Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

Politics

Mark of the Beast (except in Wisconsin)

This is scary. Wisconsin is in the process of passing a bill outlawing forced implanting of microchips in human beings. It also outlaws covert insertion. Huh. Was anyone thinking about that?

Every time I think that writing about privacy causes me to become paranoid, I run into something like this. I appreciate that Wisconsin is anticipating this and doing something about it, I really do. But you don't have antibodies without an infection. There must be good reasons to think that someone is seriously planning on forcing human beings to get "chipped."

I believe that we will have mandatory human implants and soon.

Here's a couple of possible cases:

- Employers requiring RFID magnetic "keys" for building access
- Sex offenders and possibly all paroled prisoners
- Police officers
- Children of privilege
- Domestic servants (nannies)

There will also be voluntary, but highly attractive reasons for people to get the implants.

Some highly religous Christians believe that these chips are the "Mark of the Beast" mentioned in Revelations. Perhaps that will be enough pressure to pass this kind of legislation on a national scale.

Posted on April 27, 2006

Sun and sundries

Scott McNealy stepped down as CEO of Sun Microsystems this week after 22 years in that position. He will be replaced by Jonathon Schwartz, McNealy's protege, often described in the press using the adjective "pony-tailed."

Sun loses money. $217 million last quarter, as a matter of fact. Their revenue is generally okay, but their profitability has been sliding.

They're inconsequential.

That's the worst thing that can happen to a Silicon Valley exec--to be ignored. Sun was the "It" company in the Valley for many, many years. Some of the best tech people in the business cut their teeth at Sun. Sun's championship of things like UNIX-based windowing systems, NFS and BSD in general, provided a platform that serious developers used as their first choice for serious development.

I went to IBM in 1994 into the fledgling Internet division and given the time constraints of projected development, I insisted that we build the initial system on Sun boxes instead of IBM ones. After a lot of grief, I was allowed to do so (although quietly). Every UNIX geek that I knew used BSD, SunOS and eventually Solaris and could handle a Sparc station in their sleep.

Now, they sell big servers to the government and large companies, but they're not the development platform of choice for hot developers anymore; now it's Linux and in a pinch, Windows.

Sun's business moves don't shake the industry. I had to hunt for the announcement of the CEO change on the Washington Post website, because it quickly disappeared off the front page into the back of the business section. Ten years ago, it would have been all over the paper, because it would have been significant to an industry, not just a company.

Today they're inconsequential.

I have no solution, but some suggestions. Sun's success was lockstepped to that of the Valley and its geeky denizens. Sun prospered because they'd tied themselves to an industry.

They should reinvent themselves by owning new areas of expertise that they could excel at. Grid computing would be a good example of something that they do well.

They need a new image and a plan, not for this year or next, but ten years out...what do they sell? Big servers, cheap workstations, integrated hardware/software vertical solutions or maybe web services?

It may turn out that they were tied to an earlier era that doesn't exist anymore--that they were the general store servicing the cowboy geeks of the wild, wild Internet. Their time may have passed, but hey, that's what billion dollar mergers and acquisitions are all about. Changing the business usually means more than just changing the CEO, often it takes something a little more drastic, some kind of corporate electroshock.

I remember Jonathon from Lighthouse. He struck me as energetic and creative, two qualities that he'll need in this position.

I have fond memories of Sun and so do many others. I wish them well.

Posted on April 26, 2006

Business

The law of unintended consequences

The Canadian Privacy Blog has an interesting tidbit stating that the Department of Homeland Defense is sharing passenger information with the CDC (The Center for Disease Control), apparently to address pandemic and other health concerns.

Now this seems to be a good thing. If the media is to be believed, every chicken mcnugget is a potential source of Avian flu these days and given the way many of us trot the globe, it's easy to see how a pandemic could start and quickly get out of control because of air travelers. In circumstances like that, most of us would want health authorities to punch through bureaucratic walls, find the disease carrier and stop the spread, privacy be damned.

