakistanis in my network. Using the full history of my data they wouldn't have found much except that I liked to drink and wrote drunk posts on Facebook while in college. However, it's likely I would have remained someone to keep an eye on, and since then I've written numerous posts about Anonymous, LulzSec and other controversial topics.

Anyway, it's important to keep this in mind when selecting the companies you decide to store your information with, even if it's "only" metadata. Where you go, who you talk to, and what you do online are all representations of you and a lot of information can be gleaned from that.

What can we do? Vote all the bums out of office next go around for one. Start companies that only hand over encrypted data that the end users are the only ones that can decrypt it. Educate your friends, family, co-workers, and anyone politically minded you know. We need to drive change otherwise this will continue and will only get worse. At what point do we need to start worrying that the NSA/US Government will start killing your friends because of who they talk to and what they believe?

The word "Terrorism" has jumped the Shark

"You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means" - Princess Bride. Growing up terrorism meant something. It meant that someone out there could get to you in a very violent way designed to inspire fear in the general population. These events were rare, but horrifying. The first World Trade Center Bombing, Oklahoma City Bombing, The Unibomber, The Olympics bombing, the nerve gas in Tokyo Subway, etc... However, since 9/11 the word Terrorism has begun to change meaning. 9/11 of course was a terrorist attack and spawned may other attacks that were intended to cause damage and inspire fear in the populace. They worked, the US has spent billions of dollars in security measures that are ineffective at best, we've spent trillions of dollars on two wars, and who knows how many shadowy engagements using our special forces and drones.

It's had many other consequences, the no fly lists, the removal of passengers for speaking Arabic or most recently Russian, hateful actions against both Muslims and the religiously unrelated Sikhs - they have turbans therefore must be a terrorist! - and of course more attacks. The disturbing trend however is the lack of even handedness in classifying an act as an act of terrorism. We're seeing kids getting arrested and facing 20 years for making terrorist threats by posting rap lyrics on facebook. We have the Boston Bomber charged with terrorism (as he should be), but the guys with the guns in the movie theaters aren't being charged with terrorism.

Most recently in the UK, there was an attack with a machete on a solider that's being called Terrorism. Just yesterday there was an attack in France which happened in a similar fashion that's also being called terrorism. Does terrorism mean any attack on non-Muslim by a Muslim? Why are these not politically motivated murders or even assassinations? That is what they are, is that terrorism? I don't really think so. David Cameron is going to use these murders as an excuse to stamp out what he considers "hate speech" in the UK. Will this simply turn out to be an attack on Muslims in general?

Many of you out there are not fans of the blow back theory, where our actions in those regions are creating hostile agents that attempt to get revenge in any way possible. Initially, I was very skeptical of this stand point. However, as I've paid attention to the new more and expanded my sources of information, I completely accept this theory. I believe that there are clear parallels with the US response to hacking activities. The final piece of evidence I'll provide in support of the theory is this great short read by Juan Cole:  "Who's the Threat?" It's a simple chart showing what countries have invaded each other since 1798 and the numbers killed by the "terrorist regions" or the west. Put in this larger context, hearing about drone strikes would be terrifying - especially since you have absolutely no recourse if your brother is "collateral damage" to a strike.

With that in mind, I think it's paramount that we work to keep terrorism to mean an act of violence that's more similar to the Boston Bombing than a brutal machete murder which was more of an attack directed against the state than the people of that state.

A bit remiss

Sorry dear readrs, I've been very bad about writing any blogs lately. I've had some pretty big changes in the past two months as you all know. I've moved back from the Netherlands to the US, did some consulting work and I just started a job at AMD. Consequently, I've not been able to post as much as I have in the past. Big changes have been happening in my life.

Because of these changes I wasn't able to pay enough attention to the CISPA fiasco that just occurred in the US. This law is a terrible step in the direction of data tyranny. I'm even being hyperbolic about this either. I wrote about the risks of having a voluntary data sharing program and in my review of Consent of the Networked I discussed the different data and Government regimes out in the "wild." These concerns are valid. We need to be aware of what's going on. Now, I have to say we pretty much blew our collective internet protest load with the SOPA/PIPA protests. Which is actually a problem. I would hazard that in many ways CISPA is as bad or worse than SOPA, however I didn't see as much chatter about CISPA on reddit, twitter, Google+ or Facebook about CISPA as I did about SOPA.

I think there are a few reasons for this actually. First, the majority of the people were able to clearly understand the risks associated with SOPA. These risks are pretty straight forward and understandable. These risks affect us tomorrow not in some future time period. In many ways SOPA like acts can already happen today. This makes it extremely obvious why SOPA/PIPA are terrible laws and should be opposed at many levels. Second, with CISPA coming so quickly after the SOPA/PIPA protests there was likely something of a protest overload or disbelief that another law could come through so quickly that is as bad or worse than SOPA. Especially with the language that was being used at the time of SOPA. It would have broken the Internet, how could anything be worse than that? Third, there was more support by large companies for this law than for SOPA. Apparently that actually matters more than we realized. We were able to push Wikipedia, Facebook, and other large companies to protest this law. However in this case Facebook and Microsoft supported the law while Google sat on the sideline saying nothing about the law.

I think from this stand point, people that weren't happy with CISPA but didn't understand the importance likely didn't do anything about it. However, whenever a fantastic website like Wikipedia blacks out in protest for a law it will get people who are only on the fence about the law to actually do something about the law.

CISPA and SOPA are both bad but in very different ways. CISPA is something of an abstraction of risk. Losing your privacy when so many people already voluntarily give up so much information about themselves on Facebook and Twitter might not seem like as big of a deal. The secondary abstraction is a lack of understanding of the impact of the data sharing. It's unclear of what exactly the Feds would do with the data once they have it. It's unclear how data sharing would occur within the government. However, it is likely that the data would be shared throughout the government including the military. Which many privacy experts are say essentially legalizes military spying on US civilians. The third problem is that many people also feel that if you aren't doing something wrong you don't have anything to worry about. However, this is a fallacy as even people who are doing things that aren't wrong can get in trouble. I've discussed the cases where people are fired for posting drunken pictures on Facebook. Additionally, this type of law represents the biggest of the big government that we can imagine. There's no reason why the government needs to know what we're doing in this level of detail.

It's going to be a long and difficult fight to keep our internet free. However, it's something that we must do and I believe we can do it. We will just need to keep vigilant and work together to ensure that our internet stays our internet.

Free-market, Small Government and Regulations

The free-market has been used to argue against regulations and for small government for years. However, I believe that the major supporters of using the free-market argument are disingenuous in their application of the argument. In addition, the free-market is a flawed theory which needs to be revisited by neoclassical scholars and adjusted.

