Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

Congress with Congress

by David Holtzman

The Washington Post offers an analysis today of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling dealing the Bush Administration a severe setback in their (now) illegal use of special tribunals to try the Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

The Post feels that Bush's philosophy has been stabbed in the heart (et tu, Justice Breyer?) by the ruling which cuts to the core of the White House's contention that the President's extraordinary wartime powers allow him to brush aside the Geneva Convention and essentially do whatever he wants.

I'm not a legal scholar and have no opinion on that part, but I'm glad of this ruling, because it shoves the responsiblity on this mess where it belonged in the first place--Congress. The Court ruling hinted that Bush might want to go to Congress for another bite at the apple, either that or try the suspects in either a normal civilian court or a military court martial. The White House is loathe to do either, because then the suspects will have some rights of due process, which right now they do not, presumably because Bush, like Santa Claus, can make a list, knowing who's naughty or nice, without any external proof.

Congress has been cowardly since the beginning of the "war". Elected officials and staffers both, are plenty smart enough to see through some of the post-WMD chaff that the media has been eating up. Yet, they haven't called the President on it. Why? Because legislators do not, as a rule, like to take sides on issues without clear charters on what will be most acceptable to their constituents, or rather what is least likely to annoy them.

If Bush brings this to Congress, and I hope that he does, let it be on their heads. Put Congress on the record, so blame can fall where it belongs, on Bush and his lesser demons, on Senators and Representatives and if someone can figure out how to hold the media accountable for being ineffective, even better.

Posted on June 30, 2006

Leave the gun, keep the cannoli

by David Holtzman

In the last month, I've played both the Godfather and the From Russia with Love video games. They are different, in my mind, than other games that I've played before, because they wrap part of the real films into the game.

The Godfather even uses Marlon Brando's and Robert Duvall's voices (among others). Famous cut scenes from the movie are interspersed as "rewards" for successful gameplay. You play as an unknown thug, running errands for movie characters like Clemenza. There are two problems with the game. First is that for some unknown legal reason, they could not use Al Pacino's voice and apparently not his face, because they obviously went to great pains to create a new character that wouldn't trigger a lawsuit. The second problem is that the game sucks. Really sucks. On a scale of 10 to -1, where getting drunk at Mardi Gras is a 9 and Disney World is a 5 and kissing your grandmother and feeling tongue is a 2, then playing the Godfather video game is a 1. Yes, it's that bad.

From Russia with Love is a better game, although it's quirky, too. First off, there's the well-known James Bond theme and the infamous shoot-em-in-the-eye opening sequence. The game plot at first seems to be off from the movie, but the next thing you know Robert Shaw is killing the fake James Bond at the SMERSH training camp, stripping off the rubber Sean Connery mask. The game is really, really good at tracking the movie and is probably one of the closest true "interactive" games. I have never cared for the gameplay in Bond games and this isn't much of an exception, but the movie part is amazing. They've replicated much of the movie, scene for scene by rendering the film into game animation. This has the added advantage of permitting them to use the actors' voices from the movie, since the action matches the original film.

The future of this kind of mixed genre should be very interesting. For one thing, this provides another way to milk a few more bucks out of a movie. Sure, lots of them are using video game tie-ins already, but sooner or later, a so-so movie is going to spawn a great game franchise, the way that the so-so Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie became a much better television series. See a trend here? Movies to games. Games to movies (Super Mario Brothers, Doom), comic books to movies (Hellboy, Spiderman), movies to comic books.

The most valuable thing in the very near thing is recognizable brands that can drive content, because content is technology agnostic. Create a new copyrighted character, get it in peoples' faces and my boy, get rich. Hello, Mickey Mouse. Hello, Superman. Hello, Kitty.

Posted on June 29, 2006

Free parking: municipal wi-fi

by David Holtzman

There's been a lot of stories about municipal governments looking at adding free or low-cost wi-fi as a public service. The NY Times has one today discussing Taipei's plans. New Orleans is also thinking about it, along with several Canadian and U.S. cities.

