Monday morning
It's a summer morning in Cambridge, Mass. Yesterday afternoon the weather lifted after days of sweltering misery, making the shade real and softening the glare. Cantabridgians don't believe in air conditioning, so the change was significant. Time to head back to work.
Divine Inspiration from the Masses and everything written about Wikipedia suggests that we might as well believe in ourselves. But here is a short bit to begin the day of commuters, swaming through train stations on the way to do something more immediately remunerative (sorry to say) than edit a Wikipedia entry:
I would live all my life in nonchalance
and insouciance
Were it not for making a living, which
is rather a nouciance.
(Ogden Nash)
CALEA: Driving innovation offshore
Someone sent me a clandestine copy of the CALEA draft. I don't see how it could be worse.
The whole idea behind CALEA is to shift the cost of surveillance from law enforcement to industry. (The statute isn't about the legality of requests for information — the question is how much help industry should give law enforcement by making services easily tappable.) The 1994 statute recognized these cost issues by setting up a fund of $500 million to repay the telcos who were required to comply. It was also clearly limited to the large telecommunications carriers (traditional telephone companies) and to information identifying telephone calls, which was relatively limited and standardized from the outset. The internet was not covered.
In this new draft bill, the costs of making surveillance easy have been firmly shifted to the tech industry in the U.S. And innovators will have to satisfy law enforcement that their new applications and services are easily tappable and produce the data that government wants. “Communication-identifying information” is very broadly defined, and includes (but isn't limited to!) “source and destination Internet protocol and other protocol addresses, the port number, packet file size, and user authentication and logon information, including session time and duration.”
Here's what you need to know about the rewrite of CALEA now being proposed by law enforcement: It's limitless.
(1)It covers every possible communications service and application (voice and data), using every possible medium.
(2) To the extent any service is somehow not covered (because, say, it doesn't provide any routing or addressing attributes), the bill reserves unlimited discretion in the FCC to decide that it would be in the public interest to cover it.
(3) It says that communications-identifying information should be available in formats that law enforcement wants.
For example, the draft bill defines “communications carrier” to include any entity providing “replacement telephone service,” and then defines “replacement telephone service” to include any service using ”transmission, routing, addressing, or switching services” that make it possible for a customer using any technology to “send and receive any communications involving the human voice.”
This would cover any gaming application that sets up its own namespace/voice system; any online conferencing service, any instant messenger client that is voice-enabled. Webmail services are covered to the extent their provider makes available “transmission, routing, addressing or switching equipment, facilities, or services.”
All network access providers are covered, of course (as long as their services are offered to the public).
All of the covered entities/people will have to get all communication-identifying information to the government on request in a “standard, commercially available, and reliable format.” The network access providers will have to isolate the stream of communications being created by the subscriber and store that stream for law enforcement (no limits on time).
There is much more here — the FCC is to take into account noncompliance with CALEA in considering anything having to do with the covered entity (whether CALEA-related or not); the FCC doesn't necessarily have to give covered entities any reasonable amount of time to comply; and covered entities will bear all the costs of any modifications needed for equipment/services created after 1995.
The requirement that all applications that include any routing component provide an easily-accessed back door to government and spit out standardized data is breathtaking. And I'm sure there's more here that I haven't understood.
This is the bill that sends innovation offshore.
What do you want the web to be?
One of the questions that OneWebDay tries to get people to think about is: What do you want the web to be? (And what helpful web-related action are you going to take on Sept. 22?)
Here's a forward-looking attempt: the Metaverse Roadmap.
As far as I can tell, the Metaverse Roadmap is an attempt to predict how the future web will affect society. When video games, virtual worlds, and web applications all merge, what will we have? Obviously, we'll have the metaverse, but what does that mean?
From the web site:
Like other potentially disruptive new technologies, metaverse/3D web related technologies can each be expected to follow a hype cycle. Gartner's classic five phase technology hype cycle model, from 1. Technology Trigger, to 2. Peak of Inflated Expectations, to 3. Trough of Disillusionment, to 4. Slope of Enlightenment, to 5. Plateau of Productivity. Virtual reality technology, artificial intelligence, first gen web virtual reality (VRML), and others have all been through peaks and troughs. A dot.com peak, with companies basing their business models on inflated expectations for metaverse technology, followed by a trough, will almost certainly be a key dynamic of the next ten years.
Sounds great. I hope I live long enough to see what happens after the hype cycle has run its course — it's been great to see the rebound after the bust a few years ago. Things are becoming so interesting right now.
