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March 25, 2006
Spring break photos
Against all odds, I arrived safe in D.C. Drew and I have been hanging out and having a good time. I bought a copy of Watership Down and Drew got a Graham Greene novel.
That’s pretty much the news. I am putting pictures on Flickr, which you can view here.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 23, 2006
Light blogging this week
Leaving for D.C. in the early AM, which will be the start of my East Coast swing. Maybe some blogging along the way, but who knows?
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Myst IV Diary
Among my birthday presents was the sweet nectar of Myst 4. I hadn’t played a Myst game since Myst III: Exile came out back when I was in D.C.; I think I ended up completing that game in 48 hours of non-stop play. Needless to say this was well before meeting C.
I suspected that another binge like that was probably not in anyone’s best interests. So I let Uru, Myst IV, and Myst V pass by (didn’t hurt that for most of that time my only computer was a relatively-pokey PowerBook).
But I’m back, baby. Picked up Myst IV at Fry’s and have been working my way through it on the iMac when I get a chance. I’ve poked my way through two Ages now, and have reached Serenia, a.k.a. the “Age of Plot Development.” Here are a few thoughts on the whole experience, FWIW.
The FMV—The first scene in the game places you in a sort of flying rail-car… with some random FMV little girl. The whole thing is kind of unsettling (she’s not much of an actress) and while it’s technologically impressive (you can swing your perspective around 360° while she’s talking to you), it’s not very Myst-like. I want to explore recently-abandoned islands full of dark stories, not have Punky Brewster tell me how to use my camera.
Atrus and the first puzzle—Atrus is still kicking, and is the second person you encounter. He also completely ruins the first puzzle (a kind of quasi-electrical wave-matching thing) by walking you through it. It’s like ten minutes of him “helping” you by saying things like “try turning the left knob” or “Hmm… that’s not right.” I almost threw the computer out the window. Shut up, fat man! Myst is about figuring things out for yourself. I spent four hours using three air-horn things to talk to a bunch of monkeys and loved it. Luckily Atrus takes off shortly afterwards, and hasn’t really interfered since, so stick it out.
The graphics/the worlds—Everything looks fantastic. This 360° view thing was introduced in Myst III, but everything’s much more animated now and it looks great and very alive. I”ve spent most of my time on a sort of jungle island, with little monkeys and everything running around. It takes getting used to, but the feeling of immersion is real. I was poking around Achenar’s now-abandoned study and C walked up behind me and really startled me. Oh, and the depth of field effects—where focus changes depending on what you’re looking at—are fantastic.
The music—The box art heralds that Peter Gabriel did the music for Serenia. Well, he phoned it in. Serenia’s music, at least so far, is not that great. But the ambient music everywhere else is good and fits in very well with what’s going on on-screen. I wish I had a CD of some of this stuff.
I love Myst. I love Cyan, and I mourned the death of Uru: Myst Online, which seemed like a really groundbreaking effort, but maybe ahead of its time (see Tycho’s reflections on this point). I’ll post more thoughts here as I move through the game.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 09:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Net neutrality v. tiered service
Preston Gralla’s blog entry claiming that FCC Chief Kevin Martin has endorsed AT&T’s (and other ISPs’) ability to extract rent payments from popular web services, and citing it as the end of the open Internet, is getting a ton of play today. But is that really what’s going on?
Gralla points to a news article, also on Networking Pipeline, that directly reports on the Chief’s comments with a bit of much-needed texture. Martin came out strongly against any kind of intentional blocking or degrading of unaffiliated web services, but wavered on, or maybe even endorsed, ISPs’ ability to contract with web businesses to provide preferential bandwidth. Gralla’s point is that this is simply the converse of intentional blocking/degradation, and that small sites won’t have access to these new SuperPipes. But aren’t we already sort of in that position? You can’t serve up serious traffic without some kind of caching/peering system like Akamai, right?