The opposition to the idea typically comes from telcos and their minions. They dislike the idea of free Internet access the way that I imagine vampires feel about Red Cross blood drives.

I love the idea of free access and I believe that any municipal government that does it, is going to be rewarded tenfold with increased retail foot traffic and a higher quality of life for its residents.

Some people don't get it yet. The business model on the Internet is not about paying for access, it's about content. When the infrastructure capital costs to put a city block online are $10k or so, we're talking about chimp change and we as consumers are not going to stand for being gouged on this.

The alternative, of course, is for vendors to buy a couple of hundred dollars worth of Linksys or DLink and do it themselves. There's some critical mass point at which everyone will have to offer free access in public places. I expect that it will become like parking in downtown areas. Some places use it as a revenue generator, some outsource it to 3rd parties, some offer free parking as a public service. My hats off to the enlightened towns that choose the latter.

Posted on June 28, 2006

Putting the ace in disgraceful

by David Holtzman

President Bush denounced the newspaper leaks of his covert financial surveillance program as "disgraceful." I can't really beat the Post's characterization of his comments:

"What we did was fully authorized under the law," Bush said in an angry tone as he leaned forward in his chair and wagged his finger. "And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America."

He wagged his finger. Imagine. He's scolding the entire United States of America for being...disgraceful. He is sitting in moral judgement on us (or maybe just on newspapermen). Is that we elected him for? (well, I didn't elect him)

To recap the situation, two rich white men, both of whom used power and influence to duck military service have sent our country to war based on false pretenses, which so far has resulted in the deaths of 2500 American youth, crippled many times that and killed untold tens of thousands of Iraqis. These two have damaged a century of hard fought privacy laws in the United States. They have elevated cronyism to an Olympic event. They have been caught lying...repeatedly.

So why are newspapers so disgraceful for doing their job? They're supposed to be a check and balance on the government, there's even an amendment about that.

I said this in another blog post, I think that the tracking of bank records is a reasonable thing for the U.S. to do. However, I don't buy this moral high ground from a couple of draft-dodging yahoos. If we trusted the White House, this wouldn't be an issue. I do not trust these creepy old oil millionaire; everything that they say and do should be checked by the media and questioned by the Press. I would not trust them with my tax dollars, I would not trust them with the future of my country, I would not leave them alone in a room with my penny jar.

Posted on June 27, 2006

The Illustrated Man

by David Holtzman

I was thinking about sticking a computer somewhere in my body. Wait, that sounds bad. What I mean is that it would be nice to have embedded computers, as long as they weren't running Windows XP anyway (wouldn't that bring a new meaning to the words "Blue Screen of Death."?) By using WiFi, Bluetooth or something similar, the gizmos could be easily programmed and interrogated remotely.

Implanted computers could regulate medicine, like the pumps that are in use today. All of us could have little medical devices inserted into our arms that would dole out meds precisely and at the same time constantly monitor temperature, blood pressure and possibly scan the blood for sugar and cholesterol.

I'd love a couple of k of RAM that I could access in my head as a scratchpad. It would be perfect for storing phone numbers and to-do lists, because I can never remember any of that. Of course if somebody figures out how to do the chip-brain interface thing, each of us could turn into a digital camera, couldn't we? What would that do to privacy? What about going to a concert and walking out with a perfect recording in our head that could be uploaded and shared. I can't wait to see the lawsuit over that.

There's always that basic human need of ornamentation. We could plant wire matrices, little plasma screens or maybe conductive nanobots under our skin and via a control interface, turn in to a walking advertisement or a mood ring or something.

Posted on June 26, 2006

Smuggles

by David Holtzman

The Bush administration is trolling through international bank accounts in search of turrorists. The system in question, called SWIFT, is an electronic bank exchange, a clearinghouse for confidential financial transactions. The Bush people fought to stop the revelation of the program to get the data, but have admitted it. They've said that they've only used it for very narrow, well-defined targets.

I think that we're going to find that there are several more international databases that are being fished. The funny thing is that it's probably not a bad thing to do. I just don't trust these guys doing it. We're talking about a group of people who won't disclose who attended an energy meeting at the White House 4 years ago and yet they want to know everything about us and our friends...remember these transactions aren't just from Americans; they're from Canadians and Europeans also.

