Monthly Archives: February 2006

Chinese chickens — contd.

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There’s a wonderfully ironic blast in Good Morning Silicon Valley today about the Chinese censorship issue. Here’s a sample:

Given a choice, representatives of four big tech companies probably wouldn’t be spending the day sitting in front of a congressional panel getting their eyebrows singed by accusations that they consort with torturers. But there they sat today — the crash-test dummies sent by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to take the hit for their employers’ concessions to repression as the price of doing business in China — as Rep. Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, unloaded on them: “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” And Republican Rep. Chris Smith, chairman of the House subcommittee on global human rights, produced a quote that should be engraved on the entrance of every stock exchange: “Cooperation with tyranny should not be embraced for the sake of profits.”

The responses from the witnesses was [sic] familiar: The “lesser evil” argument (Google’s Elliot Schrage: “The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship — something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company. … [but Google entered the market believing it] will make a meaningful, though imperfect, contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.”) and the “little us” argument (Yahoo’s Michael Callahan: “These issues are larger than any one company, or any one industry.’ … We appeal to the U.S. government to do all it can to help us provide beneficial services to Chinese citizens lawfully and in a way consistent with our shared values.”).

For Rep. Smith, that just doesn’t cut it. “It’s an active partnership with both the disinformation campaign and the secret police, and the secret police in China are among the most brutal on the planet,” he said. “I don’t know if these companies understand that or they’re naive about it, whether they’re witting or unwitting. But it’s been a tragic collaboration. There are people in China being tortured courtesy of these corporations.”

I particularly liked the headline on the piece: “But we’re only giant, powerful tech companies … how could we possibly make a difference?” And the phrase “crash-test dummies”. Must make a note of it. Might come in useful sometime.

Quote of the day

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We partly didn’t know what it was, and certainly what the press said it was wasn’t what we thought it was, but even what we thought it was we didn’t end up doing all of that.

Bill Gates, explaining to the Financial Times why his ‘Hailstorm’ project (in which users were going to entrust their personal data to Microsoft) bombed.

Gates was speaking to the RSA Security conference about a new Microsoft desktop security program which would protect people from phishing scams and eventually make Internet passwords passé.. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest on the same day, Microsoft released seven new security patches, including two rated “critical” for its products, and then had to fix one of the fixes after it failed to install correctly. Verily, you could not make this stuff up.

Chinese chickens coming home to roost in Washington

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The NYT has an interesting report on the fallout in Washington of the capitulation of Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Microsoft to the requirements of the Chinese regime.

Now the companies are being pressed in Washington for fuller answers about their business practices in China and the implications for human rights. That pressure will escalate today when the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations questions officials of the four technology companies, along with other witnesses critical of their activities.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, plans to introduce legislation by week’s end that would restrict an Internet company’s ability to censor or filter basic political or religious terms — even if that puts the company at odds with local laws in the countries where it now operates.

Mr. Smith’s legislation, called the Global Online Freedom Act, however, would render much of what the Internet companies are currently doing in China illegal.

Among the act’s provisions is the establishment of an Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would establish standards for Internet companies operating abroad. In addition to prohibiting companies from filtering out certain political or religious terms, it would require them to disclose to users any sort of filtering they undertake.

Separately, the State Department announced the formation of a new Global Internet Freedom Task Force yesterday, charged with examining efforts by foreign governments “to restrict access to political content and the impact of such censorship efforts on U.S. companies.”

I bet those pesky Chinese are quaking in their boots.

The NYT report also has some interesting further information about the extent to which Yahoo has compromised itself:

The company, which has been providing Web services in China since 1999, has been criticized for filtering the results of its China-based search engine. But its bigger problems began last fall when human rights advocates revealed that in 2004, a Chinese division of the company had turned over to Chinese authorities information on a journalist, Shi Tao, using an anonymous Yahoo e-mail account. Mr. Shi, who had sent a government missive on Tiananmen Square anniversary rites to foreign colleagues, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, a group based in Paris, revealed that a Chinese division of Yahoo had provided information to authorities that contributed to the conviction in 2003 of Li Zhi, a former civil servant who had criticized local officials online. Mr. Li is serving eight years in prison.

Academic development

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The diversification of British universities continues apace. First there was Oxbridge, plus Durham and a couple of ancient institutions in Scotland. Then there were the dissenting academies like UCL in London, and the “redbrick” (municipal) universities. Then there were the “plateglass” universities established after the Robbins Report in the 1960s. Then came Polytechnics (which have mostly morphed into universities). Now comes an entirely new classification — the “rackety” universities, described by Lord Carlisle, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, in evidence to the Commons home affairs committee yesterday. Discoursing on the threat posed by radical imams to impressionable young British muslims, he said (according to the Guardian):

If you talk particularly to young female students in the larger, more rackety universities, there is a degree of concern expressed about some societies where women are excluded and where there might be radicalisation.