The free-market theory comes from the idea that there is an invisible hand that guides the market towards equilibrium between supply and demand. This assumes that once the equilibrium is hit it will stay at that point until there is some shock to the system which would find a new equilibrium. Each time that there is a shock, the invisible hand would push the market into a new equilibrium. This idea came as a side comment in the Wealth of Nations. This idea has become enshrined in the minds of neoclassical economics in a manner that Newtonian Physics was presumed to be accurate. In both cases the theory is incorrect. Relativistic Physics has replaced Newtonian, but in Economics the free-market is still the prevailing mechanism for policy creation. There has been no evidence for an invisible hand at all. In fact Metcalf created the theory of a networked economy which argues that the value of a good becomes more valuable as more people use it. I've mentioned this in the past. Essentially, this will prevent any equilibrium from every being found as the price can increase and people will still adopt the networked item because it's becoming more valuable to the user. Or the price can remain constant even when it should drop for other factors such as a reduction in cost of production. A perfect example is the iPhone. According to research Apple has a whopping 72% margins on the iPhone, even if production was moved to the US Apple would still make 42% margin on the iPhone. There also is an over production of the iPhone and strong competition, which would indicate that the iPhone should drop prices as they are capable with that large of a margin. This market has a great deal of competition and has a large number of companies producing, which indicates that it Apple should be under pressure to drop prices. However this isn't happening because of the networked value of the iPhone. There are a huge number of apps for the phone, the apps are high quality and the product works well with other iPhones. The market has had no impact on the cost of the iPhone.

However, free-market champions would look at any effort to change the labor practices of Apple as wrong headed and regulation that isn't required. The Market isn't demanding any change to labor practices because the market can bear the current prices and the demand indicates that people don't care about labor practices. However, it's well known that there are no alternatives to Apple's iPhone that are produced in an ethical manner. So voting with your money wouldn't actually work here. The problem arises because there is something of a monopoly in the manufacturing of the smart phones in FoxConn. In this case there is a market failure. Which is something that neoclassical theorists argue cannot occur. The market cannot send a signal to firms because there is no mechanism in which the market could send a signal. This is can be understood if you view this industry as a networked economy. Where you see the ties between manufacturers and handset companies, which would show a massive connection to FoxConn.

Efforts to regulate the manufacturing of devices have been argued as the reason for moving the manufacturing to other countries. However, this is not the case in the case of Apple, as they would still have huge margins. It's because the company is attempting to maximize profits, not reduce costs to be profitable. The same arguments have been used to argue for smaller government. Saying that since there are no market failures the government should not intervene in the industry.

The unfortunate thing is that these arguments immediately disappear when it comes to protecting the profits of record industries. The same free-market advocates then move to argue that intellectual property must be protected. Essentially, creating protection for a specific product through IP causes a market failure and prevents the market from operating at its most efficient because there are not other competitors in the market. Creating IP requires a huge regulatory framework from the mechanisms of registering, logging complaints and prosecuting actors that infringe on the IP.

This type of industrial policy is typically derided by the small government fans, as it is a type of regulation that selects a "winner" (IP owners) over "losers" (non IP owners). Which may be fine. However, whenever this selection pushes our government to select a winner (Music) over the fastest growing, possibly only growing, part of our economy (internet based companies) there is a serious risk to the future. As I've mentioned before these laws represent huge risks for innovation.

These laws are SOPA and PIPA, which I've discussed extensively. However, the next round of internet regulations come in the form of CISPA. This bill, which requires allows companies to share extensively with government agencies. This type of sharing of user data and information about the activities going on at the company would not go over very well from the the free-market advocates if this was a request for data about customer data for car dealerships or steel mills. Essentially, this is going to increase the cost of doing business in the US. This may prevent companies from working in the US and prevent innovation. If I was to create a company that dealt with social data I would not want to do so after the passing of this bill. It would be likely that I would be blackmailed into giving the government data about my users that I had no desire to give them.

The internet is the perfect example of a networked economy. Facebook's value comes from the fact that it has a huge user base. This is true for Google, Amazon and Instagram (List of companies that support CISPA). Without the users the services is literally worthless. With the users a company without any revenues can be worth $1 Billion (Instagram). The difference between this bill and other bills like SOPA and PIPA is that the agreement is bidirectional. The government will likely help Facebook and Google fight Chinese attacks and give information to each other about the activities of online hacktivist groups like Anonymous. It is likely that 4chan will end up giving over IP data and other information related to anonymous and Anonymous users.

This is regulation that the internet doesn't need and will stifle innovation. The government already has these powers, which maybe why the Obama administration is opposed to CISPA. It is also ironic that Obama plans on sanctioning countries that use Tech to abuse human rights specifically committing genocide. A whistle blower has recently announced that the NSA has intercepted 20 TRILLION emails and likely has copies of all of these stored somewhere. The passing of CISPA and any other law of similar persuasion  would likely protect companies like AT&T from future lawsuits for being complicit with these activities.

For devotes of the Free-Market these laws create market distortions and will cause serious harm to innovation on the internet. For people that understand networked economies, this will greatly undermine the value of these networks as users will likely change their behavior to mitigate the amount of information the Government can compile on them. CISPA and its sister laws SOPA and PIPA represent big government actions attempting to control and regulate industries that do not need to be regulated. In this case there is no market failure that needs to be addressed. Privacy is something that the users have been pushing for and Facebook and Google have steadily improved on those accounts. Surprisingly industry is doing a decent job at regulating itself. Finally, regulations being pushed by advocates of small government and free-market smack of hypocrisy and a lack of understanding. These laws require a deep understanding of the internet and how the market of the internet works. Without this understanding terrible laws will be passed that will damage our privacy and freedoms. For the issues that this law would protect from there are other methods that could be employed to gain the desired results without passing laws.

Contact your congressional members to fight against this bill.

CISPA and the problem with volunteering data

So, CISPA, Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, is the newest cyber bill on the block. There is a difference between this and the other laws though. In SOPA and PIPA the laws were mandatory, and the government could simply act. In CISPA companies can willingly filter material and this may be based upon information the government provides as a threat. This was a bad situation and internet companies seem to like this law. Facebook and Microsoft are straight up supporting the law. There is uncertainty in the public if Google is or not.

So, in this law the government and internet companies can voluntarily share information about cyber threats and suspicious activities online. However, the problem with voluntary sharing programs is that they can turn into "voluntary" programs. What do I mean? Well, if the government is not required to give the information to all parties that could be affected in some sort of terrorist act the government could decide to give information to companies that are sharing information with the government. Additionally, the government could punish companies, like Twitter, that fight the government over privacy issues by not sharing information.

