Tangled Webs

Well, as far as I can understand it, this is the position…

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been trying to clamp down on telemarketing (cold-calling to you and me). It set up a do-not-call registry on which you can lodge your number if you do not wish to be pestered by marketers’ phone calls. The telemarketers’ industry association then went to court, arguing that their First Amendment rights were being violated by this high-handed government interference. On September 29 a judge (named Nottingham) agreed and granted the pests an order that barred the FTC from fining them for dialling registered numbers. The Commission announced that it would appeal all the way to the Supremes and yesterday a federal appeals court let the FTC enforce its do-not-call program against telemarketers, pending the outcome of its appeal against the Nottingham ruling. The Appeals Court judges seem to think that the FTC will win the Constitutional case. And why not? It seems daft to maintain that a double-glazing salesman has Free Speech rights to intrude on my privacy.

This tele-marketing case, however, is really just a dry-run for the spam problem. Here the spammers seem to have convinced the Congress that they also have Constitutional Rights to fill one’s personal inbox with revolting ads for unmentionable products. This has led Congress to the perverse idea that enabling people to ‘opt out’ of spam is the way to solve the problem — analogously to the telemarketing policy. So anyone wishing to avoid spam will have to register his email address(es) with some federal body which will then be empowered to fine spammers for violations. As if… !

It’s a patently daft and unworkable approach. Compare it with the emerging (and broadly sensible) EU policy — which is that consumers would actively have to ‘opt in’ to receive unsolicited email. But because the Net is a global system, the EU policy cannot work so long as the US operates a diametrically opposed approach. We’re doomed.

California dreaming

Tom Lehrer famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What, one wonders, would he have made of the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected Governor of California? I love California — well, the Northern bit of it anyway — but really it’s a basket-case politically. Someone once said that, geologically speaking, the US slopes from East to West — which explains why everything in America with a screw loose winds up in California. Amen.

Why Linux and Unix-based systems are less vulnerable

One of the myths frequently propagated by Microsoft apologists goes like this: “Sure, Windows users are plagued with viruses, worms, trojans and other nuisances. But that’s only because Windows is the dominant system. If everyone used Linux, then the world would be full of Linux worms, viruses and trojans”.

It’s a superficially plausible line of argument, but wrong, because it ignores the architectural differences between different types of operating systems. Linux/Unix, for example, allows users much less freedom to inadvertently trash the entire system (though they may make a mess of their home directory). Linux email is less vulnerable to malicious executable attachments simply because the business of handling attachments is more fiddly and not just a matter of click-and-regret. And so on. There’s an interesting and useful essay in The register about all this.

At last! M’learned friends take an interest in liability issues arising from Microsoft vulnerabilities

I’ve been thinking for a while that we will only see progress on the security front when software companies (particularly the biggest, but others too) are held accountable for flaws in their products which damage their customers. And now the NYT reports the first Class Action suit in the State Superior Court in Los Angeles, asserting that Microsoft engaged in unfair business practices and violated California consumer protection laws by selling software riddled with security flaws. Quotes:

“The litigation, legal experts said, is an effort to use the courts to make software subject to product liability law — a burden the industry has so far avoided and strenuously resisted.

“For a software company to be held liable would be a real extension of liability as it now stands,” said Jeffrey D. Neuburger, a technology lawyer at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner.

To date, software companies have sidestepped liability suits partly by selling customers a license to use their programs — not actual ownership — with a lengthy list of caveats and disclaimers. So the warranty programs offered by PC makers, for example, cover hardware but not software.

The industry has argued that software is a highly complex product, often misused or modified by consumers. Assigning responsibility for a failure, the argument goes, would be unfair to any single company.

Besides, software executives say, the industry is a fast-changing global business that is largely led by United States companies. Opening the industry up to product liability lawsuits, they say, would chill innovation and undermine the competitiveness of American companies.”

Tsk, tsk. I’m sure it would indeed ‘chill’ innovation in Microsoft products. It would lead to longer and slower release cycles and much more intensive testing and less ‘feature bloat’. Legal liability chilled innovation in the automobile industry. It also saved a lot of lives. And it stimulated innovation in safety technologies, leading to cars which are immeasurably safer than their predecessors of 40 years ago.

