Milord Acton wearing my Baily hat. All hats corrupt, but fedoras corrupt absolutely.
Photographed using the cod Hipstamatic iPhone App.
The Asian economic ‘miracle’
Intellectual Property (IP) theft by China is a theme to which Mark Anderson often returns. But even by his standards this blog post is pretty explicit. Extracts:
Two weeks ago, I was visited by two people speaking for China, representing a new company whose job would be to – well, they described it, but it was a bit vague. During this description, we talked about IP and China, and they pointed to the new high-speed trains China is building everywhere.
Indeed, China has laid more high-speed rail, and plans for more of these showcase trains, than any other country in the world.
My visitors pointed to these trains as examples of how China was now developing its own IP, and not just depending on IP theft or forced disclosure from others.
Last week I learned the rest of the story: how Japan (Kawasaki Heavy Industries and others) brought this technology to China, hoping to make money, and now are watching as their IP reappears in Chinese products owned by Chinese companies, and the Japanese get little or nothing.
That’s the story of modern mercantilism, and of the so-called China Miracle.
And:
Last quarter, a letter was reportedly sent from the Prime Minister’s office in the U.K., to the country’s top 300 CEOs, informing them that they should consider all of their current IP crown jewels to have been compromised.
All of them.
This brings the level of security concern to a level not yet anticipated by most executives: what if the cost of broachable security is your company’s future ability to compete and survive?
Ask Boeing, Cisco, Kawasaki, Qualcomm, 3Com, Sony, Google, General Electric, BASF, or Microsoft how they feel about all this. Most will dissemble in public, but tell you the truth offline; and many are rapidly coming clean, even in their public comments, as GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt did not long ago.
You are now CEO of a 50-year-old global corporation with, say, 60,000 employees. And the PM’s letter sits open on your desk.
You call in your CIO, close the door, show him the letter. Have we been hacked? you ask. He goes into geekspeak, describing various levels of difficulties, generally safe behavior, all seems well today, no guarantees or ways to tell.
What? You ask. There are no ways to tell if our crown jewels have been stolen by some competitor?
Here are some of the crown jewels obtained by China in the last couple of decades: the top U.S. nuclear warhead design, from Livermore Labs; wing fabrication machinery and blueprints, from Lockheed-Martin; selected Boeing airframe designs; navigation and rocket design for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (specifically, the Long March series), from both Boeing and Lockheed; high-speed router designs from Cisco; the source code to Windows, from Microsoft; complete car designs from Chevy and Ford; advanced chip and fab designs, from IBM; high-speed rail systems from Japan; etc.
And you think your company’s IP is somehow safe?
What we are watching, currently, is the largest theft in global history, happening in front of our own eyes. And while one group is busy exclaiming at the wonder of China (and South Korea and Japan) making all that progress and money in their turn, another group is now recognizing the mercantilist model in its third iteration.
I haven’t been able to find any independent corroboration of the alleged letter from David Cameron, but I haven’t had time to do much digging yet.
Ode to Steve
Warning for sensitive souls: contains rude words.
It prompted me to download the 8mm home movie app for the iPhone. Another lovely example of using sophisticated computing to produce primitive retro effects. No wonder normal people think that geeks are nuts!
Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.
Obsessiveness rules OK
This morning’s Observer column.
While all this was going on, Apple and Microsoft were squabbling about capital letters. A while back, Apple attempted to trademark the phrase “App Store” – the name of its online store of downloadable programs. Microsoft objected, arguing that the term was too “generic”. (This from the company whose main products are Windows, Word, Office and Excel.) On Monday last, Apple struck back. “Having itself faced a decades-long genericness [sic] challenge to its claimed Windows mark,” it sniffed in a court filing, “Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public.
“Yet, Microsoft, missing the forest for the trees, does not base its motion on a comprehensive evaluation of how the relevant public understands the term App Store as a whole. What it offers instead are out-of-context and misleading snippets of material printed by its outside counsel from the internet and allegations regarding how the public allegedly interprets the constituent parts of the term App Store, ie, ‘app’ and ‘store’.”
Searching for Saif
Hmmm… I was searching the LSE online catalogue for the entry for Saif Gaddafi’s legendary Ph.D dissertation. But it doesn’t appear to be listed.
Curious. Maybe the LSE doesn’t catalogue dissertations.
LATER: As usual, the cock-up theory is the best explainer: I was searching under the wrong name.
Many thanks to Lawrence Osborn for his tactful hint about search technique.