Thinking out loud here… assuming that these “tiering” agreements become part of the landscape, couldn’t Akamai (or an Akamai-like enterprise) enter into such agreements with the ISPs and then share the cost out to the small providers? If that’s the case then the question is: is such an arrangement (in which service providers share some of the infrastructure cost) better or worse than denying the ISPs the ability to “tier” service and requiring them to recover all their costs directly from their subscriber base?
Posted by Rob Courtney at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 22, 2006
Patents at the Supreme Court
So far in U.Id’s short life, there’s been a bit of copyright discussion but nothing on “the Other White Meat” of intellectual property, patents. Mea culpa.
The oversight has a special sting this week, with two major patent cases before the Supreme Court. C and I watched the “Nightly Business Report” last night, which gamely tried to cover yesterday’s oral arguments in LabCorp v. Metabolite but ended up conferring little more than that it had to do with subject matter. Pish posh!
You deserve better than that, Dear Reader, and because I care here are a few words on what’s going on in Metabolite and in the other major patent case of the Court’s term, eBay v. MercExchange.
LabCorp v. Metabolite—LabCorp, plaintiff, holds a patent covering techniques used to study deficiencies in a certain body protein. One of the claims (lucky no. 13, as it happens) specifically covers:
13. A method for detecting a deficiency of cobalamin or folate in warm-blooded animals comprising the steps of:
assaying a body fluid for an elevated level of total homocysteine; and
correlating an elevated level of total homocysteine in said body fluid with a deficiency of cobalamin or folate. (Emphasis added.)
It’s that word “correlating” that’s causing the problem here. Defendant Metabolite argues that granting patent rights over such a broad range of activities as “correlating” implies amounts to granting LabCorp a monopoly over a basic scientific relationship. It’s kind of an indefiniteness/subject matter/written description argument. It’s semantic at some level, but when you think about the broad array of “inventions” that seem patentable these days, it’s probably useful for the Court to refine our limits about how well-defined an “invention” has to be.
The Court heard oral arguments on this one yesterday.
eBay v. MercExchange—This is a lot more high profile, you might have heard of it. The question here doesn’t concern the scope or interpretation of the patent, but what the remedy should be when a patent is infringed. The two patents involved are held by MercExchange and were found by a jury to cover eBay’s (and its subsidiary Half.com’s) eponymous “Buy It Now” feature. The “usual rule” in such cases is for the court to enjoin further practicing of the patented invention in the absence of a license from the patentee. eBay successfully convinced the District Court to forego the injunction and simply make a damages award of $29.5 million. MercExchange successfully appealed to the Federal Circuit, which ordered the lower court to grant a permanent injunction. eBay has appealed to the Supreme Court.
The basic question here is whether patentees who succeed at trial are “entitled” to a permanent injunction, or whether courts may in their discretion grant alternative remedies. There have been a plethora of briefs filed by numerous parties, including EFF, which pointed out that there may be public interest reasons why a court would decline to grant a permanent injunction in these cases; and two contesting groups of law professors (a group headed by Mark Lemley filed in support of eBay; one headed by Richard Epstein filed in support of MercExchange). eBay (and its supporters) are calling for flexibility; MercExchange (and its supporters) seek certainty in the rights that a patent establishes.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on this one next Wednesday, the 29th. If you start reading up now you’ll be ready to lead discussion around the water cooler at the office.
Patents aren’t as “sexy” for tech policy people to study as they ought to be. These cases, as well as lots of others before the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit, are going to influence billions of dollars of scientific investment in health, environment, information, and societal concerns. The patent system is the glue that holds the gears of our innovation culture together! We need to understand it.