As we move into the 4th of July of weekend, it would be nice to stop and think about what it means to be an American. Are we a nation of spies, poking through our neighbor's dirty laundry? Where are the limits to our protectionist fire and what does it take to extinguish our national paranoia, fueled by a nice, healthy shot of self-righteousness and stoked by a bunch of smug old white guys? You know what they are? They're smuggles.

Posted on June 23, 2006

Kids n' Klergy

by David Holtzman

The furor over Myspace is the window dressing around a very real problem, "how do you protect the kids in cyberspace?" As a father of five, I'm naturally concerned, although my kids are grown. Something must be pretty bad for kids out there on the 'Net, right? Not a week goes by without some politician trying to save the kiddies from something.

The implication, I guess, is that there's something inherently dangerous about the Internet. Look at today's whipping horse, Myspace, for instance. They've just changed their policies making it harder for adults to talk to teenagers according to the New York Times. They've done this under threat of Congressional action targeting them because they make it easier for kids to talk to creepy adults.

There are certainly cases where children "hook up" with adults on the Internet and something bad happens to them in the real world. But this happens at shopping malls, schools and most certainly at churches, so what's the difference?

Speaking of the church, here's a question: have more kids been molested by priests or by internet stalkers? For an interesting discussion of just how many children have been hurt by the clergy, see here.

I can't prove this at the moment, but just for a second, if I'm right if I guess that the answer to the preceding question is "clergy", then shouldn't we apply the same sort of internet regulatory craziness to contact with the priesthood? Clearly a kid has a higher statistical chance of being attacked by a man (or woman) of the cloth than they do by any one person out of the half billion Internet users.

Unless of course, the Internet user happened to be a priest:)

Write your congressman. Protect the kids by restricting their time in church.

Posted on June 22, 2006

Create, not educate

by David Holtzman

When I talk to college kids today, I try to discourage them from studying computers.

It's not because i don't think that computers are important now and in the future, because I do. It's because I don't think that the world needs a couple of million more computer majors. Business doesn't require hard core computer expertise in every department the way that it did ten years ago.

What matters the most now is creativity. Marketing is way more important than engineering. It's all about applied technology, figuring out what the next killer app or service is, than inventing the underlying technology. Sure, someone needs to innovate the tech, but not that many people are needed and can do that kind of research. That job is best for the uber computer geeks.

Being able to write and speak, having the creative spark necessary to come up with a new kind of commercial or ad--the liberal arts--that's what's important. That's what business needs more of. And those are going to be the people who get the best jobs in applied technology.

Posted on June 21, 2006

A Texas girl named "sue"

by David Holtzman

I see more of these kind of stories lately. A Texas lady is suing Myspace for $30 million because her 14 year old daughter was allegedly molested by a 19 year old that met her on the popular website. Her contention? Myspace should have done more to protect her daughter.

I don't understand why Myspace is responsible? Does every website have to have an age-verification system set up?

Malls and bowling alleys don't segregate participants by age, why should websites?

As a parent, I have to wonder about other parents that abrogate their child-rearing responsibilities onto others. It's like people who believe in school prayer or teaching "Creationism", many of these problems go away with a good, strong home life. I realize it's Texas, but...

If American's penchant for get-rich-quick-by-litigation schemes transfers fully onto the Internet, we're going to lose a good thing because everyone will be too afraid and banner ads will be replaced by legal caveats warning that older men are after one thing and hot coffee will burn.

Posted on June 20, 2006

Hillary's Bill

by David Holtzman

Senator Clinton has called for a "Privacy Bill of Rights" and plans to introduce privacy legislation to support the concept.

Her speech details three basic rights that she'd like to protect:

-People have the right to know, and to correct, information which is being kept about them.

- People have the right to know what is happening to their personal information when they are cooperating with a business and to make decisions about how it is used

- And in a democracy, people have the right and the obligation to hold their government and the private sector to the highest standards of care with the information they gather.

