User error
Somehow, while I was away for several months, the extra laptop I leave in my apartment became infested with spyware. I’m sure it was user error. I’m not sure who the user was.
It doesn’t matter. I’m worried, for some reason, about the poor little laptop. I don’t even use it, except on nights when I’m too beat to carry home my usual laptop from the office. But it’s like some innocent lamb that I left alone and now is a mess. I’ve run three different kinds of scans time after time, I’ve downloaded every possible update, and I’m not comforting the machine at all. Even with no online connection, new stuff shows up in each scan. I’m distracted by this - I’m spending hours trying to win this battle. And it’s completely fruitless.
Moral: Don’t leave your laptops alone for months at a time. Something horrendous could happen to them. Or get a Mac.
Follow the money
I’m on a panel next week that is nominally about virtual worlds but seems infinitely expandable, so I’m planning to talk about FCC regulation. It’s a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! kind of approach.
You’ll recall that a petition was filed earlier this fall asking that the FCC require email forwarding. There was even a frisson of Congressional interest. I went back and looked at the filed comments. You may have all thought this was a pretty silly petition, but Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, NCTA, USISPA, ITIC, and a bunch of individuals thought the issue was close enough (and the Commission is unpredictable enough) that they needed to weigh in. Meanwhile, the petitioner remains outraged (petitioner’s follow-up letter here) — particularly irritated that Time Warner is now paying a gaggle of lawyers to make elaborate legal arguments about the appropriateness of government intervention when it could have simply solved her problem through better customer service.
Time Warner’s elegant opposition:
[C]ompetitive choices already afford consumers the “e-mail address portability” that the Petition would have the Commission establish through a rulemaking. Thus, proceeding down this path would result in no discernable benefit for consumers and in fact would harm their interests by placing substantial operational and compliance burdens on service providers that could only increase costs to end users and curtail the degree of choice available in the marketplace today. The result would be a net loss for consumers as well as for the Commission, which would have wasted valuable resources in pursuit of an outcome that market forces already have produced.
The Petition is more than an invitation to make bad policy—it would represent an unprecedented (and likely unlawful) jurisdictional stretch. The Commission has never sought to regulate the provision of e-mail addresses and, as explained below, it lacks any jurisdictional basis on which to do so.
Verizon continues the jurisdictional argument:
Although Title I grants the ommission general jurisdiction over interstate or foreign communications by wire, this jurisdiction can only be asserted if it is “reasonably ancillary to the effective performance of [the Commission’s] various responsibilities.” This requirement is not satisfied here because email address portability is not mandated by any statutory provision. Further, the proposed regulation is inconsistent with the deregulatory regime that Congress has mandated for the Internet and Commission has adopted for information services.
You get the gist. Lots of opposition to this petition, and, as ITIC wryly points out, even parties who don’t usually agree with one another agree that the “Commission’s jurisdiction to require email forwarding is, at best, questionable.” But it’s questionable enough, there’s enough there to worry about, that they all hauled out their guns and filed.
Okay, so maybe the Commission won’t go into the business of regulating email. There are other ways for regulatory pressure to be brought to bear on online applications - try access charges.
I’m new to this subject, so forgive me if I get this wrong. As I understand it, local phone companies charge a lot to long distance companies to connect (”terminate”) the calls that come in from them. To protect ISPs from these exorbitant access charges, the FCC some time ago declared that “Enhanced Service Providers” (including ISPs) are treated as local phone customers and are exempt from interstate access charges paid by carriers. Thus, rather than paying higher access charges, ISPs simply purchase phone lines from the local phone company as any local business would do.
Now, what if the Enhanced Service Provider is in the business of making it possible for virtual world denizens to call traditional phone numbers? (You can see that this quickly becomes a bigger issue about the interface between internet “calls” of all kinds and the phone system.) What if you want to set things up so that your guild can ping your mobile phone, or your virtual workgroup can get in touch with you over your handset? Alerts? Video hookups, one end of which is using a traditional phone number? A Skype call to your cellphone?
W ell, AT&T in Texas is taking the position that in order to qualify for the access charge exemption, the call coming in has to be associated with a traditional local phone number. So unless your guild has a number, it will be subject to these charges. That could be a lot of money, as I understand it. (I’m gleaning this from a petition that was recently filed with the FCC.)