Super thanks to Dennis Crouch and his fantastic Patently-O blog, particularly Sunday’s post describing MercExchange and Metabolite, to which this post bears an obvious relationship, and his unbelievable March 14 post that summarizes every brief filed in MercExchange. The man is superhuman. Check out his blog for some extremely high-quality analysis as well as copies of all the filings in these and other major patent cases.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2006
A giant Prince symbol is an improvement on any house
Carlos Boozer, from the Utah Jazz, is suing Prince for making unauthorized modifications to the house Prince is renting from Boozer in L.A., including:
I think I just got an idea for redecorating our house. Don’t tell C. (From The Smoking Gun)
Posted by Rob Courtney at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Quick hits P.S.: Achewood
I can never post a “Quick Hits” entry without forgetting one thing. Have you been reading Achewood? If you don’t know about the Great Outdoor Fight you don’t know about one of the best comics of the day.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Quick Hits: Funky beats, e-waste, parricide, and comments
Don’t, don’t, don’t let’s start.
- Finishing my moral character determination application. A little late on this one, hopefully not a problem.
- Are you on the east coast? If so I will absolutely see you next week. You won’t know when. Or where. Maybe while you’re sleeping. Or brushing your teeth.
- Finally saw Brokeback. Joy and pain in the American west.
- I have embarked on a steady musical diet of East Coast hip-hop and They Might Be Giants.
- There’s a rumor that the CD mix club is going to restart. I hear C has a new mix looking for an audience.
- Spent the whole weekend editing my e-waste note. Slouching toward publication.
- Finished Brothers Karamazov. A book review would be fun but quite an undertaking.
- At Bruce’s insistence, comments are now active, with aggressive junk filtering. If there’s any monkey business though I swear I’ll turn this car around.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 13, 2006
Music Review: Curtis Eller
I first saw Curtis Eller after DC’s City Paper sidebarred his upcoming performance at the Galaxy Hut in late ’02 or early ’03. That little mention doesn’t seem to be on the City Paper’s site anymore, but as I remember it described Curtis’s performance as “angry” and “foot-stomping,” and his slow, waltzing banjo rolls as a far cry from the bluegrass music we normally associate with that instrument. In the years since, I’ve enjoyed all of Curtis’s albums and seen him perform on both the East and West coasts. I’d feel comfortable saying there’s no one else like him in music today, and you owe it to yourself to check out his work.
Taking Up Serpents Again, 1890, and Banjo Music for Funerals, by Curtis Eller’s American Circus; Hunger Music, by Curtis Eller
America is a weird and wondrous place. Nabokov called Americans “cheerful barbarians,” and he was right. It follows that we are not exactly an introspective people. As a rule, we don’t spend a lot of time looking back over our shoulders. Which is ironic, because unless you look at America’s history, and the path we took to get where we are, nothing we do today makes the slightest bit of sense.
Curtis Eller understands that. He picks up pieces of our cultural past, warps and combines them with a modern sensibility, and spills out music with all the dirt, anger, sadness, joy, achievement, and ridiculousness that made us great.
Let’s start with the basics. Curtis Eller plays the banjo. He’s had some pretty serious bluegrass training—I heard him bust out a solid breakdown at a live show—but his playing is by no means bluegrassy. It’s slow and methodical, almost minimalist, supporting lyrics taken from some of America’s greatest but least-told stories. Many of the stories describe people isolated by their circumstances or their ideas—the kind of people who sometimes turn out to be Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers, but often turn out to be nothing. Other stories are about the forgotten, coal workers and carnies and Luna Park. There are a few about the pop idols of the past, now footnotes to most, like Buster Keaton or Steven Foster. A lot of songs are about the Civil War, because it never ended and because it’s the defining story of America.
There’s simple orchestration and elegant harmony throughout, and turns of phrase that will haunt you. Buy these CDs and you will be glad you did. But Curtis’s live performances are electric. I’ve never had a chance to see him perform with the American Circus, but solo he is one man with a banjo and an opinion. He stomps, whoops, cries, jumps, and makes you feel what he is talking about. When you leave you will feel it was worth the trip.
A few years ago his song “Alaska” was featured on NPR’s “All Songs Considered;” from the web site, it looks like it won. So that’s something too.