But. But just for a second, I'd like to resurrect the dreaded liberal boogie man--the slippery slope argument. One of my big problems with DHS and the Patriot Act is not the use for which they want to put the data (catching terrorists) and not even the principle as an abstraction. It's based on a very real fear that the information, once collected for counterterrorism purposes will sit there and be used by other agencies for other things. And at some future date, these new purposes may be ones that the Americans of today would find morally reprehensible.

Clearly that doesn't include pandemic control, but this is really just the first step down that hill, each subsequent action will be easier and faster until governmental data usage is out of control. Hence the slippery slope. By the way, it may look like we're just talking about travel information like flight times, but DHS has much more information than that linked to each passenger record.

So what's next? Certainly child pornographers deserve to be stopped, no matter what. How about spousal abusers? Classified information leakers? Sounds farfetched? Remember that Tom Delay used similar government powers to try to stop Democrat Texas lawmakers from leaving the state on an airplane to avoid a gerrymandering vote.

Posted on April 25, 2006

Diluting the DMCA

According to CNET, Congress is readying another go at the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Going against increasingly vociferous public sentiment, their approach is not to weaken it, but to strengthen it. The Bush Administration's draft bill, backed by key Republicans including Lamar Smith, will make it a crime to possess any software or hardware that could be used to bypass copy-protection. It's already a crime to to sell such devices.

You would think that Congress must have a strong reason to support such unpopular legislation, wouldn't you? The more cynical among you might suspect that it's the fat political contributions made by groups such as the RIAA. But it's more than that. According to Attorney General Gonzalez, proceeds from piracy are used to fund...(drum roll)...terrorism.

Yes, that's right. The monster under the bed for the new Millenia, the terrorist, raises his ugly head again. Just as the attack on P2P file sharing systems is ostensibly to stop trading in child porn, arresting kids who copy computer games or DVDs protects our country against terrorism.

Modern technological gadgets have separated the content from the wrapper. It's almost necessary for consumers to break the "copy protection" on CDs to use iPods and the same situation will shortly be repeated with DVDs as video servers become affordable.

I, for one, am tired of this greedy fear-mongering approach by the Republicans. I can just see Tom Delay in his future jail cell, requesting better accomodations because he had been threatened by terrorists.

The DMCA, bad is it was, allowed for consumer fair use copying that has in most part, been ignored by the escalating and very public RIAA lawsuits supported by their partners-in-slime, the Bush administration. And as bad as the Bush White House is, the Bush Justice Department is worse. Since Ashcroft, it has smelled worse than a stopped-up toilet in a sewage plant. They have effectively dismantled the 40 years of civil rights support and have flipped from being the defender of the defenseless to the enforcer for the elite. The best that money can buy.

Posted on April 24, 2006

Intellectual Property

Tupac, too late

The Washington Post has an interesting article talking about the latest teenager trend--wearing customized or "bling" dog tags. Some of these things are iconic, having picture of Jesus or Tupac, some are jewel-encrusted, some are high-tech with multi-colored LEDs.

The idea of faddish design elements among teenagers is hardly new. Remember slap bracelets? What's interesting to me is how fads often serve the purpose of propagating an archetype. Take Shakur for instance. Brutally gunned down almost ten years ago, he' s become this generation's Che or Mao--the counter-culture revolutionary killed for his beliefs. Ignoring for a second the fact that this is hardly true, it's interesting that everyone seems to think that he was a victim of something, killed by a conspiracy of someone for some unknown reason. The fact is that gangstas generally killed each other for turf or money reasons that were hardly altruistic.

Each generation has its archetypical symbols and they say a lot about the underlying culture. Howdy Doody, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers turns to John Wayne, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, JFK and Elvis. The Vietnam War takes center stage and then the "Keep Truckin'" Mr. Natural, Che, Mao, and the ubiquitious marijuana leaf.

I wonder how this need for tribal symbology will transfer itself onto the web. The fledgling social sites like Myspace and Facebook may, I suspect, become the new gold standard of culture. Tee shirts are too slow, television is faster, but the Internet is quickest of all.

Posted on April 21, 2006

Pop Culture

The Chinese finger trick

Apparently Yahoo has fingered another Chinese dissident. Jiang Lijun was sentenced to 4 years in prison for subversive activities. The proof was a draft email that Yahoo turned over to the Chinese government. This is the third time that Yahoo has fingered a dissident to the government.