This is a longstanding and hairy issue, involving the construction of interconnection agreements and apparently unlimited acronyms (AUA).
It seems pretty straightforward at bottom, though — not only can traditional phone companies seek to control internet escapades of their customers (through the rejection of network neutrality), but they can also make it really expensive for group/virtual internet escapades of all kinds to reach traditional phone numbers.
I suppose the answer could be “well, leave the phone out! who cares about phones!” But if in the mobile wireless world the “phones” (and the phone numbers) become even *more* salient — if the cellphone internet access model wins out over the open internet access model — this kind of monetary hold-up could be extremely destructive.
Which is why we need unlicensed access to the white spaces..but even I may not be able to fit that topic into a panel on virtual worlds.
The internet, the brain, and plasticity
New favorite book today is The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. Lots of food for thought. So what if you had terrible parents! You can change! Find new paths.
Also the idea that bits and senses are rather similar -
[A]ll our sense receptors translate different kinds of energy from the external world . . into electrical patterns that are sent down our nerves. These electrical patterns are the univeral language ’spoken’ inside the brain - there are no visual images, sounds, smells, or feelings moving inside our neurons.
Of course you *knew* that, it’s obvious, but it’s the basis of plasticity - not only are all those impulses the same (bits are bits) but different areas of the brain that process them do it using a similar structure (in layers!). And if one of those processing areas is injured or vanishes for some reason, another area can take up the cudgels and do the work.
Also, for me as someone who tries to play an instrument, day after day, slog slog, a cheery rationale: There’s a competition for brainpower going on inside your head. If you stop practicing, the “brain map” area used for those skills will be turned over to something else instead.
If you ever ask yourself, “How often must I practice French, or guitar, or math to keep on top of it?” you are asking a question about competitive plasticity. You are asking how frequently you must practice one activity to make sure its brain map space is not lost to another.
It’s time to plan your plastic brain map for 2008.
OneWebDay, Sept. 22, 2008 - nine months away
OneWebDay is an Earth Day for the internet that takes place each Sept. 22. The first OneWebDay took place in 2006 - in 2008, it falls on a Monday.
We’re going to create “OneWebDay In A Box” kits this year, with suggestions about events and activities to plan. If you’d like to contribute to this effort, OneWebDay is a Cause on Facebook - you’re one click (okay, several clicks) away from donating.
There are substantial threats to the free flow of information online, all over the world. Many governments censor online content. Many people in developing nations can’t get online at all. Gatekeepers abound. We need to ensure that the internet used by future generations will be open and empowering.
The idea behind OneWebDay is to encourage people to think of themselves as responsible for the internet, and to take good and visible actions on Sept. 22 that (1) celebrate the positive impact of the internet on the world and (2) shed light on the problems of access and information flow.
OneWebDay is a global, decentralized event. We’re encouraging people around the world to meet up on Sept. 22 to talk about the threats to the net and how the net could change lives around the world in the future.
In 2007, thanks in substantial part to ISOC’s involvement, there were events in Colombia; Benin; Ethiopia; New York City, USA (with Jimmy Wales and others); Poland; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Bulgaria; Ecuador; Israel; Mauritius - Ebene Cybercity, Mauritius; Chennai, India; Taiwan; Cambridge, MA, USA; Chicago, IL, USA; Austin, TX; St. Louis, MO, USA; UAE; PICISOC - Pacific Islands Chapter of ISOC; Naples, Italy; Berlin, Germany. Next year - many more countries!
Top ten lists
Do you have one for 2007? The top ten books, the top ten moments, the top ten surprises?
I enjoyed FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s Top Ten Predictions for the 700 MHz Auction:
# 10. AT&T will say the outcome proves network neutrality is not necessary.
# 9. Google will say the outcome proves network neutrality is necessary.
# 8. NAB will say the outcome proves the XM-Sirius deal should be rejected.
# 7. I will say the outcome proves the country needs à la carte.
# 6. Congress will spend the auction receipts 10 times over before we cash the checks.
# 5. No matter how fast the D Block licensee builds out the public safety network, Commissioner Copps will say it was too slow.
# 4. Even if AT&T and Verizon bid against each other, costing each other billions, Consumers Union will claim they conspired to rig the bidding.