Network neutrality and parliamentarian acumen
I understand that the current thinking is that Sen. Stevens won't be able to collect the 60 votes he needs to stop debate on his bill. This is, in my view, good news.
But there are lots of other ways to get a job done.
For instance — what if just the video franchise provisions (hard to fight those) and the universal service fund provisions (attractive to constituents even though the system is entirely broken) were peeled off and stuck in a large appropriations bill? that no one heard about until the day it was offered?
What if those provisions were attached to the E911 bill, which is largely helpful in giving competitive interconnected VoIP providers assistance the FCC denied them?
What if there was a lame duck session — six weeks or so to do more mischief?
So all NN lobbyists will have to bone up on procedure. We're heading into a period of legislative legerdemain.
Speaking of which: I have heard about a really awful revision-to-CALEA draft that is being circulated. Really awful.
All the stories connect
From “Know It All,” by Stacy Schiff:
This [Wikipedia] is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an elite, or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We're on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We're free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. . . .
From “The Lobsterman,” by Alec Wilkinson (related Q&A here) (about a skilled fisherman who was recently awarded a MacArthur genius grant for finding ancient fish spawning grounds — “Where were the cod, once, and how do we get them back?”):
A predatory hierarchy that has a number of species at all levels is called a food web. The food web in the North Atlantic is so meagre that it more nearly resembles a food chain.
So Wikipedia is a visual, arresting example of the evolving web at work. You get the sense that Schiff really enjoyed finding all about its curious inhabitants. And Wilkinson really enjoys hearing about forensic ecology involving interviewing ancient mariners. Both of them are writing about webs.
Is there a predator, potential or actual, in the story of Wikipedia? Any chance we'll ever create a “food chain” online, just by accident?
Dabble Land v. Telco Land
Welcome to the world, Dabble! You didn't have to ask permission — you just launched today, and you're a zippy new place that lets users create guides to online video. (You've got a blog, too! Good work!) There's no telling what you'll be able to do in time — you're the first of your kind.
People are uploading video by the scores, and they'll need to be able to find what they like. You're filling that need.
It's a need we didn't even know we had a year ago.
Dabble Land is an interesting place. People have ideas, they have energy, and they just put their heads down and work. (Go, Mary!) Then they launch something new and watch it grow.
It's useful to contrast Dabble Land with Telco Land. According to a fine article in BusinessWeek:
Welcome to Telco Land, a strange country where the biggest players talk more and more about innovation yet approach new ideas with baby steps, build little themselves, and when they think about technology are apt to believe it's a threat they have to fight.
The telcos keep claiming that innovation comes from them — but today it's coming from Dabble Land. And in fact Dabble may be deeply troubling to the telcos because its success depends on the popularity of user-generated video. And user-generated video (which is not Telco-Land-generated video) is taking off in that old hockey-stick way we got so excited about six years ago.
Welcome, Dabble! Let's hope that Telco Land keeps moving slowly. They'll never catch up.
Mandated interoperability for TPMs?
The reason there's a net neutrality debate in the U.S. right now is that there is inadequate competition in the market for broadband access services.
When that competition heats up (either intermodal, which means that the competitor doesn't have to use existing DSL or cable networks, or intramodal, which means that the competitor DOES have to use existing networks), there will be much less reason to worry about the amount of gatekeeper control the network providers will be exercising. Users will have choices.
The market for DRM, or “technical protection measures,” by contrast, is competitive. We have a full complement of techniques of all kinds, from all kinds of manufacturers, at many layers of the protocol stack. These TPMs are competing and evolving in unpredictable ways.
So I was surprised to learn that there's a major movement afoot in France (and soon in other European countries) to mandate that all TPMs be interoperable. In particular, the French Constitutional Court will rule someday soon as to whether a statutory provision to this effect should be upheld.
The statute requires that ”suppliers of technological measures shall provide access to the information essential to interoperability.” It doesn't seem to be limited to TPMs that have been found to be dominant in their markets — in fact, the definition of TPM is very broad indeed: anything that frustrates an unauthorized use of content.
“Information essential to interoperability,” in turn, is defined as “the technical documentation and the programming interfaces necessary to allow a technological device to access.” In other words, any and all information someone claims to want with respect to interoperability will have to be made available.
Take a deep breath here. Before you react with distaste for all DRM, remember that government-created technical mandates are generally not a great idea. This one involves the creation of — get this — a “Regulatory Authority of technical measures.” That authority will take a look at interoperability claims and make a decision. It will have the power to issue injunctions and financial penalties.