Senator Clinton's Privacy Bill of Rights will be encapsulated in the PROTECT Act, the Privacy Rights and Oversight for Electronic and Commercial Transactions Act of 2006 which supposedly will contain among other things: an increased ability for consumers to sue companies for privacy violations, the ability for consumers to freeze their credit and some protection for phone records.

Senator Clinton is reportedly running for President in the 2008 election.

You know, I could be cynical about this. Sure she's running for President. And whatever legislation she introduces probably won't be very effective. The only that will really work IMHO is some pretty major pushback on both aggressive consumer marketing companies and of course, muzzling the sleeping wolverine that is counterterrorist America. Who's going to have the guts to do that?

But, having said the above, more power to you, Senator Clinton. At least you're trying to do something. The general impotence of Congress to protect our privacy rights has been appalling. Even if her actions are politically motivated, at least her heart is in the right place.

A privacy Bill of Rights is an excellent idea, although I'm surprised that she's willing to put the words "Bill" and "Right" into the same sentence.

Posted on June 19, 2006

Off to the data mines

by David Holtzman

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon and Homeland Defense are paying commercial companies for data-mined lists. (yawn) This story has been reported for over a year and what's really amazing is that no one is doing anything about it...yet.

The basic idea here is that the government uses commercial data companies to build custom lists and sell it to them, usually through a classified contract. They do this because they can circumvent the few remaining restrictions on government collection and use of private data by using a corporate shill.

This will undoubtedly turn out to be a huge scandal in two years. Right now, Congress and most of the press continue to ignore the story, yet it's almost certainly going to explode when the details become public. Why? Because these agencies are doing things like using credit reports to determine a subject's terrorist risk profile or having companies scrub psychographic marketing data to find kids who might be susceptible to a military recruiting pitch.

Why does Congress ignore things like this? If the executive branch is clearly trying to circumvent legislative restrictions, I would think that this at least calls for an investigation.

Posted on June 16, 2006

See you later, regulator

by David Holtzman

Republican lawmakers criticized the FTC for not slapping down Take-Two software over the hidden sex scenes in the game Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. The FTC doesn't actually have the authority to do anything, but this has been and apparently will continue to be a hot topic on the Hill.

So what gives? The notorious "hot coffee" mod that unlocked the naughty parts in GTA:San Andreas was anything but easy to install. It took me a couple of hours:) Any kid who can patch a game is learning far more about computers than they're hurt by pixellated simulated sex.

Do we really need to regulate game companies?

I still have trouble believing that nobody wants to regulate data base marketing companies like Choicepoint or Acxiom, who continually bleed hundreds of thousands, even millions of consumer data records all over the Internet, costing God knows how much money and hassle for the victims. But yet, these idiots want to regulate freaking computer games, for God's sake!

I mean, like what parent who had a clue thought that GTA was acceptable for kids WITHOUT the sex mod? We're talking about a game where you make points by carjacking, robbing any and everyone, bitch-slapping hookers and running drugs. But the sex makes it unacceptable? Spare me. Like all forms of censorship, the censors have almost certainly never even seen the game, let alone played it. Dollars to doughnuts they've only seen the sex clip and huffed out of the room.

Priorities, please. We're in a war started because of one of history's biggest lies. Our economy is a mess, partly because of jungle-like, unregulated market sectors ruled by companies like Enron, who whenever they're hungry, just reach out and take a bite of anyone's haunch that happens to be walking by.

Why our legislators spend the duration of one exhaled breath for any reason other than pure politics to talk about this escapes me.

Besides I like the game.

Posted on June 15, 2006

The 'Y' in America

by David Holtzman

Why should America do as well in the coming Information Age as it did in the Industrial Age?

In the Industrial Era, the countries who rose to the top were the ones who were the most, well...industrial. Winning countries had either a deep supply of natural resources, a transportation system and the innovation to create new businesses (America) or innovation, a navy and imperialism (England and Japan). The resource requirements were big--lots of rivers, coal, iron ore. The transportation needs were met either by exhaustive inland waterways or by a well-protected blue-water navy. Innovation was more or less a byproduct of capitalism.