Peter Spiro at opiniojuris.org reveals that Oxford University Press had plans to publish the dissertation, and wonders if they will persevere with that plan. He also provides a link to the downloadable pdf of the dissertation on the Mother Jones site. “Leaving aside the dubious provenance”, he writes, “from a quick scan it looks pretty interesting.”
It does. One of the most interesting sidelights is that Gaddafi expresses fulsome thanks to the celebrated Harvard scholar, Joseph Nye, who is credited as being one of “a number of experts with whom I met and who consented to read portions of the manuscript and provide advice and direction.”
And then, of course, there’s the small matter of Footnote #259:
Libya: why the West has no good options
Excellent summary by Paul Ragers on opendemocracy.net. Makes gloomy reading.
The Church of Latter-Day Apple
Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry's mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.”
That was a long time ago…
Thus begins my Observer ‘Comment is Free’ piece on Apple’s transformation into the behemoth it has become. Towards the end of the piece, I mentioned Umberto Eco’s famous essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.
I’ve always thought that Eco’s essay was just a lovely literary conceit. But now, courtesy of Evegny Morozov, I find that there is even a scholarly literature on the subject. Or, at any rate, one learned article. It appeared in 2001 in the Oxford University Press journal Sociology of Religion: a quarterly review under the title “May the Force of the Operating System be with You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion” and the Abstract reads:
The purpose of this study is to consider the devotion of Macintosh computer enthusiasts as a case of implicit religion. Data was collected from two primary sources: twelve in-depth face-to-face interviews, and letters to the editor from MacAddict magazine. In addition, supplementary information was obtained from pro-Macintosh Web sites and magazines. Following Nesti (1997), Macintosh devotion was analyzed along four lines: (1) the search for meaning, (2) social forms, (3) the hidden message of the metaphor, and (4) the case of the voyage. I found that Mac devotees used the Macintosh as a “reflective medium” to discover meanings in the midst of changing computer technology. As an implicit religion, Macintosh devotion is based on the sacralization of the bond between people and computers. Its followers envision an utopian future in which humans and technology work together in harmony. Furthermore, the Mac enthusiasts adopted from both Eastern and Western religions a social form that emphasized personal spirituality as well as communal experience. The faith of Mac devotees is reflected and strengthened by their efforts in promoting their computer of choice.
The iPad is “a post-PC” device? Oh yeah?
Paul Hontz nails it.
As I listened to Steve speak, one phrase kept gnawing at me. Steve said that the iPad was “a post-pc device”. As an iOS developer who makes his living building apps for iPads and iPhones, I disagree. You see iOS has this ball and chain attached to it called “iTunes” that runs on a typical PC. The first time you turn your iPad on you’re greeted with this screen on the right prompting you to plug your iPad into a computer so it can be setup. You can’t even turn your iPad on the first time without being tethered to iTunes.
Yep.
Drakes
Why the Libyan School of Economics isn’t unique
Further to my post about universities being addicted to tainted money, Stefan Collini had an interesting take on the underlying malaise:
All academics in British universities will immediately recognise that nothing they do as scholars and teachers wins anywhere near as much commendation and support from their university’s “senior management team” (older readers may still refer to them as “administrators”) as the securing of some kind of external funding. Such funding may range from a project grant from a research council or charity to the sponsorship of a post or studentship by a local business, and then on to the murkier regions of whole courses and centres being paid for by some overseas government or large corporation.
At first sight, it may seem absurd to bracket all these disparate types of funding together. The first and second kinds are not only innocent of any taint of corruption: they are the bread-and-butter of most working scientists and an increasing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well. But that is precisely what is so insidious and why the LSE case raises systemic rather than merely local questions. Let me illustrate in two ways.
First, it is now axiomatic in British universities that a piece of research that was financed by any of these forms of external funding is ipso facto superior to one that is financed indirectly out of the university’s recurrent income. Such external funding is, in principle, supposed to cover the “extra” costs of doing a piece of research, but this means that in practice academics are now under instructions to incur more expense.
If a book or paper could be written either during the research time that universities still, just about, make available or during a period in which the scholar or scientist in question receives external funding for the notionally additional costs, academics are now obliged by their universities to opt for the latter. Indeed, being able to raise such outside money, from whatever source, is now being written into job advertisements as a requirement of the post.
Spot on. There is one aspect of this that Collini doesn’t discuss, which is that in many scientific and technological disciplines there isn’t any realistic prospect of universities being able to finance the research out of their own stable funding. Maybe the big American Ivy League colleges are exceptions, but even then I doubt it. But research and scholarship in the humanities does not require such lavish funding, and yet even there academics are being pressured to seek external funding and to demonstrate the “impact” of their work. Collini’s strictures apply with even greater force there.