The Telco Soviets

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Lovely WSJ column by Walt Mossberg…

Suppose you own a Dell computer, and you decide to replace it with a Sony. You don’t have to get the permission of your Internet service provider to do so, or even tell the provider about it. You can just pack up the old machine and set up the new one.

Now, suppose your new computer came with a particular Web browser or online music service, but you’d prefer a different one. You can just download and install the new software, and uninstall the old one. You can sign up for a new music service and cancel the old one. And, once again, you don’t need to even notify your Internet provider, let alone seek its permission.

Oh, and the developers of such computers, software and services can offer you their products directly, without going through the Internet provider, without getting the provider’s approval, and without giving the provider a penny. The Internet provider gets paid simply for its contribution to the mix: providing your Internet connection. But, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t control what is connected to the network, or carried over the network.

This is, he says “the way digital capitalism should work”, and he’s right. But there’s one area in digital technology where it doesn’t apply — the mobile phone industry.

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it’s hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes. While power in other technology sectors flows to consumers and nimble entrepreneurs, in the cellphone arena it remains squarely in the hands of the giant carriers.

The Soviet Ministry Model

That’s why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.”

It goes on, and gets even better. This is a great op-ed piece.

Time Out Pad

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Yuck. Google threw up this ad in a Gmail message about the pressures that kids are under nowadays. The blurb reads, in part:

Young children need to learn when their behaviour isn’t acceptable. To do this, many parents use the time-out or naughty step technique, making the child sit quietly (usually on the bottom step of the stairs) for a few minutes to calm down and reflect on their actions.

In practice it’s not always easy. How do you time a time-out, when you’ve got so many things to do? And what happens if the child gets off the naughty step during the time-out? How does the child know when the time-out is finished?

Time Out Pad ensures effective time-outs and encourages better child behaviour.

Key Features

* Simple to use pressure pad with built-in timer, helps parents monitor time-outs
* Adjustable timer from 1-5 minutes
* Visual countdown and audio function
* Includes free ‘Positive Parenting’ guide
* Suitable for children from 2 years upwards

How the Time Out Pad works
Simply set the built-in timer to the desired time-out duration (usually one minute per year of the child’s age) and sit the child on the pressure sensitive pad.

If the child gets up before the end of the programmed time, an alarm sounds to alert the parent or carer, and the countdown will pause until the child sits back down.

Presumably the Premium version gives the kid a mild electric shock if s/he moves.

Microsoft bends the knee to the EU regulators

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Well, well. Telegraph report:

Since the ruling [by the European Court of First Instance], Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer has been in almost daily contact with Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for competition policy.

Following these intensive discussions, Microsoft has agreed to change the way it provides rivals with information that allows them to write programmes that mesh with Windows.

Microsoft will now make information available to open source developers, with licensing terms that allow every recipient of the resulting software to copy, modify and redistribute it in accordance with the open source business model.

In a statement today Ms Kroes said: “The Commission’s 2004 decision set a clear precedent against which Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour could be judged.

“Now that Microsoft has agreed to comply with the 2004 decision, the company can no longer use the market power derived from its 95pc share of the PC operating system market and 80pc profit margin to harm consumers by killing competition on any market it wishes.”

Microsoft has agreed to slash its requested royalties for a worldwide licence, including patents from 5.95pc to 0.4pc – less than 7pc of the royalty originally claimed.

The software group has also abandoned its demand for a royalty of 2.98pc of revenues from software developed using licensed information…

Later: This from GMSV:

Apparently, the key to reaching a resolution was to clear away all the lawyers and turn to personal diplomacy. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes became fast phone friends with daily calls over the past three weeks, and the deal was sealed in person over dinner at a little restaurant in the Netherlands (Ballmer had the crow en croute). “I sincerely hope that we can just close this dark chapter,” Kroes said later. “I feel a bit sad because it took so long, it took so many years, and during those many years consumers suffered from the fact that Microsoft didn’t go along with what the Commission asked it to do.” Microsoft mumbled something about continuing “to work closely with the Commission and the industry to ensure a flourishing and competitive environment for information technology in Europe and around the world.” There remain some outstanding issues, including how much of that accumulated fine the EU will impose, and in case Redmond starts backsliding, Kroes said, “Microsoft should bear this in mind. The shop is still open, I can assure you … there are a couple of other cases still on our desk.”

The message is meant for more than Microsoft. The EU continues to show a willingness to jump in where U.S. regulators won’t, and that has to be a sobering thought for companies like Intel, which looks like it’s getting a pass from the FTC, but has until January to answer EU charges that it violated antitrust rules by selling its chips below cost to strategic customers, among other things.

That “crow en croute” crack is nice.

The future of personal computing

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According to Nicholas Carr, it’s captured in a single simple equation: Google plus Apple.

The future of personal computing was divulged by Mr. Eric Schmidt, the chief executive officer of Google, on March 23 of this year during an interview with Wired’s Fred Vogelstein. Vogelstein asked Schmidt why he had recently joined Apple’s board of directors, and Schmidt responded:

“Google’s architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve. And they have very good judgment on user interface and people. They don’t have this supercomputer I’m talking about, which is the data centers.”

At this very moment, in a building somewhere in Silicon Valley, I guarantee you that a team of engineers from Google and Apple are designing a set of devices that, hooked up as terminals to Google’s “supercomputer,” will define how we use computers in the future. You can see various threads of this system today – in Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, its dot-mac service, its iLife and iWork applications as well as in Google’s Apps suite and advertising system, not to mention its vast data-center network. What this team is doing right now is weaving all those threads together into what will be, for most of us, the fabric of cloud computing. (This is so big, you need at least two metaphors to describe it.)