Two questions: (a) what, if anything, does this mean? (b) What are the criteria by which anxious parents would be able to rank an institution on the rackety scale?

Has Google peaked?

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Barron’s, the influential US financial publication, seems to think so. Excerpt from an interesting piece:

INVESTORS HAVE BEEN FIXATED on Google the past few weeks, as its shares have tumbled nearly 25% from a peak of $475 — and the fact is, there could be a lot more tumbling ahead. The share price could well be cut in half over the next year as the Internet giant grapples with growing competition from Microsoft and Yahoo!, increased pricing pressures in its online ad sales and mounting concern about what’s known as click fraud.

Barron’s thinks that Google stock is overvalued by at least a factor of two. Reasoning:

To get a sense of what might happen to the stock, we gave one über-bull’s 2006 revenue estimate for Google a 20% haircut, trimmed his projected expenses by 5% (but no further, because bulls greatly underestimate Google’s costs), deducted stock-based compensation and, generously, gave the company credit for the considerable interest income on its cash. The result: Earnings would be 30% lower than the bull’s projection, at $6.28 a share. If the stock were to maintain its current multiple of 41 on those lowered earnings, it would be worth $257. It’s more likely the multiple would shrink to as low as 30, in line with the slower growth. That would make the stock worth $188, versus its recent $360.

Since I don’t own any shares, it’s all theoretical to me. But it goes to show how overheated the Google stock-hype (with some people fantasising about a share price of $2000) could turn out to be.

Common sense on free speech

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Terrific piece by philosopher Onora O’Neill in today’s Guardian…

Yet even committed liberals don’t seriously think that rights to free speech are unlimited or unconditional, although they seem to be unsure about which limits should be set. They are often torn between an aspiration to justify free speech as minimal and uncontroversial, and a contrary belief that free speech matters because it is not minimal but powerful. This double vision is well reflected in contemporary tendencies to construe freedom of speech as freedom of expression. Freedom of expression sounds so harmless: merely a matter of expressing oneself, seemingly no more than an aspect of individual privacy. Yet most speech acts are not merely expressive. They are intended to communicate, and may affect, even harm others. The nursery jingle “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is palpably false.

Prosper.com

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It’s funny what the Internet makes possible. After FON. com comes Prosper.com, a service described by the New York Times as “a mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank.”

On Prosper.com, prospective borrowers register with the site and allow the company to review their credit history. Then borrowers post a loan request of up to $25,000, along with an upper limit for the amount of interest they are willing to pay. Loans are not secured by collateral and are paid off over three years at a fixed rate, with no prepayment penalty.

Lenders essentially deposit their money with Prosper — which holds it in an interest-bearing account with Wells Fargo— and either review the loan requests individually or fill out a form permitting Prosper to allocate money to borrowers who meet certain criteria.

Chief among those criteria is the borrower’s rating from the credit reporting bureau Experian, but borrowers can also join or create groups with defined interests or characteristics that, they hope, will make them more attractive to some lenders.

Among the groups on Prosper are aficionados of the Porsche 914 model, associates and employees of a Berkeley cafe and Vietnamese-American students. Borrowers, who typically post their loan requests and any group affiliation, along with a description of who they are and why they need the money, then wait a maximum of two weeks for lenders to bid in ever-lower interest increments for the right to issue the loan.

Quote of the day

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News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.

Reuven Frank, former head of NBC News, quoted in the Economist, 21 January 2006

Footnote: Bill Thompson points out that the quote was attributed many years ago to Lord Northcliffe, a famous British newspaper proprietor. And then, of course, there’s Evelyn Waugh’s definition in Scoop:

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that, it’s dead.

Brown study

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As regular readers will recall, I’ve thought from the outset that David Cameron’s ascendancy spelled big trouble for New Labour if they continue with the plan of anointing Gordon Brown as Tony Blair’s successor. Last week’s catastrophic by-election defeat in Dunfermline has really underlined that. Andrew Rawnsley writes about the fallout in today’s Observer…

The difference on this occasion is that bad news for Blair is not good news for Brown. It has been repeatedly said that the byelection was in the Chancellor’s backyard. Actually, it is more like his living room. The Chancellor’s Scottish home is in the seat. If he ever has a problem which needs the attention of his constituency MP, he will now have to ring a Lib Dem to help sort it out. The Chancellor regards himself as the king of Scottish politics. His repeated interventions in the byelection were an investment of his personal political capital.

It is going too far to say that this was a referendum on Gordon Brown, but it has to be wounding. Worse, it raises the question that he most dreads: if he cannot secure a Labour victory in his native fiefdom, how attractive will Prime Minister Brown be to the rest of the United Kingdom? If he can’t woo them in Fife, what are his prospects of swinging it in southern England?

As I said, boredom is the problem. The British electorate has a longish attention span, but Labour are reaching the end of it. If they plump for Brown, they are doomed. Must see if I can put some money on this hunch.