These are pretty obvious problems with this type of law. It assumes that each event is independent and previous actions have no consequent. This is a faulty premise. If this is viewed as a multi-turn prisoner's dilemma, it's obvious that with repeat interactions the best actions will always be to share. This will likely lead to sharing when there are cases of doubt over if the company should share or not. Companies will fault on the side of security over privacy, because the future benefits outweigh any punishment the users can enact on the companies.

These types of pseudo quid pro quo is impacting the US government in other ways including lobbying. It is likely that this information exchange will be used by companies whenever there are negotiations for future laws. They will be able to say, "you need to respect our rights to X, look how friendly we've been with the government" and then show a list of times they voluntarily gave data to the government. This was a tactic that Ma Bell used to keep their monopoly as long as they did. Because the company was providing the government with extra public goods (military research), the government was willing to over look the fact that the company was a monopoly and perhaps should be broken up.

CISPA is a dangerous law that we need to carefully weigh accepting. We need to pressure internet companies to step away from the law. We also need, if it passes, better understanding of when companies hand over data willingly and for what reasons. We should also be notified any time a company hands over our data about us to the government for any reason.

Are we talking past each other with the net neutrality debate?

I started reading (yes another book) "Internet Architecture and Innovation" on my flight to Portland Tuesday night. It's going to be a really interesting read, if you like the internet, economics and innovation of course. One of the first parts discusses the history of the internet and a design principle called end to end. This means that when something is transmitted certain events must happen. There are two meanings to the same principle though, which complicates things. In one version only peers can "talk" to each other and share the information. This isn't exactly literal, because if I'm skyping the data isn't just between skype on my pc and yours, it goes through many, but the idea is that only your pc and mine know we are skyping. In the second method, some intermediaries might know that we are skyping, through something called deep packet inspection where a router is able to read the information it processes. Both ways are still called end-to-end. Which is obviously a problem.

Another easy example. One version would require equal up and download speeds, the other doesn't. Let's say you have a picture and want to upload it, in the one version it would take you the same time to upload as to download it the next day back to your pc. We know this doesn't happen.

Until reading this book I really thought that the internet was truly designed in an equal and neutral manner. However, this isn't the case. Using these two design principles results in an internet that looks very different and we would expect it to evolve differently based on which understanding was applied.

It's obvious that for consumers the first option is better. Where the network behind the internet is neutral and a "dumb" pipe. Why is it better? Because no one would be able to intercept your data or change the speeds you get your information or even cap your data downloads. This is bad for network owners because they can't charge or filter as easily for specific content. They simply become a pipe that information flows through.

The differences in incentives and contexts which the design rules are applied drives this discussion. Since the participants believe they are talking about the same thing there is confusion over the disconnect. This leads to an obvious other problem, our clueless elected officials. They don't understand how the internet works at the simplest level, let alone the esoterics of the minute differences in this argument. It is no wonder they have tried to do back door deals to get this topic to go away.

This also has led to confusion within the internet community of how the telcoms can say that the internet wasn't developed as a neutral platform. In a way they are correct, in other ways they are wrong. It was just a matter of what was being discriminated. Before it was up vs down speeds, now it could be content. Which to them is no different. For us, it matters a whole lot more.

Content and implicit threats

I'm reading "consent of the Networked" right now. The book is about digital rights, privacy, government and the internet. Once i finish I will write a review for the Urban Times. I found out about the book through TechDirt's book club. One of the major points the author makes about repressive regimes is the activities of pronationalist actors that are not truly part of the government.

These actors are typically regular people and act as hackers, journalists or progovernment rally organizers. They are found in many countries including China, Iran, the former regime of Tunisia and Libya. In a way these groups are a counter weight to "organizations" like Anonymous, dissent groups and the "liberal" media. However, these organizations are unlikely in the US and Europe right?

Well according to the author now. These groups do exist in the US and in some cases are formal business like HBGary. Some of them actually work for the US government and others do with a wink and a nod. These groups help monitor internet users and potential members of groups like Anon. In many cases this extends the impression of continual  observation by the government and other actors, which can lead to self censorship and self selection for activities.

Has this happened to me? You bet it has, but I didn't really think much of it at the time or how it could really impact me. One of the times happened during a Facebook conversation about Wikileaks, which I was supporting. The person I was discussing doesn't like me much and thinks I'm "a rube." He suggested that I should get a job which requires security clearance so I would get an understanding of how things actually work and that I was niave. Of course I disagree with the fact that I'm niave and I view the world in a much more complex manner than his black and white view. However, I had been thinking of applying to a government type position and he told me I should be careful what I say, which he is correct. This then led me to rein in my views and self censor. This had serious implications on how I discussed topics for some time.

The other times are slightly different and after I started blogging. For one my brother is in the Boarder Patrol which gives him clearance and my sister does stuff she can't talk about. So, to some extent, I don't want to negatively impact their ability to work either. This does have a moderating affect as well.

The final source was actually my dad writing to me about my post about anonymous and my discussion of using DDoS as potentially a source of public demonstration on the internet. I was not surprised that he suggested I be careful, he did retire as a Major in the Army Reserves. However, when responding I told him I was already being careful with my wording due to self censorship. I already expect that I'm likely to have my material spring up on someone's radar due to the content I write about. So, I do try to be careful.

In a democracy where these threats should be minimized we have to worry about it. Why should the rest of the world be different or any less oppressive?

Continued fall out from MegaUpload arrests

A few days ago I discussed some of the actions taken by the hacker community and the impression that the MegaUpload arrests were related to SOPA. After some time we see that this arrest didn't happen over night, you could argue the announcement and the timing was done poorly. However, I think that we should be paying attention to the ramifications of these arrests. Torrent Freak is reporting that there has been a massive response from the Cyberlocker companies. These cyberlockers were similar to MegaUpload in that a user would be able to upload a song and then anyone would be able to download it or stream the video. Now these companies are removing the search capabilities from their website and are restricting users to only their files.

While, what MegaUpload may have done may be illegal, the impact of the arrests is a foretelling of the impact of a law like SOPA. Internet companies argued that SOPA would be a job killing bill that it would kill innovation and break the internet. I think that this action clearly demonstrations that they are correct. For instance, Torrent Freak mentioned that several companies are shutting their doors and others are changing their services. Since it's space based service, it is likely that each of these companies only has a few employees. However, they make a good chunk of change. MegaUpload was making several million and their competitors were likely making millions a month.

All of that money is going to be gone by next billing cycle. Not a single one of those companies where users were paying a premium will pay them another dime. Ad revenue will dry up, MegaUpload made almost a million alone since 2007 on ads. All of this money was getting put back into the economy through the purchase of servers, software and other equipment. It allows employees to buy stuff and was making a positive contribution to the economy.

