Benlog

I’ve long been an Apple fan. So it’s sad to see them sue a blog. Sure, Apple should protect its trade secrets. But you didn’t see them suing Newsweek when they leaked the iMac G4 a day before the launch. And that was the iMac, for goodness sake, not some Midi hardware box. Not to mention that Newsweek probably had an exclusive contract with restrictions, too. The person Apple should be suing is their inside leaker. That person violated the terms of his contract for sure. The blog only did its job of reporting the news it obtained. Let’s not confuse reporting and spying.

What’s truly sad is to see a company like Apple claiming that blogs don’t deserve the protections that journalists enjoy. I would have expected them to get it, to not help shield the mainstream media from much needed reform.

Note to Apple: a number of your fans are pretty unhappy about this. This is tantamount to suing your customers. It’s nice to finally see Apple succeeding in the marketplace again. I just hope this isn’t a sign of how Apple is going to behave now that it’s become more successful.

Boston’s Silver Line is possibly the best bus in town. From the South End to downtown in 15 minutes, with double-length buses every 2-3 minutes during rush hour. Except that, starting a few weeks ago, they installed these new, fancy bus pass readers. Instead of a half-second swipe, it’s now a 2-second let-the-machine-suck-your-card-in-read-it-and-spit-it-back-to-you maneuver. Not to mention that they don’t take single-dollar bills anymore for those without passes: they force travelers to buy $20 bus debit cards. On the bus. At the same machine. So now, loading time on a silver line bus is at least multiplied by 4, not to mention what happens when someone is trying to feed a $20 bill into the machine to get their new bus debit card.

But it gets worse. Boston bus riders know that, every now and then, the bus announcement panel displays “Out of Service” instead of the route number. In those cases, bus drivers have taken to sticking a piece of paper up on the windshield to indicate the route number. But now, with this new fancy Silver Line bus card system, when the on-board computer crashes and displays “Out of Service,” the card system also goes out of service. And the bus driver is forced to wave people in, collecting no cash. I suppose that’s better than having the driver wait until the system reboots.

Have people noticed how scenarios like these are more and more frequent?

2 weeks ago, I was helping out with the A/V during the Theory of Cryptography Conference held at MIT’s new Stata Center. The ampitheater has a state-of-the-art integrated A/V system with touch-screen central control. Plug in a laptop, touch the right buttons, and the lights dim, the screen comes down from the ceiling, and the projector turns on. Except that, 2 hours into the conference, the whole system spontaneously shut down. The screen retracted. The projector shut down, and the lights turned on. We restarted the system, hoping this was a one-time problem. It was not. 30 minutes later, the system spontaneously shut down again. Low and behold, there is no manual override. Our solution involved bringing in a backup projector, keeping the lights mostly on, and keeping the screen in place by literally pulling the fuse to prevent it from retracting.

Meanwhile, a friend recently told me a story of how car mechanics are having to deal with more and more complex and bizarre accidents. A modern car has easily 10 or more CPUs for various functions. When one of them becomes faulty, the result is unpredictable, and sometimes dramatic. Brakes may be activated because traction control is getting the wrong signal from the ABS subsystem. A driver might be cruising down the highway and suddenly find himself fishtailing for no apparent reason.

What’s happening here is that we’ve forgotten that most of these systems are mission-critical. Getting onto that bus needs to happen quickly and efficiently. A conference projector needs to work immediately, all the time. And a car, well, we generally know that if something goes wrong with a car, we’re in trouble.

But there’s something more here. There’s something unintuitive. The thing is, when a mechanical system breaks down, it’s generally something that makes sense and results in somewhat graceful degradation. A car’s brakes might become weaker as the pads wear down, and that makes sense. A projector might become dimmer as the lightbulb fades. A screen might get stuck halfway unrolled. But when a computer system breaks down, even a small fault has dramatic effects.

It’s for that reason that computerized systems in mission critical applications need physical failovers wherever possible.

My sister just got me an iPod Shuffle for my birthday, which is really nice. I’m surprised by how light and convenient it is. For all of those people who are worried about using an ipod for working out, this is your solution.

But it got me thinking. If this iPod does on-the-fly decryption of DRM’ed songs like other iPods, then it’s got enough computing power to perform AES encryption. It’s got its own input mechanism (those buttons). Of course, it has no display, but maybe that’s not immediately necessary.