# 3. No matter who wins the A, B, C, D, and E license blocks, they will all end up suing Vonage for patent infringement.
# 2. If anything goes wrong, I will blame the subprime mortgage crisis.
# 1. If anything goes wrong, everyone else will blame me.
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I love Jeremy Denk’s blog. Here’s a recent entry about a destructive doping scandal in the classical music world: Newsflash.
Noël Coward and Facebook
Nice notes today about my Cambridge-snowstorm post last week are prompting me today to shimmer gently towards another non-FCC direction.
What would Noël Coward think of Facebook?
The Vice President of the Noël Coward Society, Barry Day, has a book of Coward letters out, and it’s completely engaging. Good review here. Coward was a “productive” guy.
Lord Louis Mountbatten said this at Coward’s 70th birthday celebration in 1969:
“There are probably greater painters than Noël, greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. If there are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combined all fourteen different labels - The Master.”
(Coward called himself “The Master” in his frequent letters to his staff.) Not to mention painters and letter-writers. Coward did a lot of both of those things, too. There are letters in this recent collection from Virginia Woolf, Nancy Mitford, Rebecca West, T.E. Lawrence, Ian Fleming, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber, Harold Pinter, and lots of others. (He patiently tried to cheer up Marlene Dietrich, who fell apart (for a long time!) over Yul Brynner.) NC wrote to amuse, constantly, as well as to converse, and the Woollcott letters in particular are full of cheerful invective.
Coward wrote to his mother, faithfully, week after week for most of his life, and these letters are among the most affectionate of the lot. He often said to her that he wouldn’t be able to write, or she wouldn’t be able to reach him, because he was going on a long trip, but to leave letters for him at X or Y place; he reveled in being able to call people on the telephone across great distances.
Given all of this letter-writing and communicating, what would Coward’s reaction have been to Facebook?
I think it would have alarmed him.
Initially, perhaps, he would have enjoyed having all the Algonks near him, little thumbnail pictures of his favorite sculptress and the enormous Woollcott. There would have been zingers tossed across the walls, pictures from the Theatre, light verse composed for the occasion.
But Coward often felt that people were too much. Everyone wanted something from him. Very often in his life he raced away as speedily as he could, getting on an endless cruise to the Far East, or collapsing in Honolulu, or staying for months at a time in Jamaica. For all of his conviviality, he needed to be alone, traveling, for long stretches. After resting, he would emerge with the new play (or three new plays), convinced he had a surefire hit.
The idea of being constantly in touch, with his friends’ doings ticking by a few hundreds of times a day — that would have been overwhelming for him. He had more friends than Scoble (who has more than 5000 Facebook friends). And as frank as Coward often is in these letters, he was fundamentally a very discreet, private fellow.
But, just for fun, he would have cajoled the Queen Mother into joining Facebook. They were chums, and he would have gotten a gentle laugh out of her tremulous-but-brave joy in trying it on. They would have tried it together, sending each other little notes on birthdays accompanied by tiny electronic gifts. Perhaps she would have told only Noël of her pseudonym - a small private royal Facebook joke.
Newspapers, washing machines, and the internet
An NPR story yesterday captured some pungent words from soon-to-go-through-the-revolving-door Senator Trent Lott. He was commenting in disbelief about the FCC move to permit more consolidation of media companies. He said (paraphrasing):
Newspapers? Why is the FCC protecting newspapers? I don’t get why we’re crying crocodile tears over newspapers. . . It’s technology that’s affecting newspapers. Where I live [on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi], we use newspapers to wrap mullet.
Putting aside the fishwrap reference (oddly reminiscent of the fate of some Bach manuscripts), let’s just note the incredulity with which Sen. Lott approaches the idea that the FCC is out there regulating newspaper mergers.
It’s like D.C. Circuit Judge Harry Edward’s reaction to the broadcast flag rule:
“You’re out there in the whole world, regulating. Are washing machines next?” asked Judge Harry Edwards. Quipped Judge David Sentelle: “You can’t regulate washing machines. You can’t rule the world.”
And now, today, we have another quote, this time from Sen. Rockefeller of W. Virginia:
During an oversight hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. John (Jay) Rockefeller, D-W.Va., recommended that the panel develop legislation next year to overhaul the agency from top to bottom.