They are hardly the only Internet company to cooperate with another government's political quirks. EBay and Yahoo both block the sale of Nazi war memorabilia at the request of the French and German governments. Google blocks certain dissident sites from searching by Chinese users. Most Internet companies are reputed to cooperate whole-heartedly with American intelligence agencies, providing not only information on request, but even, in some cases, dedicated and highly secret backdoors to the logs.

It's time to stop thinking of Internet companies as Mom and Pop shops, startups or even good guys. They're multinational big businesses like General Motors, IBM or Michael Jackson. This loftiness is inevitable and if you're an investor, desirable.

But there's two ways that a company like that can go--they can either set their own culture above any one nations's and be master of their own fate or they can be the cumulative ethical sum of every major trading partners' value systems, no better than the intersection point of everyone that they do business with.

I commend Microsoft for having been the former. They stuck to their guns on their own imperialistic agenda, regardless of antitrust laws around the world. But the new guys in town? They're rolling over faster than Paris Hilton making a home movie.

Posted on April 20, 2006

Business

Listless in Maine

The Canadian Privacy Law blog reports a CBC story about a young Nova Scotia man who killed two residents of Maine. He apparently found all of their information via the state's sex offender registry.

I'm sure some people have no sympathy for the deaths of the sex offenders. But, they'd done their time and certainly didn't deserve to be murdered. It's unfortunate that interesting privacy cases always involve someone with a dubious background. If it was a database of convicted bribe-taking Congressman and lobbyists, I'm sure the outcry would be loud and shrill.

The sex registries are controversial, although becoming extremely popular in the United States. The conflict usually centers around the idea that once someone has paid their dues, done jail time or whatever else was mandated by the courts, that they should be like everyone else (more or less). Some of the requirements put on sex offenders seem to imply that they have a permanent stigma attached to them, that they've never truly paid their debt to society.

In some areas, convicted sex offenders have to go around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and introducing themselves as rapists, molesters or whatever other term might be appropriate. Many states have been eager to adopt the registries that publish current personal information about any residents that have been convicted of a sex crime.

IMHO, this smacks of death-by-psycho. Forcing this information into public databases (many accessible on the Internet) virtually tags these people as future victims. I'm not even sure it helps society so much. I've had a few friends that have found out that a convicted sex offender had moved into their neighborhood. They were terrified, having their kids play in different areas and watching the felon like a hawk.

Society should think long and hard about ever using erosion of privacy as a penalty for a crime. Only the most primitive of peoples attack their enemies by undermining their dignity.

Posted on April 19, 2006

The three most useful gadgets

Most gadgetry is not useful. In fact a lot of it looks great when you buy it, usually because of some neat feature, but quickly becomes relegated to the dusty back corners of your electronics shelf. A good litmus test these days for those of us who travel a lot is "is it useful enough to put up with the hassle taking it through airport security?" That quickly winnows the digital chaff.

So, the three most useful electronic gadgets that I've ever owned:
Palm Pilot - It really worked. The two parts that made it worth it were the address book and the calendar. The "to do" list and memo pad were nice, but not worth the hassle of lugging the gizmo around in my pocket. But dates and phone numbers are critical to every ones' business. Not only that, but important account numbers and other things were easy to store in the phone book. Oh and the basic interface was easy. Sure, Graffitti was difficult to learn, but you didn't need to. You could perform all of the basic functions with one-handed button presses. Palm users quickly grew into the habit of not memorizing numeric facts anymore, because it was so easy to look up. In short, the Palm became our long-term digital memory.

Cell phone - I should qualify this because I don't mean the first round of shoebox-sized phones. I mean ones that could fit into the pocket and had a couple of hours of battery life. What an amazing invention. These phones changed how many of us functioned socially. For one thing we could be less precise in our getting-together planning because we could always narrow in using cell phones. "I'll call you when I get to the mall and tell you where I'll be.' We could track our kids and each other. In the business context, we always became reachable, no matter where we were. Cellular phones knocked down the last artificial barrier between home and office. For some people it became a living hell. For others, it was a business opportunity. At this point, cell phones have became our primary method of communication. Many people don't even bother having a landline installed anymore, they just use their cells.