1890 was, I think, Curtis’s first album. The songs are very good, many are catchy, and they stay with you. Banjo Music for Funerals was next; it has only three songs but when I bought it at a live show, Curtis told me it was better than the other one. He was right—“Alaska,” “Dry Lightning,” and “Last Flight of the Pigeon Club” are all absolutely first rate. Taking Up Serpents Again is about a year and a half old now and brings it all together. There’s also Curtis’s solo instrumental Hunger Music, which I think was the score to a film based on Kafka. It’s all waltzes, played on the banjo, but it seems to no longer be available.
Curtis Eller has got something to say. You should listen to him. I give Curtis Eller’s work as a whole five angry yodels out of five.
The best way to hear some of Curtis’s music is over on his site. Buy something and he will make it his personal mission to see that you get it and are satisfied. When I ordered Hunger Music, the disc got lost in the mail… he sent me another copy by priority mail with a free t-shirt to apologize. The man has class.
Alternately, you can check out Taking Up Serpents Again on iTMS.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 05:53 PM | Comments (2)
More Crash controversy
This writer hasn’t seen Crash, but so much vitriol directed at a Best Picture whets the curiosity. Was there such an outcry when the pedestrian Gladiator beat out the magical Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, thoughtful Traffic, and all-out fun Chocolat in 2000? Drew already pointed out that more is at stake than artistic merit. But some just feel that Crash is a bad and pandering movie, a “safe” choice for a Hollywood elite that has a moral compass capable of indicating that racism is bad but whose artistic depth must be measured in microliters. At least, that’s how Annie Proulx feels. See her immensely satisfying rant in Saturday’s Guardian.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:05 AM
March 12, 2006
A cultural ecosystem on a planet made of wires
Yesterday Susan Crawford spoke about “Network Rules,” a.k.a. the “substrate-independent Internet.” Her major bullet point was the “us/them” conflict that’s going on over Net neutrality. They (the telcos/cablecos), tired of Google eating their lunch, are now trying in Congress to eat Google’s (and, by proxy, the lunch all future Net innovators) by wrenching the Net from a “Wild West” condition to Celebration, Florida. Susan argues that the cablecos and telcos feel not just threatened by but indignant at the idea that the people and firms who build and maintain the network’s hardware might not automatically receive a sort of moral imperative to also control its traffic. When you analyze that position, it comes down to this: on their preferred networks, content that’s not explicitly authorized to flow, doesn’t. Susan argues, with merit, that on such a “vertically-integrated” network, a great deal of innovation that we currently take for granted is going to be stillborn. Whole forms of persistent group interaction, including forms of which we don’t yet conceive, will never even come to be. What a loss. [ 1 ] In order for these interactions to flourish, we need public policy that severs any connection between the hardware and the traffic. Hence the term, “substrate-independence.”
Susan urged her audience to take heed: as intellectual property law was the lingua franca of first-gen Net law and criticism, so communications law will be the currency of the new generation. Witness the mischief that the FCC is up to lately, and Congress, and all the debate over Net neutrality. We accept that.
But just a few hours before, Jamie Boyle said that, “while [his] DMCA-hating credentials are as good as anyone’s,” he’s concerned that we’re overemphasizing digital concerns, possibly at the expense of what’s going on in biotech and pharma, as well as elsewhere. Neil Netanel, responding to Susan’s paper, said something similar, urging Susan to link her defense of the open Internet to “real-world” concerns, like ending poverty or hunger. And Julie Cohen urged us to dispense with “cyberspace exceptionalism” and look towards more conventional means of creating meaning.
Of course, these are tactical disagreements. Everyone in the room here wants to see a free and open Net. [ 2 ] But we should exercise care in our tactical choices. This writer, at least, wonders if linking our discourse re Net openness to, e.g., the fate of ideas in other important areas risks turning our ocean into a bunch of rivers. Even if the digital-cultural environment doesn’t quite, and I think we have to concede this, deserve the white-hot spotlight it’s gotten in some quarters, it is unique among the other cultural environments in that it’s entirely built on an artificial lattice. The lattice’s construction loosely reflects the OSI layers—you’ve got your physical layers (wires, RF spectrum), your data link layers (Ethernet, 802.11x), your network/transport (TCP/IP), etc.—but you’ve also got the recent attention focused on controlling the ends of network communications. There are individuals and firms with the power to alter that lattice in ways that could have indelible effects on this environment, in a remarkably short period of time. Near-term extinction for important aspects of the digital-cultural environment is a possibility.