How about storing your private key on your iPod Shuffle, where the key is unlocked by a secret sequence of button presses? This may be the tiniest and cheapest secure storage device out there. 512 megs of secure storage with trusted inputs. I wonder how difficult it would be to write new firmware for this functionality….

… there can be no freedom. I think it’s important to repeat those words to yourself every now and then: without due process, there can be no freedom. You might think that terrorism requires exceptions to the rule of law. We need to be able to torture, you might think, in the case of a ticking time bomb. We need to be able to keep people in jail without evidence, you might think, in case the authorities really know that those people are terrorists.

But then you find out what really happens when we give up due process. When we cut corners. Give law enforcement too much authority and enforce too little accountability. Innocent people get jailed without reason. Innocent people get tortured. How are we free, if an innocent person runs the risk of torture?

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the innocent person, that poor, innocent, victim of the war on terror we lament for a day before sighing “well, mistakes happen”… could be you. It’s not a mistake. It’s a systemic problem due to an administration that wants more power and less accountability. It makes me so mad.

The director of France’s National Library is worried that Anglo-Saxon culture will crush France. He squarely blames Google, in an editorial entitled “When Google Challenges Europe.” More specifically, he bemoans Google’s recent deal struck with English-language libraries, whereby Google will index and make freely available online millions of published works.

Mr. Jeanneney is right. European culture is indeed threatened when online resources overemphasize Anglo-Saxon works. But you don’t see Japan or South Korea complaining. Should Google stop its work? Should Google be regulated? According to certain French thinking, yes. Google’s already been ordered by French Courts to stop showing advertisements for Cartier when users search for Louis Vuitton. “Unfair Competition,” said the courts.

Unfair Competition? Now that’s ironic. In the fight of the Old vs. the New, the French have always been ultra-conservative. Old business models are protected, and new ideas are viewed with extreme skepticism. Mr. Jeanneney laments that Google’s work will kill off the quiet library reading rooms. Yes, and email will put an end to letter writing. And the telephone will kill personal human relationships.

I love France and, of course, my entire family is from France. But one of the reasons I live and work in the US is that I refuse to accept this kind of complaining and rebuttals to fantastic human endeavors. What is this idea that everything should be tightly controlled in a top-down fashion? Google should be mostly free to innovate. France’s National Library is a great resource, and I’m certain a bit of negotiation and government assistance would convince Google to include it as a future target for indexing.

But innovation is messy, and it certainly isn’t fair. If we want to improve the human condition – and I sincerely believe Google is doing just that – then we must accept that old business models will be threatened. Old traditions will be questioned. And people will have to compete for what they believe in. Enough with innovation by permission, already.

So it seems the Napster “music for rent” DRM scheme has been broken. This is not surprising. Apple’s iTunes was broken with PlayFair a few months after launch. In general, DRM is breakable on any hardware that doesn’t have a trusted computing element to it. And that’s a good thing, but it’s not what I want to discuss right now.

Instead, let’s look at why this is a bigger deal than Apple’s break. Let’s examine why, even though Apple’s iTunes DRM is not exactly bulletproof, users aren’t rampantly breaking it, while Napster may not be so lucky. It’s about user expectation.

What Apple did right is build a system that users understand. You buy a song, you “own” the song. After you’ve paid your 99 cents, you can play it just about anywhere you’d like. You can burn the song a large number of times, large enough that most people will never hit the upper limit. You can download it to as many ipods as you’d like. And you can share the song between up to 5 computers. What that means is that most users are never stifled by the DRM.

On the other hand, Napster’s rental model claims that you can listen to all the songs you want for $15/month. Until you stop paying, that is. And that’s just not what users expect. The idea of a music subscription fee is simply not mainstream. Some people like it, but they are in the minority. So when Bob realizes that he must continue to pay up forever or lose his entire music collection, he’ll find a way around it. He’ll download the software that hooks into his sound card and rips the DRM right out. And he won’t feel all that bad about it, either, because darnit it’s his music and he paid for it.

Maybe one day we’ll all be paying subscription fees for everything we do. But so far, the buy-and-own music model is the dominant mindset. People fondly remember the first CD they ever bought. Doubtful that they’ll ever remember the first CD they ever rented.