Tivo - This choice is probably less obvious. Tivo completely changes how we view television and I suspect, eventually all broadcast entertainment including movies and streaming live events. As we move into a different consumptive model, that of pay-per-view vs. advertising supported revenue models, the invention of the PVR (Personal Video Recorder) becomes critical, because it's the distribution and collection mechanism. The Tivo is to pay-per-view what Blockbuster is to videos. Oh and by the way, we don't need the cable companies to do anything except be a dumb cable. All of that upsale stuff that they'd like us to buy? We can get it better off of Tivo, either sent over the cable, satellite or Internet. Much is made of Tivo's time-shifting attributes and it's well-deserved. It gives us the ability to consume entertainment when we want, not when they want. And ultimately, it will kill broadcast advertising, hastening the arrival of complete pay-as-you-go television. Tivo becomes our ultimate entertainment device. I expect to see it hop off the television and have mini-tivos appear on cell phones, PCs and every other electronic device capable of streaming video.

Posted on April 18, 2006

2 Comments

Technology

Hosting Redmond

There's a lively discussion on Slashdot this morning about a recent revelation that Microsoft is bypassing local lookups for some websites. Normally there's a HOSTS file that allows the administrator to locally block specific sites, but apparently Microsoft routes around this file when looking up a small list of addresses. Coincidentally, they are all Microsoft-related sites.

There are security reasons why MS has done this. Malware often mucks with the HOSTS file to stop lookups to well-known antivirus sites. By using the OS to do the lookup and ignoring the file for their sites, Microsoft has a way to increase security by always having a software lookup to their sites that can't be messed with (at least at that level.)

The problem with this is twofold. The first and most obvious one is that it's undocumented. There's an arrogance to this approach. The DNS system is implemented differently between the various operating systems, but nonetheless operate in a similar and predictable manner. Security is not about hidden tricks, but about painstaking protections, blocking well-known holes and proactively stopping problems. Doing what they "think is best for everyone" is that old Microsoft paternalism of old. I like it even less now in a rapidly-growing open source world than I did when they were the big dog in town.

The second problem with this is that architecturally, clever work-arounds are not ever the right answer. Once a company stops security problems by brute force methods such as this one, they increase the complexity for the administrators and eventually the end users. It's not an elegant solution to the problem.

Posted on April 17, 2006

Security

Censoring for prophet

The most fervid defenders of free speech in recent memory are made out of cardboard and three feet tall. Yes, I refer to the South Park characters (or at least Kyle and Stan). Comedy Central pulled an image of Mohammed from the South Park show last night, citing "World Events." Viewers were treated to a black screen with the words ""Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network."

Last month Comedy Central pulled a rerun of the show's infamous "Tom Cruise in the closet" Scientology episode.

So, there are clearly limits of offensiveness. I could easily imagine scripts involving say, Martin Luther King, the holocaust or abortion that would push too many buttons for me to defend.

But "free speech"? C'mon,if that isn't one of the things that we're fighting for in Iraq, it must be the oil, although I don't remember petroleum products being in the Bill of Rights.

Comedy Central is a company and they have the right to show whatever they want. I can appreciate their position. I wonder where this is all heading, however. I suspect that as I mentioned in an earlier blog about Howard Stern, that explicit content moves to satellite, safe stuff stays on cable, idiotic stuff on broadcast.

Wouldn't that be funny? Segmentation of entertainment media based on regulation.

It could happen, you know.

Posted on April 14, 2006

Pop Culture

The perfect phone

dr mccoy.jpg
For the last ten years, one of the electronic's industry's catch phrases is "convergence." This means the growing-together of gadgetry, presumably into some super-gizmo that does everything. To this end, we've seen untold numbers of hybrid devices. TVs, phones, digital music players, PDAs, laptop computing devices and cameras are all jumbled together. Somewhere you can find almost every possible combination. Want to watch TV on your phone? No problem. Want to talk on the phone from your TV? We can do that.

So where does it end? What would be the perfect gadget(s) that we'd carry?