The notion of substrate-independence for the Net is, at least for now, aspirational and not descriptive. Tactical choices should be made with this in mind.
[ Edit: Susan has posted a précis of her talk over on her blog. ]
[ 1 ] Susan offered a wonderful metaphor here—the Net as ocean, in which mighty creatures, some known, many not, swim and interact. And it’s full of geothermal vents, some known, many not, that are catalyzing new creatures every moment of every day. For this writer, at least, these images evoke the sense of wonder that most Netheads feel, but that hasn’t yet spread to many boardrooms or to Capitol Hill.
[ 2 ] Mark Lemley crystallized that it’s really about tactics, saying (paraphrased), “When I read this paper, and it seems to lead to a conclusion that We, the Internet polity, are going to simultaneously rise up in order to defeat this attack on the open Internet, it just makes me think, ‘Oh sh**, we’re going to lose.’”
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:27 AM
March 11, 2006
Quick hits: MPRE, “Lost,” Gale Norton
Listening to Madhavi Sunder right now. In brief:
- MPRE: Ding, dong, done.
- Lingering several years behind the curve, O.J. and I have started watching “Lost” on Netflix. Now I must begin insulating myself from any knowledge of the show’s later seasons until I’m caught up. Under no circumstances speak to me about “Lost.”
- Interior Secretary Norton resigned. Shortly before, the parties in Cobell v. Norton essentially asked Congress to just pick a number and legislatively settle this thing. Hopefully we have seen the last Interior secretary held in contempt over Cobell.
- Buffalo is in the news again with Eliot Spitzer’s anti-payola probe involving WKSE’s parent company Entercom. WKSE was a terrible radio station when I was in high school. There, I said it. I’d say it again.
- As of now, I’m updating this blog using Kula Co.’s ecto. Give it a shot, there are Mac and Windows clients.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 02:46 PM
March 09, 2006
No posting; I’m trying to be ethical
So many things to talk about… but I can’t. The MPRE is on Saturday, and I just got my BAR/BRI review book yesterday. So I’m devoting my non-class time to devouring ethics. That probably means no posts ’til Saturday. I’ll be at the Cultural Environmentalism conference after I finish the exam, but there’ll be wireless there, so it’s all good.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 12:00 PM
March 07, 2006
Three style sheets to the wind
If you’re visiting the site right now and it looks, er, weird, take heart! The weirdness is simply because I’m trying to incorporate a new design and have no idea what I’m doing.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 07:47 PM
Design like you give a damn
Were I more virtuous, I would have listened to To The Best Of Our Knowledge’s “Design Like You Give A Damn” when it aired on KQED Sunday night. Instead C and I ended up watching the Oscars. The show concerns green design in all its many forms, with an emphasis on green architecture. I don’t see a mention of William McDonough, whose work I know best, but I view that as a plus—need to learn as many design philosophies as possible. We’ll be listening to the online stream tonight. If you were to listen too, we could talk about it tomorrow. Wouldn’t that be modern?
Posted by Rob Courtney at 03:11 PM
Interrobang is online
I didn’t know when I could safely post this link, but since Drew has mentioned it over on his site (alongside a very nice link to yours truly), I guess the coast is clear. Drew’s new group webzine, The Interrobang project is live. Check it out, won’t you? And repeat after me: “The HTML entity code for an interrobang is ‽.”