From the different companies there was obviously innovation occurring. MegaUpload never allowed duplicates on its servers and when a duplicate was uploaded it would find another version of it and supply the link to the end user. Infringing content would just have the link removed, not the actual content. This would make searching for the real version difficult for copyright holders as it would be a game of wack the mole where the content would appear here, then with another link and so forth.

What other solutions could have been reached? I think there's plenty of space here for further innovation for a business model. As users are using sites like this for personal storage and for video streaming, users are paying for content as well as clicking and viewing ads. Clearly there should be a way for the content owners to make money off of it as well. However, I have yet to read an article or a comment about the content industry approaching any of these companies, other than through DMCA, about working to pay some sort of royalty or set up a license agreement.

I think that a way to bring the balance back from the power being exclusively in the hands of the RIAA and MPAA (I'm just going to type RIAA from here on out), companies like Pandora.com, Spotify, Last.FM, MegaUpload (or any of its competitors), Google/YouTube, Vemeo and anyone else that uses licensed content should form their own consortium. Let's just call it Content Users and Managers of America or CUMA for sure (I couldn't think of anything really witty there (it doesn't have to be just of America)). CUMA would provide a counter balance to the RIAA in that it provides equal footing and a way to combine the might of the end users. There are demands for these products, but the products simply do not demand the price premium they used to demand. Since these products aren't able to demand the premium and the RIAA thinks that it should, they are overcharging as there are freely available alternatives which people flock to. Essentially, the RIAA needs to realize that for the websites allowing people to access the are getting paid pennies (if that) for a single view on a website. So for most sites, they can make more money if they don't pay licensing fees. Lowering licensing fees is something that CUMA would be able to work for, to put it inline with expected ad revenue. This would allow for broader innovation in the market and reduced piracy.

It's obvious from the amount of money that MegaUpload made that people are willing to pay to be able to watch as much content as they can when they want it. I feel like a broken record here (ha HA!), but people are willing to pay for content if it's easily accessible.

I expect additional fall out from this. If SOPA or some similar style bill ever passes, expect this type of reaction to occur in other segments of the online industry. Online content is one of the places with a great deal of innovation and killing it would be a shame when there are possible solutions to this problem without resorting to industrial policy making and picking winners.

Update: I just saw this article Looks like MegaUpload has figured out a way to allow musicians to make money off of free downloads for original works through their site. This is some seriously awesome innovation.

The Government Strikes Back

The internet had thought it won a great victory with the black out of some seriously major websites, however it was a short lived victory as the Fed and its allies the vicious RIAA and MPAA have regrouped and launched a stunning counter attack destroying a rebel outpost on Hoth... errr Actually, The US government has shut down MegaUpload.com and arrested several employees for copyright infringement. You may remember MegaUpload for recently being involved in a dispute with Universal over a YouTube video. Where Universal issued false DMCA take down notices which required YouTube to take down the video. However, this video wasn't infringing and MegaUpload sued Universal for the false claims. The interesting thing about this video is that it's about all the legal ways you can use MegaUpload. The video is essentially an attempt by the company to show that there are legitimate uses for their services which, I'm assuming, was an attempt to get them into the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

To me, this action really shows that the US government doesn't need SOPA to pass for it to censor the internet. It already has the ability to do so. SOPA would just put a rubber stamp approval on the actions that the government is already taking. This should be a wake up call. Yes, we had one with the joke of hearings for SOPA previously, however this is a slap in the face of the internet. It's basically saying, sure we heard you, but you know what? you don't matter.

Sure it might not be as easy as it would have been with SOPA passing and it's not breaking the internet the way that SOPA would, but it's still happening. As much as I hate Maddox, he's right in his post about SOPA. We really have been pretty complacent, myself included. Yes, I've written a bunch, signed petitions and emailed my senators and congressmen multiple times, but big deal. Right now this is a hot button topic, but this isn't going to go away. No one spoke up about the NDAA because it didn't impact your ability to read Reddit or surf wikipedia. That law is as bad or worse than SOPA depending on what you think of freedom and civil liberties.

When I got home last night and saw that MegaUpload had been shut down, I was miserable. It made me feel completely impotent. That I was unable to impact the way the US government acts in any meaningful way. At this point, I'm not really sure what to do about this. If any other government would be doing this the US would be up in arms (perhaps literally) and would put a stop to it. Our government is doing this in our name and it's horribly depressing that I can't do anything to stop it.

Maddox is right. SOPA only failed because we were paying attention and we were able to get the tech giants behind us on it. SOPA will rear its ugly head again and we might be sleeping. The empire has struck back and we need to decide what we are going to do about it. Are we going to get some ewoks and take it down or are we going to keep signing petitions?

Anonymous has decided to fight back and has launched a large number of attacks on internet websites. As citizens that are deeply concerned with the MegaUpload action we need to ask ourselves, is this an appropriate response? Is this a way of protesting and assembling in an online space? Should anonymous be locked up for doing this? I think that this is a type of protest. Anonymous is as frustrated as I am and have decided to do something in response. It's obvious that they felt like this is a direct attack on the internet in response to the SOPA protests and the "abuse of power" the internet displayed in taking down websites to protest SOPA.

It also begs the question, what will these website attacks actually accomplish?

What are some of your thoughts on this?

Update 1: I just saw that some 9,000 Hackers have joined Anonymous

Update 2: Apparently Anonymous is using a link that directs users to a Low Orbit Ion Canon DDoS tool that uses the users computer to attack a website. This is an interesting tactic as it will make it very difficult for agents to determine who was malicious and those that were  ignorant of what they were doing. Thus making the tool a more effective protest tool. It will be interesting to see what the ramifications of this new tactic are. I think it will be used again in the future and will make it as "easy" as signing a petition to join a DDoS without having to do the hard work of setting up the LOIC on your computer. Interesting.

Data protection, anonymity and copyright

I talk a great deal on this blog about data issues, privacy and ownership, anonymity and copyright, however is there a clear connection between them? Should we care about who has access to our data, who we are and control over our access to data?

I think that these issues are so connected that we need to do something about how they are managed at a federal level. Currently, it's rather easy for governments to request data from internet sites. Some times they require warrants or court orders other times the companies simply hand over the data. Savvy users understand how their data is collected and used by companies. I'll be the first to admit that I'm learning about this as I'm going. It's not easy because some times it's really inconvenient to really protect your data. The more sites that are connected together the more likely one of your accounts are to be hacked. Linking sites also creates other problems. Specifically Facebook and Google. Twitter isn't as bad, but it easily could be.