Let's start by looking at what it needs to do:

- It should authenticate the user for financial transactions
- It should record multimedia (video, pictures and sound)
- It should be a communicator, whatever that might mean in the future (IM, phone, email, etc.)
- It should be a sensor like the old Star Trek tricorder, reading out temperature, humidity, Internet presence, whatever
- It should be a custodian of one's personal knowledge, containing photographs, resume, you know, personal stuff
- It should be an entertainment device, capable of playing games, movies, music
- It should be an electronic assistant, helping with scheduling and phone number look-ups
- It should a library, capable of answering any question from the mundane like movie times to the historic like Wikipedia
- It should be someone's digital skeleton key controlling all interaction with the digital world. This could include things like remote control functions as well as being a door pass.

There's a lot of stuff here, but if someone could build one, I"d buy it. I suspect that technology has arrived to do so. Display screens such as the video iPod's, coupled with a GSM phone and Palm pilot functionality could handle a lot of this.

Posted on April 13, 2006

Technology

Slipped discs

I love watching DVDs. The picture quality is good, the sound is great, they're small, virtually indestructible and are often packed with bizarre extras and commentaries. But there's something about these discs that's really annoying me, in fact driving me right up the wall. The liberal use of the "FBI-warning" lockout feature that makes me watch their commercials.

The culprit? The UOP or User Operation Prohibition flag was originally mandated by the entertainment powers as a way of showing the stupid, yet dismissable FBI warning. While on that part of the DVD, the user's controls are locked up, so if they were in fact, a multi-million dollar DVD thief, they would sit there for 30 seconds, contemplate the message and reform.

In the last two years, it has been badly abused. First there's the 30 second FBI warning. Often followed by the same message in other languages (usually French, hmmm). Now we get an Interpol warning. Then they use the UOP to make us watch the little production house animated logo. Each of them. Then comes the worst offense of all: mandatory commercial watching. Some companies use this "piracy-education" feature to show their commercials.

First off, this abridges my freedom. Second off, it's useless and largely ineffective. Third off, the commercials become stale quickly and you might own the DVD for a decade. Fourth off, it's an abuse.

I've made this point before, but I'll make it again. Any kind of regulatory loophole that commercial companies are granted to "stop piracy" will be exploited by them for their own gain. Piracy is real, but it won't be stopped by these ass clowns and their circus messages.

Just to make things worse, I often use a 5-disk carousel DVD player. I can hit a button from the couch and flip through the discs. Except I have to wait for 5 minutes for each one of them.

This is something that Congress should get involved in. Hear from the other side of the "piracy" issue for once--the consumers.

Posted on April 12, 2006

Advertising

Psycho killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est?

EBay recently stopped a Wisconsin land auction owned by a gentleman named MIke Fisher. The asking price for the 40 acre property was $250,000 but Fisher had only received one small bid. The reason EBay stopped the auction? It used to belong to Ed Gein, the infamous serial killer who has been featured in several movies including "Psycho" and "Silence of the Lambs." You see, Gein skinned people and made suits out of them. The property for sale was where police discovered all sorts of body parts and people-clothing. Why did EBay stop the auction? Because it violated their policy of not selling items associated with murder.

EBay actually restricts quite a few things. They stop the obviously illegal like drugs and alcohol, yet also stop things such as screen savers with multiple celebrity images, movie prints, police badges, teacher's editions of textbooks. The most interesting category of blocked items are ones which are deemed offensive.

To whom ? Presumably EBay.

I understand why they have some rules. No one wants to go to court and I'm sure that they experience their share of lawsuits anyway. I am sure that they are being reasonable in their application of their rules. I have never, for instance, heard of EBay using their product sale policies solely to benefit themselves in some advantageous way.

It bothers me though that a company can make these determinations. EBay is not an American company, it is a global one. When Internet companies make subjective determinations, whether they're about offensive material or verboten domain names, they're making a statement about right and wrong, proper and improper, and then extending that moral blanket across the Western World. That worries me a little, although I have not the slightest suggestion for an improvement.

Posted on April 11, 2006

1 Comment

General

My, my. Why buy Google wi-fi?

Google is offering to provide free wi-fi service throughout San Francisco, but there's a catch. They want to match customers' locations with local advertising to provide targeted ads.