“The FCC appears to be more concerned about making sure the policies they advocate serve the needs of the companies they regulate and their bottom lines rather than the public interest,” Rockefeller said. “Congress cannot allow that to happen.”
All three of these pungent moments go together. We’ve got an agency that moves erratically over a vast landscape of communications issues, affecting a seemingly-unlimited array of companies and activities, at a time when everything is converging and becoming packet-switched. We’ve got concentrated infrastructure marketplaces (particularly in the wireless arena) that are prompting decreased innovation and higher prices. At the same time, we have no shared vision of the public interest this agency is supposed to serve.
I personally am not as upset as many of my colleagues about the idea that mass-media sources are becoming more concentrated - let the dinosaurs huddle in the snow! - but the sheer ad hocery of the entire enterprise is hard to take.
Tying together DTV, 700 MHz, and white spaces
There’s a lively discussion about the DTV transition going on right now. (Go ahead, ask an elderly neighbor of yours who receives television broadcasts over the air what she knows about the DTV transition. I bet not much.)
John Kneuer of NTIA recently testified that the special single-purpose converters are indeed being manufactured, and that IBM is doing a fine job organizing the entire coupon program. Of course, it looks like a mess from the outside (and once Kneuer finished testifying he left NTIA - a year before he was expected to), but maybe this will turn out to be another Y2K non-event given all the coupon-device planning that has taken place.
But GAO is saying (and Commr. Adelstein is saying, that someone really should be in charge.
Here’s the thing: if a master coordinating plan is developed, it wouldn’t possibly be implementable by … January 2008, when the coupon plan is supposed to kick in. That’s right, two weeks from now. So there would need to be a delay. What possible consequences from such a delay? Well, how about slowing down the auctioning of that 700 MHz spectrum. No transition, no hope of cleared spectrum, all the assumptions of the bidders go awry. That couldn’t happen, could it?
Meanwhile, last week in the white spaces:
1. Philips has submitted its own device for testing, with an improved user interface based on feedback from FCC engineers.
2. Motorola suggests that to protect incumbent broadcast and cable signals, portable devices have to be REALLY low power. Motorola has tested some really old, worn-out cables and shows they may be susceptible to interference.
Motorola wants opportunistic, signal-sensing sorts of devices to be available only for home use, and suggests that higher-power outside-home uses be driven by geo-location database registration information (in other words, the incumbent says in a database what its spectrum contour is, and that’s taken as gospel by the device no matter what different result sensing might lead to – and the device itself has to register with the database).
Motorola recommends that Class B consumer devices be limited to 10 mW to minimize the potential for in-home interference. We also recommend that devices outside the home environment be allowed to operate at power levels up to 4 W EIRP, along with requirements for geolocation, sensing and support for a beacon. (Designated as Class A devices in the prior white paper.) This multi-tiered classification provides for high power devices needed when deploying broadband to rural areas and responding to the growing broadband mobile or portable needs of professional users. Use of a geolocation database in combination with registration requirements will help ensure that these applications are for professional or outdoor uses, and provide additional mechanisms to ensure interference is not caused.
…The experimental Motorola WSD [for use outside the home] utilizes geo-location database techniques in order to determine available spectrum and the maximum allowed transmit power levels per channel (vs. location). The unit does not rely on sensing techniques to determine open TVWS spectrum (i.e., to determine if the unit is inside of a TV station’s protected service contour) – it relies on geo-location database techniques for such information.
The problem with this approach is that it’s hard to build a business based on devices that are so low power you have to be sitting on the lap of the signal to receive or transmit. And the real market here is mobile use – anytime, anywhere.
3. Microsoft and Philips are going to do some more testing, and talked about wireless mics. I understand that a huge percentage (80%?) of wireless mics operate illegally.
4. Google has its own devices that it wants to have the Commission test, and they’re based on repurposed equipment. (It was probably a little uncomfortable for Google to have to rely on the secretive Microsoft in the testing regime – better, probably, to go it alone.) I remember seeing the historic Google server at the Computer History Museum, with its sagging repurposed racks.Cheap equipment used redundantly can be enormously successful.Here’s the Google report:
The Google representatives presented a demonstration of preliminary test results, based on the initial phase of ongoing trials involving two forms of experimental technology iutilizing repurposed equipment.In both instances, these test results demonstrate that digital televisions (DTVs) and wireless microphones can be amply protected from harmful interference by unlicensed personal/portable devices, using reasonable power levels and sensing thresholds.