This Saturday, the 12th, I’ll be giving a talk on cryptographic voting and the latest voting standards effort I helped start: Voting System Performance Rating. The real reason you should come, though, is to hear the other speakers, including Ron Rivest.

The talk is at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and is sponsored by IEEE, ACM, and the ACLU. Find out more about the speakers, or even register for the conference, it’s free.

As usual, I’ll have my slides posted to my web page a few days after the talk, under a Creative Commons license, of course.

UPDATE: the slides are up in Quicktime and PDF at the usual place.

The state of Texas has just discovered that abstinence education doesn’t work. This isn’t surprising to those who have some basic understanding of human biology and psychology (i.e. those who remember their high school sex ed class). But at least now, it’s scientifically established.

So the question that presents itself is fairly straight-forward. If abstinence isn’t changing adolescents’ sexual behavior, shouldn’t we be doing our very best to make sure that the sex they are inevitably having is as safe as it can possibly be? Shouldn’t condoms be easily available to all? Maybe even for free in high schools?

The only reason that might lead someone to answer “no” to these questions is ideology. It’s one of the big issues on the table here. Are we really trying to help people by teaching them the information they need to make their own, truly informed decisions concerning safety? Or are we limiting what we teach in an ideologically-driven attempt to force people to behave in a way which we feel would be more appropriate?

More and more these days, people are confusing ideology and good policy. The role of science is dismissed in favor of ideology, on some disturbed premise that everything is opinion, and all opinions are equally valid.

Not everything is opinion. There are such things as facts. A number of adolescents will have sex. Condoms help prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases with 99% reliability. These are facts. Any policy that ignores fact is just bone-headed ideology. We should demand policies based on fact, science, and a real desire to help people live their lives, not the life we choose for them.

As nearly everyone has pointed out, Bill Gates is telling the world that Intellectual Property moderates are, in fact, communists.

This type of craziness isn’t new, not even for Microsoft. Way back in 2000, I wrote about how free software is, in fact, pro-capitalism. Then, after an MS executive first employed the “Communist” name-calling in 2001, I wrote an April Fool’s press release for my company at the time, OpenForce. It’s fun to look back at these and realize that BillG hasn’t moved past the arguments many made fun of more than 3 years ago.

It’s only a matter of time before BillG joins the MPAA in using the term “IP terrorist.”

With the new year comes the beginning of airline fare sanity? I certainly hope so.

The major airlines have long had fantastically complicated pricing schemes. Supposedly, these schemes are necessary to keep air travel affordable and airline companies alive. I don’t believe it, in large part because many of the consequences of these pricing schemes are simply illogical. One-way travel is more expensive than round-trip travel. Oftentimes, flying two legs of a flight is less expensive than flying the latter leg alone (e.g. Paris to Boston is cheaper than Paris to New York, even though the Paris-to-Boston trip includes that very same flight to New York). And, my latest grievance: out-of-control change fees. I recently had to change a flight from a Thursday to a Saturday. Thanks to a fine-print rule, the change would have cost me $1500. Instead, I’m ditching my Thursday flight, buying a reverse round-trip departing on Saturday and returning at some random date, and ditching that random-date return flight, too, for a grand total of $450.

By what logic does this make sense for the airline?

So I have an idea for fixing this and making the airline ticket landscape far more sensical for consumers (and airlines, too). The only catch is that it involves flexing a bit of regulatory muscle. The problem, it seems, is that airlines are both the producers and distributors of airline seats. The market for middleman airline ticket distributors is incredibly contrived, with companies like Priceline playing only very specific roles approved by the airlines. The other middlemen, Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, and your neighborhood travel agent have only limited powers. The most important role of a middleman – buying in bulk and selling in bite-size packaging – is forbidden by the airlines. The supply chain for airline seats is monolithic, because of one simple airline requirement: all tickets are issued with a passenger name and are non-transferable.

What would happen if tickets were transferable? The market would likely be far more fluid. Changing a ticket would be expensive only when the ticket you want is inherently more valuable than the ticket you have. Heck, sometimes, changing a ticket could mean a refund!

So before our government bails out bankrupt airlines with yet another billion dollar package, it would be nice to see enforcement of this type of change.

UPDATE: I’m reading Terry Fisher‘s new Book “Promises to Keep”, which does a fantastic job of explaining this arbitrage issue in a larger context. I’ll write more about Terry’s book soon.