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:46 AM
Net neutrality and how cell networks are eating the Net
A post on network neutrality has been in the hopper for a while.… Now that Ron Wyden has dropped a bill (S. 2360) on the subject (Thanks Traceroutes), a few words: [ 1 ]
Maybe I don’t get around enough, but I don’t know a single person who is unabashedly enthusiastic about the Net-enabled services they get from their cell phones. For better or worse, these networks are developing as discrete “silos,” and who your carrier is determines who you can get content from. Remember all those ads during the Super Bowl about getting sports clips from ESPN on your mobile? Did you notice that the ESPN service is only going to be available on Sprint’s network? What if you use Verizon, or T-Mobile, or Cingular? Well, you might be able to get sports content from someone else, but at least for the time being, you can’t get it from ESPN.
That’s because the cell networks aren’t traffic-agnostic. They’re designed to carry traffic—and only traffic—that’s been preapproved by the network operator. In this case, ESPN (Disney) and Sprint came to a deal, some money changed hands, some access codes were exchanged, and voilà!—ESPN content appears on the Sprint network. Without the deal, though, the content doesn’t flow.
Compare that to the Internet. When a user develops some kind of compelling content, s/he contracts with a host, uploads some files, and is open for business. His/her content is available on an equal playing field with all other content. Of course, the traffic might get too high (Ed: Not yet a problem for U.Id), but there are services like Akamai that offer caching and other traffic spreading services to ease the burden.
What’s happening now is that the ISPs are trying to push us from the “historic Internet” model to the “cell network” model. Executives at firms such as AT&T—I mean at&t (née SBC)—are starting to make high-pitched chittering noises about requiring rent payments from Internet resources that utilize the ISPs’ bandwidth. [ 2 ] The logic is that, if ESPN is paying Sprint for access to its network, then Google (for example) should pay every ISP for the same thing.
Moving to that kind of an architecture would make the ISPs the most important policymakers for the Internet. They could decide what traffic to emphasize, what traffic to deprioritize, who gets what, when, and how. Under the current system, such questions are answered by and large by the global community of users through a decentralized dialectic of links, commentary, negotiation, argument and, above all, mouseclicks. The ISPs argue that that’s an inherently inefficient system. But it seems to me to be the worst form of governance except for all the others. Putting the ISPs in charge serves nothing but to entrench large firms’ already-startling influence over media and culture.
In this correspondent’s opinion, Senator Wyden is on the right track. Network neutrality is a linchpin of the modern Internet, and the attempts of the ISPs to move back on that should be resisted.
[ 1 ] I don’t have the room here to properly go into the technical details of neutrality, and I could never do so with the thoroughness and clarity of Ed Felten’s two recent posts on the subject: Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination, parts 1 and 2. Check it out.
[ 2 ] Of course, users are paying for access to that bandwidth. So the ISPs’ characterization that they “own” it is not quite apt.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:19 AM
March 06, 2006
Now it’s on
There’s no hiding now. Some time over the weekend, the infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of terminals at Google’s apparently-infinite monkeyfarm discovered this site. I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve been waiting for this day. And yet—it signals an irrevocable commitment. Turning back now results in a shame that never dies. “Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Posted by Rob Courtney at 09:08 AM
March 05, 2006
Like a wolf among lambs
Do you like Drew? Do you hate spam? Now you can enjoy one without the other! Seriously, it took like three hours but I think I cleared out the thousands of poor-taste messages that were strangling courtney5. Now I need to take a shower.
P.S. He still hasn’t updated. Don’t get excited.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 12:25 PM
Reasons to love bluegrass
Great quote from last night’s concert with Dan Paisley & Southern Grass.… Dan was introducing the more-fun-than-it-sounds “Forty Years of Trouble,” by Troy Spencer. By way of introducing Troy, Dan said, “He was a good man. He played the banjo. He sold used cars.” He was! And he did!
Posted by Rob Courtney at 12:09 PM
March 02, 2006
Scoundrel
Last night in Negotiation class, we were discussing settlement in a breach of contract case. My side was claiming overtime expenses stemming from the other side’s late performance… my adversary asked across the table if I was positive that the entire claimed overtime was attributable to the delay.