Why are Facebook and Google bad though? First Facebook is the worst by far. Both Zuckerbergs have made statements proclaiming privacy a bad thing.We can see this erosion with the creation of Facebook's OpenGraph and seamless information sharing. We've all see the increase in the amount of information that our friends are sharing. Such as Spotify and articles they've read. Which now no longer click through, but end up going to some app from that company. All of this information is being stored and sold to customers with your name on it. Effectively you've lost your ability to view websites freely without it being stored on multiple servers by multiple companies at the same time.
Google comes in a close second with their privacy problems. They aren't any better with Google+ as they require names at this time. We also don't know what Google does with the information that you give them when you link accounts together. By giving access to Google when you sign into another website Google is learning more about you which will likely be used to adjust your filter bubble.

Without anonymity or at least pseudonymity it's significantly more difficult to control access to your data. Putting a buffer between you and the people that are interested in learning about you as a person can protect you from a lot of bad people. However, whenever there are discussions about anonymity or pseudonyms some one almost always makes the argument that it will increase the safety for child molesters or terrorists.

The Copyright industry is one of the most vocal advocates of this tactic. In fact, this is one of the arguments being used for SOPA. They argue that if you don't have anything to hide then you have nothing to worry about. Well, I don't buy that argument. People have privacy fences for a reason around their yard. Why not do the same thing for your data? Being anonymous doesn't mean your bad, it just means your being safe.

Anonymity makes it more difficult for copyright holders to come after people who download movies without buying the movie. They want to know if your downloading it regardless of the fact that you might actually own the movie in some other physical medium and are using the digital copy as a back up. They also don't really care if you go out and buy the movie after watching it. In fact the Swiss government came out and said that buying a movie or song after downloading is extremely common.

Based on these three points, I believe that everyone should be pushing leaders to increase the ability for users to be anonymous on the internet. This will protect users data from identity theft, allow users better control over their data and decrease the impact of the filter bubble. We must accept the fact that people may use the freedom in unethical ways. However, this doesn't mean that it's unethical for people to be anonymous online and doesn't mean that they are unethical. It means that we need to define clear laws and procedures to deal with unethical or illegal activities in these systems. Without these guidelines we are likely to have no control over our data.

Economics, Philosophy and Science

The Occupy Wall Street movement has spawned a great deal of branch protests. It has increased our awareness of economic, educational and governance issues. We have seen a series of aggressive police actions and amazing responses from victims. Historically, universities have been a sites of unrest. Berkeley had it's riots in the 60's, there's the famous Kent State shooting picture and there are many other examples. What do much of these have in common? The state has used it's authority and power to overly aggressively clamp down on protesters. However, violent protesters can't be accepted, but non-violent protesters cannot be met with force. It's part of our heritage to protest the government.

However, it's important to understand what we're protesting and why. It was clear from the beginning of the OWS movement that most of the people didn't really understand what they were protesting. Very broad general things like Wall Street making too much money or the fact that no one has gone to jail. I think it's important that for protesting to be effective the leaders and a majority of the protesters need to be well educated on what it is exactly they are protesting.

In this case the protesters needed to be educated on economics and philosophy/morality. Why economics, those guys are like the bad guys man? Well, sadly, to have an actual conversation with these people you need to speak their language. You don't have to actually accept their assumptions as true or accurate, but you need to be well educated on the topics. Additionally, if you are well educated on economics, you'll know there are different capitalist perspectives on economics that indicate that a more equal society is a safer and happier society. Using evolutionary economics, policies can be crafted to help protect economies from crashes. In addition, being educated in slightly beyond the basic supply demand curve, it will help prevent the wool from being pulled over our eyes. This will also allow more members of our society to enter public discourse and understand and speak intelligently about the topics that impact all of us. People will actually understand what socialism and communism actually mean.

In addition to a good economic ground work, we also need to understand some basic philosophy. People are accused of moral relativism, we need to know what it actually means (morality is flexible based on the situation) and how that impacts people's actions. We also need to know when our leaders are behaving morally, immorally and what sort of freedoms we should be giving to people. Our country is founded on the philosophical ideas of the enlightenment. The US government was founded on rights, which all people should have regardless of sex, race or whatever. This includes speech and protest. If these are within our rights, then we need to protect them from people that believe it is their right to physically assault you when you exercise your rights. Morality and ethics can also drive our legislature to define laws based on humanist principles to ensure living wages and the right to live for all people. Or at least the need to create the social mobility claim to have in our society. Decreasing costs of education reduces the initial burden after school which allows people to take more risks, which may allow them to move from one social strata to the next. These should be done for moral reasons and because education and research has been shown both neoclassical economics and evolutionary economics to be a huge driver of sustained economic growth.

We also need a strong scientific foundation, which will provide a healthy dose of skepticism for government and data published by any group on either side. It gives the tools to decide if we should accept these data or open our tool box and figure out where the flaw in the data is. Science is the driver of current economic growth. It is what allows the next big break through at the platform level. We've had several platforms, coal, steel, rail, and we're currently on the silicon platform/computing platform. To develop new platforms we need to continue to drive to the frontier of science.

Our founding fathers embodied these ideals. Jefferson was a philosopher that wrote his own version of the bible. He and Franklin were both accomplished scientists. All of them believed in the rights of the people that exist not because they are given to them by the government, but because they are natural rights all people have. It is important that we acknowledge these rights and make sure we are educated in these topics to ensure an actual debate over the problems we're facing as a society. Without being educated in the importance of these topics we'll begin to argue based on the best sound byte and not on the content of the message.

In closing, all people need to become literate in these topics to provide the best foundation for an argument. Without being able to speak the right language, you'll sound like whining children that's wondering like a child lost in the woods, or out of your element if you will. With these tools, anyone can talk coherently and powerfully against the very things our own government protests in other countries.

Feds need warrant to get phone data

In a victory for cell phone users everywhere, A court says that the feds need a warrant to request phone data which includes location. We should be celebrating this victory even though it isn't a total victory. This case will most likely go to the US Supreme Court. The Federal government is not going to give up on this easily. Especially since there have been other rulings that have ruled in favor of warrantless mobile phone tracking. So it's still unclear what the end result of all of this will be.

Additionally, this may also have implications for some of the other tracking that the government is doing. Apparently, the governments don't need a warrant to install GPS tracking devices onto cars. Which the police argue saves tax payers money. It raises serious privacy concerns though. What is the limit to the number of people the police can track at a time? Can they simply track anyone closely related to a crime even if they have nothing to do with any sort of crime? With polices officers required to track individuals this puts an obvious limit on the number of people the police and other law enforcement agencies can track. They are limited to the usefulness of the tracking and the number of officers they have available to track. With the GPS tracking they have the ability to simultaneously, continuously track any individual associated with a crime or a suspect of a case. This gives them a huge amount of data on people that may not have done anything illegal and shouldn't be tracked in the first place.

With this data agencies are able to construct a network of frequent activities for the prime suspect and any other people they consider interesting. If these suspects go to a known drug hide out it can implement additional people in a crime that wouldn't have been obvious without the tracking. It could allow for an increased ability to  crack down on crime. However, it can also send up a great deal of false positives and implement innocents.