How about the Information Age? Don't need resources. Don't need rivers (fiber optic cable is plentiful and a lot cheaper than digging canals). Innovation is where it's going to be at.

Any country can become a superpower in the Information Age, regardless of what their terrain looks like, what they import and export or even whether or not they have an effective military. It requires knowledge and most importantly cleverness in marketing and innovation in applied technology.

A handful of tech people and some Thai food is equivalent to an Industrial Age factory.
A software pirate can do as much damage to commerce as the 19th century nautical ones.
It's virtually impossible to use the military to create a trading monopoly a la England.

Innovation is the discriminator. Any country can encourage innovation.

But I wonder, can America be the best? We have several trends that is making us a less than favorite place to innovate. An insanely one-sided intellectual property system biased against the entrepreneur. An ever more intrusive government. An institutionalized lack of privacy. A propensity towards regulating the darndest things ranging from broadcast television to video games. And now comes whatever the reverse of Net Neutrality is. It's like allowing 18th century barons to put toll bridges up on every US river.

If we want to be an Information Age superpower, we have to value the single resource that will keep us at the international power pinnacle--information. Treat information with respect, cherish those who by training or skill can nourish it and above all, stop the bastards who want to monopolize it.

Posted on June 14, 2006

Satellites I love

by David Holtzman

I am right now in Canada, 70 feet above the ocean, watching lobster boats pulling up traps and writing this. I live part of the year on Prince Edward Island, in the Maritimes. Since my place is a little remote, I can't get straight broadband and am forced to use satellite Internet connectivity.

All in all, it's not bad. It got me thinking about satellites and how they're starting to play a big role in our daily lives, at least for us early adopter types.

How do we use satellites?

The Internet connectivity piece actually works. It's about twice, three times as expensive as DSL, but when it's the only option, it's not a bad one. The thing that you really notice though, is slow uplink speeds and latency caused by same when you're browsing. Even a one second hesitation adds up quickly when you're on a website that's linking all over place to Double Click. But if you're in a remote location or on a boat, it's amazes me that it works at all.

Satellite radio is new for me. I had Sirius put into my car before I set out on a cross-country trip this month. Wow, what a difference. Being able to have radio everywhere you go is fantastic, and by radio I mean non-country. It's also nice to be able to have continuity with the same station for awhile. In the old days with AM or even worse, FM, you'd switch stations every 20 miles or so, which is a lot when you're on a 3,000 mile road trip.

GPS is a necessity for me. I use it locally and globally. Sometimes it helps answer the basic "where am I" question, but even more importantly it tells me how to get somewhere. It has its limitations, most don't do well at overpasses or in cities with tall buildings, but I still love it.

Satellite world phones. I don't have one, but if it was a little cheaper, I would. A theme that runs through a lot of satellite technology, is how much better it is to not have to be in line of sight of an antenna. I imagine that's really nice when you're on a mobile phone.

What else could potentially be on satellite? Streaming video, for one. Hollywood is already rolling this out for theatre distribution, but there's no reason that it couldn't be used by consumers, other than the obvious intellectual property ones.

So, if we're doing so much on satellites and even more in the future, how come we (America) don't have a more robust space program? It seems to me that the countries that can put commsats up, USA, EU, Russia, Japan, China, could have a stranglehold on future commerce. For instance, a country with political filters on the technology could extend that bias right into the relay circuits. I wonder if the US intelligence agencies have any surprises as payloads onboard commercial commsats? Hmm.

Posted on June 13, 2006

The cowards of the civil service

by David Holtzman

The Washington Post quotes James Nicholson, the head of the VA (Veteran's Affairs) Department as calling for tougher, Congressionally mandated sanctions for federal employees who mishandle citizens' personal information.

Good idea. But not far enough. The fundamental problem with these data breaches is that nobody gets slapped down for abusing the trust that we place by giving the government our information. The VA clown that had the well-publicized data breach a couple of weeks ago might lose his job, but he compromised the privacy and possibly financial well-being of almost everyone in the United States who's served in the military, past and present. Surely the magnitude of that incident necessitates head-chopping on a French Revolution-like scale.