It's hard to understand why anyone would think this is a good idea. Also — bad ideas hatched in Europe often come to our shores later. So we should watch this one closely.
Customer service for addicts
For the last four hours or so, Yahoo! Messenger has been down. I've been a loyal user for the last six years, and I wish Yahoo! was saying something about this. What's wrong? When will the outage be over?
Because Yahoo! isn't saying anything, frustrated users have taken to Yahoo! Answers. There's a great story here. Yahoo! gives people points for answering posted questions. It's not clear to me what the points are for, but that doesn't matter. People are out there diligently answering questions from other people and racking up points.
And, boy, are there a lot of questions to answer. I went back and looked, and it seems that there are four or five questions a minute pouring in from Yahoo! Messenger addicts all over the world. They all want to know what's wrong, and there's no saying what's wrong. So the point-gatherers keep saying they don't know. It's pretty good-humored most of the time, but there have been some ugly moments.
Someone wants to talk to his buddy in Iraq. Someone's losing money by the minute. Someone feels completely cut off. Someone's mail is blocked. Someone's really mad that Yahoo! isn't saying anything (actually, lots of someones are mad about this). Someone thinks that maybe Yahoo! loaded too many features into Messenger. Or screwed up with the merge with MSN. Or it's too hot. Or maybe Yahoo! just wants everyone to switch IM clients.
There have been moments of comic relief. “I just want everyone to know that my husband did it,” one woman said. “It's Bush and Cheney,” someone else said. “Who else is taking advantage of all these points?” someone wanted to know. Lots of responses to that one. “What's an avatar and who made up that word?” runs another question. Since everything has to be formed as a question, one person asks: “Would it kill people to read the board and see that their question has been asked 500 times?”
In fact, the board has become a kind of buddy list for addicts, all of them sailing through the hours pounding at the keys and wishing that Messenger would come back up. ”Hey, we're chatting!” one guy says. ”Who needs Messenger?”
Yahoo!? Are you out there? You may want to get these people back into the fold. They're feeling pretty disloyal at the moment.
Mind map
So the train broke down in Philadelphia today, but that allowed seating arrangements to be reshuffled by the delay — and I ended up across the cafe car table from a guy who knows a lot about cognitive science.
Who's going to do best in difficult situations, like, say, a war? Well, someone whose neurological attributes allow him to become very anxious (and very alert) very quickly but then to return to baseline swiftly — and whose baseline is higher in the first place. Phlegmatic people may not do well, and always-anxious people won't either. Someone who has been through trauma before and has thrived. Someone who is able to reframe things and move on. Someone with a good support network.
How do we learn best? By challenging ourselves — not through repetition, but through trying to remember something under different circumstances and forcing ourselves to rebuild the thought-scaffolding. Not by getting into a rut, either physically or mentally. Visual learning helps too (he had never seen MindManager before and thought it was very cognitively appropriate).
Ah, but then we got to net neutrality. I asked him what he thought. He said, “Well, I don't like regulation.” We then went through a little visual mind map of net neutrality, and he had to agree (or perhaps he was just being polite) that for this moment in time, because we don't have adequate broadband competition we need to avoid privileging gatekeepers for internet access. (”I can't stand cable prices,” he said, encouragingly). This moment in time will end when there's more competition — hey, there's a spectrum auction coming up on August 9! Wouldn't it be great if some large online companies joined in?
Anyway, it was a fine mind-map-meld as the train edged its way towards New York.
(Most confusing announcement: “We are encountering trespassers and must move slowly through this area.”)
"A whole virtual network out there"
It's morning in Redmond, Washington. I was just watching CNN, and the anchor from New York was doing a story about the crisis in the Middle East. He was leading into a segment about videos that people are making and posting online — the sound of the air-raid sirens, a trip to a shelter, an explosion and its aftermath.
With a voice of slight amazement and disbelief, stumbling a little, he said to the correspondent, “It's like a … whole, virtual network out there.”
The correspondent humored him and did a little spot about YouTube videos from the Middle East. He said, soothingly, “These aren't getting thousands of hits, but they're getting hundreds. People are definitely interested.” He also noted that people were using cameras in their cellphones to capture video. “There are thousands of these things [devices] out there!” he said.
Yet another understanding of “network,” then — when a telco says it, they mean managed pipes; when an engineer says it, he means logical architecture; and when a TV news anchor says it, he means CNN. Those little videos are subversive.