Should we be concerned with this type of tracking? Definitely. The purpose of requiring a warrant, in a historical context, is to prevent the government for arbitrarily searching the house of a person. I find the ability to be remotely tracked terrifying. Just because I don't have any thing to worry about doesn't mean I'd want the government to have the ability to track me on a whim. I feel it's important for there to be a check on the law enforcement. I think it's clear from the UC Davis pepper spray incident that there's a sense of unlimited power within many of our police forces. Warrantless tracking through cell phones or vehicles are incredibly similar.

The job of the court and our constitution is to protect the people from the excesses of the government through the actions of law enforcement. We need to work with our legislation to push for laws to address these issues if the courts don't make the action in the manner to protect the fourth amendment and our privacy.

Review: Republic Lost. Or the hand book for OWS

I just finished Republic Lost by Lawrence Lessig last night. If it's not obvious by now, I'm a big Lessig fan. I find his work extremely interesting and relevant to the changing world. It is a bit dry to be honest, all of his writings deal with how society, the market and laws interact.

In my opinion this book should be the handbook for anyone interested in the Occupy movement. I'll explain why in a few steps. First, he mentions various different cases of inequity which are highly promenient in the US. He specifically addresses the 99% argument and does it a great deal of good. He fully explains what it means to be in the 99% in a way that has been missing in the dialogue. He actually says that the 1% isn't the biggest problem it's actually a much smaller percentage, but the 1% can cause a lot of damage as well.

In the book he systematically explains how and why money is a problem in the system. In many cases it's not that there is quid pro quo corruption going on. More that it seems like there is corruption going on because of the money involved. As an outsider it's hard to trust a system where the Teachers union (or wall street or exxon) can say I will give $1 million dollars to any candidate that supports tenure (or bail outs or deep water drilling). This is an implicit threat because if you don't support these topics your opponent will, because it will give them campaign donations. As donations play a huge amount of time for a congressman (30-70%) anything that makes it easier to get money the congressmen will campaign to support.

There have been studies that question if these gifts actively change legislative voting behavior, but many quotes from former congressmen explaining that there is a sense of obligation to the donor. This isn't a tit for tat type exchange, Lessig argues it's more of a gift economy. Like what buy a round of beers for your friends, you don't want money for it, you want them to buy you the next round. The fact that you bought instills (in most people) a sense of obligation to buy the next round. This analogue is perfect in fact, as Lessig argues that congress is dependent on these funds like an alcoholic. This is an illicit dependency as he shows that Congress should be "dependent on the People alone."

Lessig builds an extremely will supported case that donations impact the legislative process by impacting what congressional leaders allow debate on. Even if it doesn't impact votes, it impacts what is considered important by the congress. This is one of the ways that congress seems out of touch with regular people. I believe Lessig builds a strong enough case to demonstrate that something must be done. He actually has a few suggestions on how to deal with the problem.

The first is the old fashioned way of trying to build support through congress to enact real campaign reform. Lessig doesn't believe this is realistic and gives it about a 0% chance of success. His next idea is to get about 300 well known people to run as super candidate to force the issues. Have these people run in multiple different districts (it's legal) and garner enough attention to force the politicians to say they will vote for reform. Do this in enough state and in the right states and it might work. He calls this a kind of political terrorism. He gives it a 5% chance of working once you get started.

His next idea is to have one of those types candidates run for the of president making the promise to hold congress hostage until the reforms are made, BUT resign as soon as the reforms are completed. He argues that this is required for people to honestly believe that the changes would happen and for congress to actually enact the changes. There would be no negotiations other than making sure all the normal people get paid and services don't impact most business. He also gives this one a 5% chance of working.

The final suggestion is to push for a constitutional convention. This would require 38/50 states to OK the convention. He, at length, describes all the potential problems and legal issues with the convention, which matter once the ball gets rolling. In addition to this he suggests creating about 300 shadow conventions where regular people are given the opportunity to make constitutional amendments. These could then be the basis for what is sent to congress.

In total, if you are part of the OWS movement you need to read this book. It will help give more firepower for your arguments against the 1% and it will give some guidance on what the first priority should be. I agree with Lessig that until we get money out of the system no other reforms are possible. We will not have a function government until the People are the only thing the government relies on for choices of legislature.

Ubiquitous free high speed wireless

One of the people I follow on twitter posed an interesting question. What would happen if there was free broadband wireless all over Europe. I sent them my 140 character answer but felt really unsatisfied by that. I'm going to devote some blog space to it over the next few days because I think that there would be a lot of changes. I'm going to break this into a few section. I haven't worked out all of them but there will be government, business, computing and social changes. This structure loosely follows some of the structure within Lawrence Lessig's Code 2.0. He also argued there were four structures that impact community building on the internet. It is written in the US context, but can be applied in other countries.

I'm going to start with Governmental changes.

One of the first things that will happen will be further encroachments on the ability for users to be anonymous and use pseudonyms online. Initially the requirement to login will be used to track which areas have the highest user rates and things like that, but this could be an incredibly powerful tool to prevent copyright abuse from users of the network. IP addresses would go out the window as an enforcement tool of nearly any online abuses. For instance, the safest place to download a movie from the internet would be on the train. You'd be changing IP addresses frequently and it would be very difficult to track a single user from one IP address to the next.

To deal with these problems there would have to be strict oversight to protect users of the network from invasions of privacy from the government and third party users of the network. Currently, the US government has a significantly heavy hand in collecting data from ISPs, Cloud data and social networking data. This includes both European and US data. This would need to be prevented.

Paying for and managing this network would need to be determined as well. One route could be to put a tax on advertisements that are displayed in a IP address range. Since IPs are distributed through regions this would be technically possible. Google just announced they made $9.7 Billion and nearly all of that is from ads (99% was from ad revenue in 2008). Putting a modest tax on this revenue will help pay for this network. Assuming that this infrastructure would need to be rolled out and continually upgraded I would expect at least $2-3 billion annual investment is required. I'm basing this on how much Verizon Wireless and AT&T invest in their network annually. This of course would change based on the amount of capacity required (a lot) and what technology used (WIFI, Wi-Max, LTE) for the network.

Since, this will effectively kill the business model of the telecoms, like T-mobile and KPN, they could be used to help manage the network. Governments and the like aren't the best at managing these networks these old companies would be the best suited to manage it. That or create an organization that is based on former employees.

Finally, the network would have to be net neutral. Otherwise, it would effectively be government censorship if there was a reduction in access to any portion of the web. This means that the internet would be free as in free beer and free as in free speech. This would ensure the most positive results from the free internet on the business side and improve ability of users to participate in democracy.