I propose an escalating series of administrative punishment for government employees who loses personal information through negligence, said negligence being either sloppy handling or substandard administrative procedures. Let's also go up and down the chain when this happens. Take out the breacher's boss and his boss's boss. It's disgusting to see senior government managers perform a ritual bloodlettling against a GS-7, when the whole crew of them are responsible for creating an atmosphere of tolerance of inadequate security.

In the US Navy, if a ship crashes, the CO is punished, whether he was on the bridge or not. The military theory is that leaders are responsible, whether they're physically present or not, even whether they knew that the problem existed or not. We are paying these bureaucratic executives to be leaders. I realize that President Bush has been setting a bad example for taking responsiblity, but hey, leaders lead. Punish the guilty and his boss.

Posted on June 12, 2006

Digital Life

by David Holtzman

Far too much of my life is stored on my computers. It used to be work stuff like appointments, contacts, documents and presentations. Now it includes photographs and emails, video and music. Even more importantly, computers in general have become my extended memory. I can remember where I was on a given day by checking my Palm, in fact, it's gotten to the point where I can't figure out what I was doing if it's not on the computer.

I don't even bother to print photos anymore, I just make sure that I have a decent monitor nearby. I have to perfectly good Sony CD changers in my stereo cabinet that haven't been touched in months because I have my iPod rigged up to my sound system.

Sure I'm susceptible to computer glitches now on a personal level and backup being as hard to use as it is, I get burned once a while. I am more susceptible to privacy violations now. If someone gets their hands on my computer, I lose a lot more than a couple of video games.

Where's this all going? The big problem I think, is the undue dependency that we have when we move over to a completely digital life. I couldn't move back now if I tried. If I know that I can find something, I don't memorize it. Once I got a GPS, I stopped trying to remember directions, for example.

Good search makes it even worse. If I know how to find something on the web, I don't even save a link anymore, let alone the actual document...I just remember the search that I've used.

One big advantage is that I don't have to remember as much. A search term is a lot less information than the whole document. Knowing how to type in a Mapquest query is more efficient than storing a lot of directions.

I do worry though what happens if all of this digital memory gets zapped somehow. I wonder what the younger generation will experience, since they're growing up digital. I imagine that eventually they'll be able to interface directly with solid-state storage somehow.

Posted on June 09, 2006

Staying abreast of television

by David Holtzman

The House passed a bill today called BDEA (Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act) which increases the maximum fine that the FCC can levy against a broadcast network tenfold to $325,000. The Senate passed it last month and President Bush will no doubt promptly sign it.

The issue has been raised because of a couple of high-profile issues, most notably Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction at last year's Super Bowl.

I can empathize with the issue--kids watching TV shouldn't be exposed to others being exposed, especially during family programming. I worry though about the segmentation that this will cause between Broadcast, and Cable/Satellite programming. If you extrapolate this, it would seem to lead to a strange bipartite world with candy-coated tv on the major networks and anything goes elsewhere. I can't argue that there's a social evil here, but it does seem odd and vaguely unstable.

For what it's worth, even adults don't always like adult programming. IMHO, Howard Stern was much funnier when he had to talk around subjects. Hearing him on Sirius was a let-down. The endless barrage of explicit dirty words was depressing. Is it possible, just a wild thought here, but could it be that the oft-forgotten Free Market might kick in and self-regulate without governmental interference?

Posted on June 08, 2006

Blogger: Unabomber?

by David Holtzman

The whole world is a blog and all the people merely bloggers.

What/why is a blog?

I read a lot of blogs now. I used to think that they were silly, now it's how I filter the news. The first couple that I ran into seemed like the Unabomber's Manifesto; a rambling, semi-disjoint discourse on whatever.

If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

But the system hasn't broken down....Blogs are a good example of how the system is growing in a healthy way, by adding original human content to cold, hard data.

I wonder where blogs are going, say 5 years from now? It seems unlikely that they will look the same way.