I said yes—but in truth I knew that over 40% of what we’d claimed was actually attributable to human error and, according to the facts “this fact would almost certainly be revealed in litigation.” What I did was entirely unethical under the Model Rules. Those Rules didn’t even occcur to me while we were at the table.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 01:12 PM
MN-GOP: At bedrock, still digging
Bob Collins at MPR’s Polinaut blog is tenacious! Not satisfied with revealing the Minnesota GOP’s nefarious data-collection activities, he went in and decompiled the flash program responsible for collecting voter responses and transmitting them back to party HQ. And lo, what he did find…
Turns out that, at least as of Collins’s writing, the voter information database was entirely unsecured, and a skillful, er, blogger could review pretty much all of it at his leisure. It doesn’t sound like Collins “hacked” the database in any meaningful sense, he viewed it on an unsecured web site.
Undeterred, MN-GOP stands by its plan to have these CDs mailed out to voters on Friday, saying that “security” (whatever that means) will be installed between now and then. That is to say, tonight. They will construct an entire security system, from scratch, for a large database accepting input from thousands of distributed sources… tonight.
Of course, Gov. Tim Pawlenty wasn’t up nights coding this monstrosity—or was he? No, this is the proud work of a company called CH Consulting. Were security or transparency part of the design docs for this product? Maybe, but I suspect not, or at least not seriously. Marketing firms, at least in my experience, view consumer data not as personal but fungible. If they ever did build security into a product like this, it would be to protect their own data, not that of the people it describes. I don’t mean to condemn them, but to offer an explanation as to why they—and other corporations—lack incentive to protect data the way we as consumers want it protected. It’s a situation where background regulation is ultimately going to be needed.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:17 AM
March 01, 2006
Plug: Cultural Environmentalism conference @ SLS
Jamie Boyle’s ideas about cultural environmentalism are fascinating. I believe there are myriad unexplored links between technology policy and environmentalism, and it’s something I hope will be a major part of my career. Of course, Boyle and many others are primarily concerned with the “environment of ideas,” while my interests are increasingly on the physical environment, but thinking about the intersection of the two is productive all round.
Imagine my excitement to learn of SLS’s upcoming conference on these issues, with talks by Boyle, Jack Balkin, Peggy Radin, Jessica Litman, and Mark Lemley! Then imagine my disappointment when I realized that the conference opens on the same day as the MPRE, for which I must haul myself to hateful Walnut Creek. Alas!
Posted by Rob Courtney at 03:10 PM
MN-GOP, like everyone else, is profiling you
When the weather gets cold, Republicans’ minds turn to mischief. Drew informed me yesterday (MeFi linked it too) of a Minnesota Public Radio report that the GOP in Minnesota is distributing a CD-ROM that solicits users’ opinions on various matters of politics, then phones party HQ with their responses.
What’s notable here is not the outrageousness of the act, but the outrageousness of the proposed fix. MPR spoke with a GOP spokesman who intimated that the privacy issues here would be fixed with proper packaging. To quote: “The cd’s packaging will make clear that the cd is interactive in nature… . [It is a] very similar process to if you got a free AOL cd at the grocery store.”
If I may be so bold as to translate: the fix here is fine print. That is, a privacy policy, either printed on the sleeve or, at best, in a clickthrough. MN-GOP can offer this as a Real Solution, and with the state of privacy discussion these days, privacy activists can’t really do anything but grudgingly accept it. Of course, it’s unlikely even to make a 5% change in the quality and quantity of data the GOP gets, but they’ll have a contractual fig leaf. Raise your hand if you’ll promise to read MN-GOP’s privacy policy… and your Windows EULA, and every word on your credit card statement, and the fine print on your Safeway card, and—you get the idea.
That’s not to minimize the issue here. It’s terrible what the MN-GOP is doing, and I’m glad they’re getting it right in the keester, which probably has a core temp of around 70°F right now. But something more robust than fine print is in order. Can you hear me Microsoft and Apple? I keep hearing that Vista and OS X will make me more secure… how about a nice big alarm box—like the ones I get on OS X alerting me not to engage in copyright infringement—that points out malfeasant software in bright red letters? I thought P3P was just the first step.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:09 AM