Well, we're going to see more and more of these kind of businesses. It makes sense from many standpoints--San Franciscans get free wireless, the advertisers reach the people that they really want to and Google makes money.

Some people are saying that this is a privacy violation. I think that that's a harsh assessment. Collecting the information doesn't make it a problem. It's what they do with it later, that could be problematic.

If companies like Google could just make a stand and use their technology powers for good, there are ways that they could ensure that the information was never used for any purpose other than the stated one. Then I'd be okay with it. But they won't do that, of course. All that beautiful, valuable data is there to be cherry-picked by government agents or hackers.

As always, the problem is not in the collection, it's the usage.

Posted on April 10, 2006

Contemptible you

Attorney General Alberto "Speedy" Gonzales testified on the Hill yesterday and "slipped" the idea that he (and by extension the rest of the Bush White House) felt that they had the inherent legal authority tap domestic phonecalls without a warrant.

The Daily Kos feels that this is tantamount to admitting that such a program actually exists.

I agree. Many representatives are annoyed that Gonzalez refuses to divulge information on what NSA is actually doing. I guess that I'm confused--don't witnesses have to testify before Congress? Does the Executive Branch have the right to refuse to discuss things as they've been doing for the last few years? Doesn't that constitute contempt?

I recently saw recordings of Mafia gangsters testifying before the Kefauver commission 50 years ago and we've all seen the unpleasant video aftertaste of the McCarthy hearings. Why doesn't Congress start using its powers to get some answers to critical questions? What exactly are these people afraid of, I wonder.

When I think of this, I flash back on Vice President Cheney, Richard to his friends, Dick to his enemies, telling Senator Leahy to "fuck himself" from the witness stand in the Senate.

I'm tired of their arrogance and I'm appalled that they're listening to domestic phone calls. When oh when will this horrible nightmare be over?

Oh yeah, 2008. I urge anyone reading this to remember this when they see Bush supporters on the ballot in November. But for God's sake, don't talk about it on the telelphone!

Posted on April 07, 2006

Politics

Souring Apple

Yesterday Apple unveiled the long-anticipated Bootcamp product, that allows new Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP in a dual-boot configuration (hence the name). Currently it's an either-or-operating system situation--either it's a Mac or a Windows box. Presumably there will be a future download (it's free, by the way), that will context-switch in run-time.

So many people are asking "why?" The Mac purists don't understand why anyone would want to run Windows at all. The Windows people don't know why someone would pay a premium for a Mac, then run Windows on it.

I think that the right perspective in which to view this is as a transitional strategy for Apple. Obviously they think that they can expand the Mac user base by removing an objection to buy--namely that they do not run Windows programs. But I question the wisdom of doing so. I realize that there are some programs that are have-to-haves for corporate America. They tend to be proprietary enterprise systems, VPNs, sales tools and the like or deeply vertical applications that run on Windows and support an entire industry, like real estate sales, for instance.

However, the appeal of Macs are not just the cachet, but the fact that they work and work well at what they set out to do. They are not workhouse machines, they are creative boxes for people who don't want to think about the computers as much as they what they're doing with them.

Those people, the long-time Apple user base, will be poorly served by this corporate direction. Soon, small design compromises will be made to accomodate the dual boot configuration. Each one will lead the Mac down the road of frustration and exasperation that is the daily commute of Window's users. And let's not even talk about security implications of a hybrid operating system.

There's no bigger marketing evil than allowing greed to booger up your brand. Jobs did something very similar at NeXT computer. It didn't work then either.

Better to be the darling of the computer industry and have a small market share, then begin to wallow in mediocrity. Or as Milton said: "It's better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven. "

Posted on April 06, 2006

Business

Branded by the mouse

Disney today announced that they will start selling cellphones to teenagers. The noticeable features of the phones are not just the Disney logo, but strong financial control features allowing parents to control spending limits, who the child can talk to, SMS and photos.

This is interesting from a marketing viewpoint because it clearly points out what has been going on for awhile--brands are more important than niche expertise. It makes more sense for Disney to sell a phone to kids than it would for IBM to sell them to adults.