Biggest changes? Management of the network, increased privacy concerns, paying for the network and copyright owners influence on data controls.

In my next blog I'll discuss how this would change the business environment.

Innovation, Science and Money II

In my last blog I discussed some of the budgetary cuts occurring in the US and how these cuts are going to impact the future of science. I want to spend some time explaining why this is the case. I mentioned something called Path Dependency, what do I mean by this? Well it's a pretty simple concept, once you start down a policy path your choices are constrained by your previous choices and the results based on those choices.

This type of path dependency can be seen in scientific and technological changes. For example, if a piece of technology has three parts each one can be improved independently. If each one can be changed in one direction, from a 0 to a 1 each change could impact how likely a specific technology would be selected by consumers. Each change could lead to a local optimal, and could prevent the technology from becoming a global optimal. Additionally, these changes over time, with further research, could lead to radical different technologies. This happening from changing a single feature from on or off. Basically, it's an evolutionary process.

Policy works the same way. There's a paper written by Mustar et al (2008) that discusses the policy choices in France and the UK. The objective of the paper was to investigate the impact of policy choices on the creating of academic spin-offs. Some of the results lead to additional technology incubators in the UK and in France. However, the number of academic spin-offs in France actually decreased, however in the UK they increased significantly.

These differences came about because of previous policy choices. For example, France has laws related to civil servants and starting a new company. In France all professors are considered civil servants, so there is a history of professors not starting companies. There's a lack of culture for entrepreneurship in France for increasing the number of academic spin-offs.

This is what I meant by path dependencies. Decreasing the amount of money going into meaningful academic research will have an impact in other ways. In the US there has been an increased push for increasing the number of companies being started. Scientific research can be turned into new companies through academic spin-offs. Decreasing the funding at two of the biggest funding agencies will decrease the number of academic spin-offs.

References:
Mustar et al 2008 http://www.springerlink.com/content/68282r1460889062/

Innovation, Science and Money

The death of Steve Jobs has really shaken the technology community. It has really made people do a lot of thinking about innovation and the impact of technology based companies on the economy. The Economist notes that the American work force is on the decline and the high tech companies aren't making up enough jobs. That now companies like Apple and Google employ less than a third of what companies like GM used to employ. These high tech companies don't need as many employees. Additionally, it's a different type of work force that are required in the US. Apple outsources manufacturing because they are really concerned with driving down the cost of manufacturing and maximize profits. This is good business.

In a long article by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Pay Pal and a venture capitalist, he discusses what he calls the end of the future. Where he claims that we've been in an innovation slow down since the 70's. He also argues that scientists and technologists aren't living up to the claims they are making. He argues that in a lot of ways we've been technologically stagnant. Politicians have been making the same promises on energy since the 70's and that we've been slowing down are rate of increase of production for food barely keeping up with population growth. I think that he does make some good points, but he definitely goes a bit over the top with his statements. He's looking at things only within the national and regional context and is ignoring the fact that there have been cultural changes that have driven a change in how companies innovate.

Historically, companies don't find value in doing basic research. If you look at the history of research labs within industry, they hire researchers to do incremental and radical innovation. However, this research is carried out within a scientific paradigm which was created in basic research.

In fact we've seen a decrease in the amount of R&D being spent by companies. This has lead to some of the stagnation in innovation that Thiel mentions. To combat this and to reduce the risk borne by the company they have been doing more and more contract research with universities and have increase the amount of money they spend with universities.

Thiel also mentions that the government might be able to help but doesn't see it ever going to happen when you have to justify the expense by cutting something else. Since he's a libertarian he feels that the budget must be balanced. However, our politicians are cutting budgets to the largest scientific funding agencies in the US. My wife sent me an email with some of the funding cuts, National Science Foundation is getting cut by 2.3%, in fact it's 14% below the budget requested by the administration. The National Institute for Standards and Technology's budget is getting cut by 9.3%. Both of these agencies create a large number of jobs. It's been shown that one research job creates several other jobs. Cutting these budgets will reduce the amount of research which can be conducted. This will impact the number of researchers, impact the quality of education at universities and slow down the ability for universities and firms to exploit new research.

It typically takes 10 years for research to be monetizable. Cutting funding now impacts employment now and future employment. In fact, these changes will have a long term lasting impact. These choices create a path dependency within our society. Without proper funding we'll be passed by some one that feels research is paramount.

Occupy Wall Street

Since September 17th people have been having a live in protest on Wall Street in New York City. The protests are attempting to bring attention to the inequities between Wall Street, CEOs and the rest of the US and world. There has been a media blackout since it started until recently. The Daily Show has covered it twice (Here and Here). There were two reasons for this. First the media didn't know how to deal with the protests. They act differently, the people protesting aren't grandmothers yelling about the government, instead it's a bunch of hippie like people that are protesting corporations. Another problem was that there was no cohesive voice coming out from the movement. However yesterday there was an actual list of "demands" released. Basically these demands explain the need for changes at all levels of government and how corporations behave towards both workers and the environment.

The protests are in their third week now. They have been growing every week. Initially, there were only a few hundred protesters now it's been reported that up to 20,000 people have started to protest in NYC. The occupy movement has spread from only being in NYC to Boston, LA, DC, and several other cities as well. While the Daily Show is right that these protests are very similar to the Tea Party protests the problems they hope to address the end goals and the means are very different. Both groups also had a lot of uninformed people, for example you had the old lady saying keep the government out of my healthcare when she had medicare (government healthcare), and here you have people just saying they want Wall Street to take less money. These protests have gone beyond just the hippies, unions in NYC have also joined the protesters as well as more "responsible" people from other walks of life.

I think these protests could eventually make a difference. I don't think it will happen in time for the next presidential election. The changes that they are demanding are structural changes that require socio-economic changes. They require complete changes in our ethics and our goals in lives. These are not changes that happen over night. There are some changes that we can do that will have immediate impacts though, and these aren't popular among policy makers. We need to get money out of politics, we need to limit how politicians can make money off the laws they pass and we need to use public funds for elections (as well as have elections on the weekend or a holiday). Removing the money by creating public funds will eliminate the leverage that lobbyists can use on politicians. Preventing politicians from making money off the laws through stock purchases will prevent tit-for-tat behavior with lobbyists as well. Making it easy as possible to vote will increase the immediate participation in the government.

The reaction to OWS in NYC has been horrifying. The cops have been brutal towards the protesters and really show that the indignation our leaders displayed during violent responses to protest are just words. If US politicians cared about freedom and democracy they would support the protesters. Protesting is part of being American. It's part of our constitution because it drives conversation and it drives democracy. Protesting is a form of participation. If we aren't able to participate we don't have a democracy. Arresting 700 people for going to the protest isn't acceptable. Pepper spraying women that were corralled is not acceptable, it's not how a democracy deals with protests. The right way to deal with these protests is to invite them into the conversation and really take a look at what they have to say. We aren't doing that in the US. The 99% don't have the same voice as the 1%. As can be seen from Fox News, that 1% is trying to divide the 99%.