Beyond Fear reviewed

Useful Slashdot review of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Beyond Fear: thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world.

Net now reaches into nearly 50% of UK homes

According to the Office of National Statistics, 48% of British homes now have access to the Net.

Broadcasting vs. community

I have to give a talk soon about the changing world of the media, and so I’ve been re-reading Clay Shirky’s stuff, which is consistently brilliant and insightful. Here’s a quote from his essay comparing broadcast mentalities with community-focussed ones:

“#3. Participation matters more than quality.

The order of things in broadcast is “filter, then publish.” The order in communities is “publish, then filter.” If you go to a dinner party, you don’t submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tell you which ones are good enough to air before the group, but this is how broadcast works every day. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a community, by contrast, say what they have to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact.

Media people often criticize the content on the internet for being unedited, because everywhere one looks, there is low quality — bad writing, ugly images, poor design. What they fail to understand is that the internet is strongly edited, but the editorial judgment is applied at the edges, not the center, and it is applied after the fact, not in advance. Google edits web pages by aggregating user judgment about them, Slashdot edits posts by letting readers rate them, and of course users edit all the time, by choosing what (and who) to read.

Anyone who has ever subscribed to a high-volume mailing list knows there are people who are always worth reading, and people who are usually worth ignoring. This is a way of raising the quality of what gets read, without needing to control what gets written. Media outlets that try to set minimum standards of quality in community writing often end up squeezing the life out of the discussion, because they are so accustomed to filtering before publishing that they can’t imagine that filtering after the fact can be effective. “

Clay has also written insightfully about the differences between audiences and communities

The Rule of Links

… Or: One Major Difference between Blogging and Journalism. From an essay by Dave Winer:

“Jon Udell wrote about the Rule of Links the other day, though not by name. He noted that professional publications usually don’t link to the subject of their articles, where weblogs usually do. He noted this in relation to the furor over a security whitepaper that got one of the authors fired. The professional articles didn’t point to the whitepaper, thereby clearly breaking the Rule of Links. If you’re writing about something that’s on the web, at any length, the Rule of Links turns from should to must. It’s disrespectful to your readers not to link to the subject of your article so they can form their own opinions.

The New York Times, always controversial, says it’s their policy is not to link, that their pub is self-contained and complete. This is total bullshit. While I love the Times, and have been reading it my whole life, I know that they’re crazy over there.”

Chateau Naughton ’03

One of the unexpected side-effects of global warming is that I have become proprietor of a productive vineyard. Well, a productive vine anyway.

So I’ve been harvesting my crop in the time honoured manner…

Trouble is, I don’t know how to make wine, but that should not be a problem. After all, I’ve got Google…

(Later) Three million pages on Google under ‘how to make wine’, so I tried ‘making wine from fresh grapes’. Ah, here’s something promising — WineMakerMag.com. “Winemaking starts with inspecting the grapes”, it says. “Make sure they are ripe by squishing up a good double handful, straining the juice and measuring the sugar level with a hydrometer, a handy device you can buy at a winemaking supply shop. The sugar density should be around 22° Brix – this equals 1.0982 specific gravity or 11 percent potential alcohol – and the fruit should taste sweet, ripe and slightly tart….”. Ye Gods! Hydrometers, degrees Brix… (Who was M. Brix?) I will also apparently need an ‘acid titration kit’. Hmmm…. I can buy Crozes Hermitage in Waitrose for about £8 a bottle. If I cost my time at, say, £50 an hour, Chateau Naughton could easily come out at three grand a bottle. There is perhaps something to be said for specialisation after all.

Edward Said

There’s a lovely tribute by Steven Johnson on his Blog.

“I think it’s worth saying something here that I’ve said about Said for more than ten years now: on his best days, he was the most charismatic man I’ve ever met in my life — handsome, stylish, impossibly articulate, and surprisingly willing to take a joke at his own expense. (I used to tease him about his being indirectly responsible for unleashing [Judith] Butler on the world.) I remember vividly one early spring afternoon, sitting through a seminar he was teaching on public intellectuals, in a room overlooking the Columbia campus and the sun setting over Riverside Park, and thinking to myself: there’s literally nowhere else I’d rather be right now. I’m sure there are thousands of his students out there sifting through similar memories today.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be remembered like that.