As communications technology becomes more commoditized, then it becomes ever easier for companies with strong brands like Disney to immediately become competitive on pretty much whatever they want to, as long as their brand supports it.

It does not, however, work the other way around. This is bad news for the Yahoos of the world whose brand is amorphous--Disney's is razor-sharp. I would expect to see more of this from any other company who owns a demographic niche.

In the modern age, brands are more important than ever. If I had any brains (which I don't), I'd set up a company to build a brand. We're talking about Disney, Harley-Davidson, Oprah. These are killer brands and they can sell candy bars, phones or timeshares in Florida. The brand is more important than the technology.

Posted on April 05, 2006

Advertising

Data pimps

The Data Accountability and Trust Act (DATA) was approved by the U.S House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, sending it closer to a vote by the House.

This bill is far more liberal than one currently under consideration by the Senate. It makes public disclosure of data breaches mandatory. It also calls for FTC oversight and gives the agency the ability to demand a security audit (after the fact, unfortunately).

This is a good bill. Most of our country's privacy woes start with this--if companies can hide their breaches, then how do we know enough to even regulate them? Sure, some states (notably California) already require it, but you can rest assured that many states would never pass this legislation on their own. I could live with that; there's something to be said for the idea that you pick the state that you want to live in, based on shared beliefs and values. However, data breach is a national problem and ideally, should be treated uniformly.

The first step is notification. The second step is auditing and analysis--fixing the problems so there's no recurrence. The last step is punishment of the guilty. We have to find a way to whack the knuckles of these data pimps in the direct marketing industry. It's no accident that the big and nasty privacy incidents seem to happen to companies like Choicepoint and Acxiom. Their business model invites it and apparently they don't or at least haven't, taken security seriously enough. Like industrial polluters in the '60s, they will stop only when they're forced to. And the way to do that is to hit them where it hurts--in their money belts.

Posted on April 04, 2006

Security

So you say you want a revolution...

While sitting around this weekend, listening to the part of my music collection that's 40+ years old, I started thinking about the protests in the 60s and how they would be different today because of technology. I highly recommend songs like Buffalo Springfield's For what it's worth or Creedence's Fortunate son if you want to set the right mood. Some candles and incense help, too. I'd put on a strobe light, but I'd probably give myself a seizure.

So if the 60s happened today...first off, the campus protests. Communication would be much, much better. Everyone has a cell phone, now. If you bought a 7-11 special provisioned with a smart card, they're virtually untraceable. Huge protests could be called with virtually no notice by using SMS. Lack of coordination is usually the problem with coalition groups, cells, wi-fi and special websites could easily fix that. How about counter-culture blogs where Yippies, Black Panthers and SDS members could plot?

Civil disobedience could be significantly enhanced by wireless technology. Flash crowds could block highways, train stations and public venues without even breaking the law. I saw a blurb recently about some students that, to prove a point, drove 4 cars in parallel down a highway, going the speedlimit and blocking anyone from passing them at greater speeds. It was a complete mess, snarling traffic for miles. Imagine a concerted campaign to do that on say, the DC Beltway? At 3:30 on a Friday? Before a 3-day weekend?

A little encryption would make it very hard for routine government wiretapping. Specially coded websites could be used as "digital dropsites" for cohesive maneuvering. MP3 players would bring the music to everyone and permit songwriters to create protest songs about topical events and instantaneously broadcast them to the budding revolutionaries.

Abbie Hoffman's Steal this book would probably be Hack this website.

I can almost smell the pot.

The flipside, of course, is that whatever the counter-culture has, the cops do, too. They would spy on the websites and the cellphones and the wifi, essentially becoming "cyber narcs" without taking any risks.

Even more importantly, I suspect that any organized student protests, especially if there was a hint of violence, would be considered terrorism and therefore subject to the Patriot Act and worse. I do not think that America would tolerate stone-throwing revolutionaries today, even if they were our own kids.

I pity the next generation that hasn't figured this out, because government now has all the tools that they need to take action against domestic protest. I wonder if there's room in Gitmo for antiwar protesters? I hope that they at least write good rock-and-roll.

Posted on April 03, 2006