The ACTA has been signed

For those of you who aren't aware the US and many other countries have signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. This law provides a legal framework for nations across the world to enact something similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This framework gives additional control to law enforcement and copyright holders. Something also abnormal about this trade agreement is that the US claims that it doesn't need congressional approval. I find this extremely odd, as it's part of the charter of the legislative branch to approve trade agreements. Additionally, as I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what's inherently different in the ACTA from the South Korean Free Trade Agreement, which has been stalled since Bush II.

At this point the EU hasn't signed the agreement yet. France and Germany have both enacted some already strict laws in regard to the number of strikes an infringer can have before they lose internet connections.Of course there are some serious issues with the approaches that are used to accuse copyright infringers. most of them deal with how to identify a suspected infringer. At this time France's first three strike infringer doesn't know how to do that. Additionally, in Germany, where a legislator wants a 2 strike law, the same legislator has already violated this before the law has gone into affect.

I believe that these cases really indicate that legislator really don't understand how the internet and copyright works. It's clear from the DMCA that they don't and neither do judges. However, I think that Judges are starting to seriously figure out what's going on with copyright and the controls that are being put into place. Recently in several districts judges have severed joint cases of copyright cases, because most of the IP addresses, which are typically associated to a region or city, were outside the jurisdiction of the court they are being tried in. Additionally, some judges are noting that IP addresses aren't people and other people could be using the IP address. Even more recently a judge writes that in the DMCA suggest if you own a DVD it's ok to rip it.Which is something that the DMCA is trying to prevent. DMCA was design to prevent circumventing the copy blocking technologies. It made it illegal.

Overall, the ACTA is a huge blow for advocates of reducing or eliminating copyright. I seriously hope that if this trade agreement does have to go through the US congress that it will be rejected. It's a law that doesn't take into account the current technologies and what culture really means.

Fortunately, not all governments support the ACTA. In fact Brazil has created an interesting framework that is the antithesis of ACTA. It is designed to support privacy, encourage usage of Creative Commons copyright(left) protection and have true net neutrality.

Facebook dirty filthy liars

Facebook has patented the ability to continue tracking users after they have left their website. Despite this Facebook repeatedly claimed that they were not in the business of tracking their users. However, Facebook's business is knowing their product as well as possible. You are their product. They are extremely interested in knowing everything they can about you. Why? It's really simple. The more they know about their user's online browsing activities the better they can customize ads for you. I imagine that they will create some pretty sophisticated models to determine who will click what sorts of ads. The more people click the more accurate the ad targeting will become.

While individual users do have a web "fingerprint" as the EFF puts it, people will typically browse the same types of websites together. For example people who play fantasy football will be going to yahoo! sport (or some other competing service), they then visit sites like espn, sports illustrated and probably a few sports blogs to try to figure out the best way to get an edge in their game this weekend. Facebook will take this data and aggregate it for a larger set of data. As there are 800 million facebook users and millions of players of fantasy sports, this data could be extremely useful for Facebook to use in placing ads. From these data they may be able to determine which sports team you're interested in, which players are on your fantasy team, and then display ads for jersey's from that team or for a specific player. They will also be able to figure out which ads will have an higher likelihood of someone with your browsing profile to click on.

Facebook will then be able to set a premium for ads that they do this with, or they will earn more money from the number of clicks a given ad gets. This of course is why Facebook has decided to collect this data. Some of it seems harmless enough. It's not that big of a deal that Facebook is getting my fantasy football information, why should I care? Well, you don't just use the internet for fantasy football, you use it for banking, shopping and a plethora of other activities. Do you know what data facebook is collecting? I certainly don't. From the patent it is unclear what protections they are providing on the data they are collection. It also doesn't say what data they will be collecting when you visit a third party site.

As a personal precaution I have started to use Facebook in a separate instance of Chrome using the Incognito function. This prevents my browsing history from being saved and deletes many cookies. I have also taken to deleting all my cookies every time I close my browser. I don't do it myself Chrome does it for me. Additionally, these settings are available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I suggest that you look into doing similar safety measures to prevent Facebook from getting information from you that you don't want them to have.

Finally, the other thing that isn't really discussed in many places that mention the ads, this data is also being provided to law enforcement agencies. Now of course there's the whole if you aren't doing anything wrong then you don't have to worry about anything. However, this worries me regardless because I'm losing my control over what information is going to the government and companies. I don't like that. Patents like this one and cookies that record our daily activities are changing our private life into our public life.

Technocrats and Technology

On my way back from Oktoberfest, which was awesome, my fellow car passengers discussed the decision by Germany to phase out nuclear energy over time. We all felt that this was an incredibly stupid long term decision. We agreed that it was a knee jerk reaction to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. However, this raised some other questions about how to enact energy policy choices as well as other technology/science policies. We mostly focused on energy as that was the topic of interest, but it really does spill over to most scientific/technology policies at a national level.

The obvious solution to most engineers is to set up a panel of experts and have them come up with the best choices for energy sources. There are some flaws to this line of thinking, sadly. First, who selects these experts? Let's use the US as a model country in this regard. There will be a huge battle over what experts should be included in the panel. If it has to be split 50/50 between experts selected by the Republicans and Democrats we'll most likely have a group of lobbyists for the Oil and Gas industries from the Republicans, and a mixture of wind and solar experts from the Democrats. Nuclear energy maybe completely left off the radar. Even though there are tons of technologies out there that are hugely safer than the Fukushima nuclear reactors.

Additionally, nuclear energy has a stigma associated with it due to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima. It doesn't matter that coal is as destructive or that oil and natural gas extraction causes almost immediate negative impacts in the local environment. Why? Because these are huge job creation industries and also have been legitimatized over the course of the past 100+ years in many regions. For example in Pennsylvania, where Three Mile Island resides, coal is a way of life for many people. It has been an occupation that many people have been doing all their lives. There are nuclear facilities in the state still, but they are viewed with much more skepticism, lack of trust and fear by local residents.

Many engineers are something of a technocrat, where they believe that technology can solve a huge number of issues and that technology experts should be making many policy decisions related to technology issues. These technocrats are viewed with skepticism from the broader public. In many cases there are huge debates over the sources of the data and the reports which accompany many of these technology experts. In the case of GMO, even when the public is given information from both sides it is not trusted. Why? because people have lost faith in their governments and believe that there are scientific conspiracies to enact practices that are dangerous.

In my next blog I'll discuss some more issues with these topics. I'll go into some detail of cases where large differences in views were eventually over come.