What they’re doing is spread-spectrum sensing, I think.
Problem: Narrowband pilot-based schemes are subject to “deep fades”, making power estimation unreliable, requiring large margins
Broadband DTV sync signals give reliable power level estimates, even when the pilot is deeply faded, removing the need for large margins.
Unlicensed devices can safely coexist with licensed devices, without fear of harmful interference
Broadband sensing technologies can greatly improve the accuracy and reliability of spectrum sensing
Burst transmissions inherently cause less harmful interference to existing licensed devices.
All of this fits together. I think. As I understand it, you can’t do proper highspeed internet access using the 22 MHz of 700 MHz being auctioned off as Block C. Even if you had access to/control over the entire 60MHz portion available for commercial auction, it wouldn’t work. I understand you can do about 2 bits on one Herz. So 60 million Herz would equal 120mbit/s. But this would be a shared medium, so you’d be stuck with at most, for ten households, 10mbit/s down and 2mbit/s up. Not so zippy.
That’s why the white spaces are so important. The 700 MHz auction sets the precedent for the entry of the internet ethos into the wireless carriers’ world, but it won’t solve the nation’s highspeed internet access problem. Opportunistic low-ish-power portable devices capable of operating on unlicensed white space spectrum could be used to avoid the last-mile bottleneck for internet access. They could allow for short hops in isolated places to shared fiber connections. FreePress takes the position that “[u]sing these white spaces, the wireless broadband industry could deliver Internet access to every American household at high speeds and low prices — for as little as $10 a month…” Cooperative neighborhood mesh networks could use the white spaces to share a single fiber connection to the internet with hundreds of people.
So that’s why tech giants and public interest groups have formed a coalition to support unlicensed, portable uses of the white spaces. If the 700 MHz auction gets screwed up by a failure to adequately plan for the DTV transition, the white spaces can still move forward - and could really help with highspeed internet access in underserved areas.
Pause
Faced with conflicting advice from my horoscope, doubt as to the contribution being made by my latest draft paper, and the desperate need for a cup of coffee (coffee is never on the menu at the Aged Relative’s), I went out into the snowstorm this afternoon.
Well. Poets write about this sight, and this post won’t add anything to the snow-in-midlife literature, but I have to say it was a delight to be out on streets with names like Fayerweather and Brattle in a soft, persistent blizzard. Cambridge MA is an essentially black-and-white town, and the snow is just another special effect calculated to make you think you are wiser than you are. There are little patches of color - daring to paint your ancient house yellow! - but mostly you walk through an older and gentler time, and the sound of the snow hissing comfortably through the trees only confirms the time-travel.
There were cars on Brattle, Garden, and Concord, but they weren’t going anywhere. Sometimes a Volvo would lurch forward, slipping on the ice. I, on the other hand, made great progress towards the coffee place, and only fell once. I didn’t hurt myself, and the coffee had been almost drunk by then, so even that was just fine.
Complete unplowed silence, with warmth at both ends of the trip. Perhaps that’s enough progress for today.
More filtration processes
I’ve heard about this from a couple of directions today:
Europe could follow France in proposing a law that would shut down all internet access for those caught illegally sharing files. We reported last week how French president Nicolas Sarkozy would endorse a plan that, in exchange for dropping many DRM restrictions, would create an agency to monitor all high-volume internet users’ traffic - and snip their connections if they persist in sharing after two warnings. Now that plan is cited as an example of one way to balance copyright rules with stimulating the European online media market. . .
Links here and here. Is this legal? Are all ISPs going to go along?
And this from Japan, where an all-IP “next generation network” is about to be launched:
See that IMS layer? That stands for “interactive multimedia subsystem.” Wikipedia describes it as a “horizontal control layer that isolates the access network from the service layer.”
IMS is the technical version of the “agency to monitor all high-volume internet users traffic” that the Europeans are working on. The general goal is to make internet access much more like the current US version of wireless “services” - more easily billable, controllable, and knowable.
I’m retreating to the letters of Noel Coward. He would have something funny to say about this, and I will search it out and report back.