I suspect that we'll see video podcasting turning into the new blog with thousands of roaming reporters, interpreting and even making the news the way that they see fit. Conventional American network news is now so bad, so poorly made and pandering to the worst possible element of public taste, that their depowering would be a welcome relief.

Posted on June 07, 2006

Less data, less risk

by David Holtzman

A message to CIOs:

Given the recent controversy over the government's well-publicized request of ISPs (Internet Service Providers), I have a thought for any far-sighted, consumer-oriented company: Purge your data.

Here's the problem. The more data you hold, the more of a target that you become. Hackers want to break in, the government and civil lawyers wants to subpoena it and the chance that you will eventually screw up and get a privacy lawsuit are directly proportional to the amount of information in your corporate cyber coffers.

It costs a little money, but I advocate putting into place a data purging policy now, before it's too late. Stick to it and you've got some push back against all of the above hassles. Ignore the marketing greed and its snarky practitioners trying to squeeze yet another drop out of a database.

Set guidelines for transactional history purging, former customer record deletion and in general, force the sys admins to clean house once a quarter.

The best corporate offense is a good cyber defense.

Posted on June 06, 2006

Hip, hip, HIPAA

by David Holtzman

I do not believe that the government can effectively protect privacy. I've often said so publicly and have gotten into lengthy debates with people who have faith in the system. They often point to legislation as a way out, such as the landmark medical privacy bill passed several years ago called HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). HIPAA was ostensibly a way for the government to levy fines against medical providers who breached patient confidentiality.

An article today by the Washington Post shows the truth. Out of the 19,420 grievances filed so far with the government, only two cases have been prosecuted. One was a bunko scheme where a cancer patient's credit card information was ripped off, the second involved an FBI agent medical record being stolen. So far, there has not been a single fine imposed as a result of HIPAA--not one.

This is the problem with trusting Big Daddy to stop Big Brother--it won't happen. Unless mandatory fines are required as part of future privacy legislation, there just won't be any action. Sure, some of it is because of the Bushies...but I doubt that a Democrat administration would be much better. Too much lobbying money from the health care industry.

Posted on June 05, 2006

Terrorists molest children

by David Holtzman

Apparently. The Bush adminstration is at it again, blurring the line between child molestation and terrorism in a new effort to spy on the real victims here--Americans. This time, they are asking Internet companies to retain data indefinitely. Why? So they can subpoena it. To stop Turrorists. And child molesterors. The usual villains that are trotted out whenever Bush and Gonzalez wish to do something that appears to be unconstitutional.

At a meeting that the Justice Department held yesterday with privacy experts, the government also alluded to the possiblity that they might want to get the data for "intellectual property" issues.

This is the real problem. These people cannot be trusted with our personal information because once they have it, they'll use it for any damn thing that they want.

Again they are reassuring Americans that they don't want the "content" of internet traffic, just the externals; who emails whom, for instance. Guilt by association.

I think that it violates our privacy, plus from the Internet company perspective, it's expensive.

I hope that the ISP (Internet Service Providers) fight this, forcing the Bushies into court. I hope that the privacy organizations sue the government to stop the practice. I hope Americans everywhere push back against this further erosion of the right to privacy.

Posted on June 02, 2006

Coasting through America

by David Holtzman

So I'm driving across America right now from Oregon to Virginia and getting a little thoughtful about tech. Like most technologists, I live for the big coastal cities...New York, DC, San Francisco. I tend to ignore the central part of the country and certainly rural America in my "where-are-computers-heading" kind of thinking.

So, here's some off-the-cuff observations based on virtually no data points:
Americans everywhere have and use the Internet
IF they don't have Broadband, they can easily get it
They use DVDs and HD TVs

The Internet is part of their daily life. I hear people everywhere talking about using Mapquest or EBay or Amazon. The Internet is not about Silicon Valley or Wall Street or even Congress. It's like Wal-Mart.

The funny part is that the coastal urbanites make all the big decisions. We pick what cars like and what's on TV and how much computers cost.

I wonder how long that will go on, given the subversive nature of universal Internet communications?

Posted on June 01, 2006