Damn. I’m going to have to get an iPhone…

In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering | Business | The Observer

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This morning’s Observer column…

Storm has been spreading steadily since last January, gradually constructing a huge botnet. It affects only computers running Microsoft Windows, but that means that more than 90 per cent of the world’s PCs are vulnerable. Nobody knows how big the Storm botnet has become, but reputable security professionals cite estimates of between one million and 50 million computers worldwide. To date, the botnet has been used only intermittently, which is disquieting: what it means is that someone, somewhere, is quietly building a doomsday machine that can be rented out to the highest bidder, or used for purposes that we cannot yet predict…

TrueGrain

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This is interesting to anyone who — like me — muses on the aesthetic differences between digital and analogue photography.

TrueGrain is a creative tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black and white film with digital imagery.

TrueGrain takes the form of a stand-alone image processing utility that imposes the physical characteristics of a real-world film stock onto a digital image. The synthesis is done through measured and sampled data gathered from the actual film and development process being reproduced…

Here’s the workflow:

1. Prepare a color digital photograph as a TIF file

2. Load the TIF file into TrueGrain

3. Choose a film stock

4. Save the resulting image

It’s ingenious, but expensive. A single licence costs $300. Having just taken delivery of a batch of chemicals for processing some recent films, I’ll stick with chemistry for the time being.

There’s a nice irony in using sophisticated digital processing techniques to create an analogue effect!

Many thanks to Boyd Harris for spotting it.

Halloween mania

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I detest Halloween. Here are two reasons why.

Seen in a local Tesco store. Er, shouldn’t that read “this store has agreed to…”?

A newspaper ad.

Of course none of this will stop Tesco commercialising it.

Neat work, AP

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Associated Press have done a really neat piece of detective work to investigate rumours of dirty tricks by Comcast, a US ISP.

NEW YORK (AP) – To test claims by users that Comcast Corp. was blocking some forms of file-sharing traffic, The Associated Press went to the Bible.

An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems.

We picked the Bible for the test because it’s not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size.

In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.

Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking.

The Bible test was conducted with three other Internet connections. One was provided by Time Warner Inc.’s Time Warner Cable, and the other came from Cablevision Systems Corp. The third was the business-class connection to the AP’s headquarters, provided by AT&T Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc.

No signs of interference with file-sharing were detected in those tests.

Further analysis of the transfer attempt from the Comcast-connected computer in the San Francisco area revealed that the failure was due to ”reset” packets that the two computers received, carrying the return address of the other computer.

Those packets tell the receiving computer to stop communicating with the sender. However, the traffic analyzer software running on each computer showed that neither computer actually sent the packets. That means they originated somewhere in between, with faked return addresses…

It seems that Comcast uses Sandvine traffic-shaping hardware to limit the effectiveness of BitTorrent seeding. The goal is to manage BitTorrent traffic without tipping off mainstream users that it’s being done. This source cites Robb Topolski’s explanation of how it’s achieved:

“The Sandvine application reads packets that are traversing the network boundary. If the application senses that outbound P2P traffic is higher than a threshold determined by Comcast, Sandvine begins to interrupt P2P protocol sequences that would initiate a new transfer from within the Comcast network to a peer outside of the Comcast network. The interruption is accomplished by sending a perfectly forged TCP packet (correct peer, port, and sequence numbering) with the RST (reset) flag set. This packet is obeyed by the network stack or operating system which drops the connection.”

I love the idea of using the Bible as the test file. Reminds me of Larry Lessig’s report of coming into his office in Stanford one morning to find the network police waiting for him, grimly announcing that it had been discovered that he had P2P software installed on his computer. Larry explained that he used P2P as a way of distributing his own publications — intellectual property that he owned. The idea that there might be legitimate uses for P2P had clearly never occurred to the management.

And that’s in Stanford!

Later: Ed Felten has also commented on Comcast’s traffic shaping practices.

“Hi darling, I’m on the plane”

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Oh no. BBC NEWS | Technology | Mobile phone use backed on planes…

Passengers could soon be using their mobile phones on planes flying through European airspace.

Plans have been developed across EU countries to introduce technology which permits mobile calls without risk of interference with aircraft systems.

Regulators around Europe are calling for consultation on the potential introduction of the technology.

If given the go ahead, the service would allow calls to be made when a plane is more than 3,000 metres high.

Individual airlines would need to decide if they wanted to introduce the technology, if the green light is given by national regulators.

Bah!

Bogus email ‘agreements’

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I’m perpetually irritated by the ludicrous legalese that organisations force employees to tag onto the end of email messages. Here’s a typical example:

This e-mail and all attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender and delete the e-mail and all attachments immediately. Do not disclose the contents to another person. You may not use the information for any purpose, or store, or copy, it in any way.

Up to now, my standard reaction has been to mutter “Oh Yeah! You and whose army?” But I’ve just noticed that Cory Doctorow, Whom God Preserve, has had a better idea. He has decided that ridicule is the best defence against this nonsense. His boilerplate legalese reads:

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

I’m going to add this to my email signature options so that anyone who signs off with legalese will have the compliment returned, in spades.

Later: Hmmm… I’ve obviously touched a chord here. Lovely email from James Cridland pointing me to his personal legalese:

Terms and conditions of receipt of email

These terms and conditions apply to emails sent to the above email addresses or any containing ‘james’ before the @ sign and ‘cridland.net’ after the @ sign. Unsolicited email is herein defined as email which is not the result of demonstrable prior contact using or quoting such an address. No guarantee of confidentiality is given, or honoured, on receipt of unsolicited email, irrespective of any terms and conditions block contained therein. It is illegal to send EU citizens unsolicited commercial email without the users’ explicit (opt-in) permission, according to The Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC). This site owner reports all such mail direct to your ISP.

That’s the stuff! I feel better already.