The Powells that be

Michael Powell is coming up for the fourth anniversary of his appointment as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Larry Lessig has an interesting column in Wired arguing that Powell is quite the most sophisticated policymaker in Washington. What he doesn’t say — though I think it’s true — is that Michael has probably been much more successful than his Dad, the outgoing Secretary of State.

Election 1.0

Very thoughtful article by James Fallows about the voting machine technology used in the US presidential election. He starts from the point that all computer systems have hidden bugs in them when they are first released, and these are only detected and ironed out through relentless testing by coders and, later, users. Here’s the nub of it:

“On the available evidence, I don’t believe that voting-machine irregularities, or other problems on Election Day, determined who would be the next president. The apparent margins for President Bush were too large, in Ohio and nationwide. But if the race had been any closer, we could not have said for sure that the machines hadn’t made the difference. That is because many electronic systems violate the two basic rules of trustworthy computing.

By definition, they have barely been exposed to real-world testing. The kind of thorough workout that Visa’s or Google’s systems receive every hour happens for voting machines on only a few special days a year. By commercial standards, the systems are necessarily still in “beta version” – theoretically debugged, but not yet vetted by extensive, unpredictable experience – when voters show up to choose a president.

Four years ago, about one-eighth of all votes for president were cast electronically. This year, nearly a third were. How the system would handle that large increase in scale could not have been tested until the presidency was at stake. Worse, most of the electronic systems are not accountable. When I voted this year, I fed my paper ballot through an optical scanner and into a storage box. In a recount, those ballots could have been pulled out and run through the scanner again. If I had used the touch screen, I would have had no tangible evidence that the vote counted or was recountable.

Is that a problem because the chief executive of Diebold, the largest maker of such systems, is a prominent Republican partisan? No. It’s a problem because it defies the check-and-balance logic built into every other electronic transaction.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

H C-B died while we were on holiday in Provence. Today, while going through some papers from the trip, I found the Guardian issue which reported his passing. Nice tribute, isn’t it? And since you ask, that’s a Leica M3.

What Nathan did next

Nathan Myhrvold used to be Microsoft’s Chief Technologist. Now he’s spending more time with his money. But he’s also set up a secretive new company, Intellectual Ventures Inc., which doesn’t actually make anything. It simply generates patent applications and buys patents from all over the place. The idea is to harness the insanity of the emerging patent regime — to ensure that, one day, nobody will ever be able to start up a company without first paying some royalties to Nathan or his investors and clients. There’s a fascinating Newsweek piece about this here.

Larry Lessig found a nice quote from Bill Gates about all this in Fred Warshofsky’s book, The Patent Wars. This is what Gates said in 1991:

“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.”

Update: [28 November]: Rats! Just discovered that Quentin had spotted this before me!