I’ve been asked or told about Ron Paul many times over the last months, usually on the assumption that I’d respond positively. It always pained me to explain that while I broadly agree with Paul on policy (with some glaring exceptions like immigration and abortion), I could not work up significant enthusiasm for the campaign, nor even support it (apart from joining his Facebook group, which I’ve left).
First, Paul’s supporters wildly overestimate the chances of the campaign’s success, whether that be election, nomination, or even just effectively growing the constituency for freedom. He never had any chance of winning and I’m happy for the demonstration that merely speaking the truth on national TV doesn’t change anything. Of course many libertarians will ignore that truth and continue throwing money at false hopes.
And while there were bright spots, Paul was an extremely problematic messenger for freedom. He’s a marginal kook, he attracts hardcore kooks, and the fundamental basis of his argument — the U.S. constitution as holy writ — is about the least interesting and least convincing argument possible. In other words, Paul is an embarrassment. (Of course almost every politicianhuman spouts nonsense almost continuously, but more or less conventional nonsense that is not accorded the kookiness factor richly deserved.)
However, I had no idea how problematic and embarrassing Paul would be. While it is conceivable that Paul is not a racist and did not write any of the racist items in his newsletter and did not authorize or know about any of those items, I assign these probabilities ranging from medium to almost nil. Paul’s response is evasive and painful to watch, despite his attempt to redeem himself by focusing on the drug war.
If you really need to read more go here. I urge anyone who has supported Paul in public or private to reverse that support, immediately.
I think I’ve only posted about it once, but I’ve long been extremely skeptical of “digital identity” technologies — evil, hopeless, overhyped (no, giving users control of their identities will not save democracy nor make a pony appear, and there are no scare quotes around the preceding words because I haven’t cornered the market on scare quotes), often more than one of these.
OpenID has been the most reasonable identity technology to come along, mostly because it does very little and builds on existing standards. I still think it’s overhyped. Evan Prodromou recently posted an informative essay on OpenID Privacy Concerns. This bit jumped out at me:
The key to mitigating this, of course, is using strong security on the OpenID provider. The good news is that since your authentication is centralized, you can use much stronger authentication than most Web sites support. I really appreciate using browser certificate authentication on certifi.ca — it’s a very strong system that’s (almost) immune to phishing, brute-force attacks, or other password-stealing scams.
The good thing about OpenID is that it moves authentication to parties that are presumably good at that and can offer stronger authentication methods, without the sites and services you want to login to having to know anything about authentication technologies (apart from having implemented OpenID login).
I knew that an OpenID provider could authenticate however they want, but the usefulness of this did not click until reading the above, though I’m sure it’s been pointed out to me before.
I fairly frequently use the total lack of adoption of browser certificates as a negative example to be learned from when people try to solve supposed problems by throwing crypto into a supposed solution. Perhaps in the distant future this example won’t work, because OpenID (or something else that abstracts out authentication method) is widely implemented, making strong authentication relatively useful and usable.
I endorse Bill Richardson for temporary dictator of the U.S. jurisdiction. His positions on executive power seem acceptable, his overall domestic policies and record as governor of New Mexico are better than most politicians (i.e., not abominable), and his foreign policy is not insane. Regarding the last, Richardson outlines his principles in this video.
True, Ron Paul’s more radical foreign (and general) policy is mostly closer to my preferences than Richardson’s. However, in spirit and delivery, Richardson’s foreign policy is a viable and positive alternative to interventionism, approximately the Wright thing, in contrast to Dr. No’s.
And Richardson is in theory electable, while Paul is not. Traders are probably correct in giving Richardson essentially zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination at this point, but they are certifiably insane to give Paul even a smidgen of a chance of winning the GOP nomination (currently about 7%), let alone the dictatorship (4%).
I also think that to the extent the Paul campaign gives some libertarians (entirely false) hope of revolutionary change for the better through electoral politics, the campaign and whatever success it has is a bad thing. It makes me sad to see libertarians impoverish themselves by sending a “moneybomb” to a hopeless electoral campaign.
However, I probably would not have bothered to tack on this anti-endorsement of Paul had I not seen this excrement from his campaign.
Paul is also a religious kook (but then so is every candidate, of one sort or another). At least Barack Obama admits doubt, which I’d challenge any other candidate to do. As Richardson doesn’t have any chance of nomination, this post is effectively an Obama endorsement.
So an economically optimal regime would have different rules for different industries, protecting some but not others, based on their exactly supply/demand curves.
“… but don’t forget about enforcement costs.”:
But really, it doesn’t matter. There is just no fucking way that IP protection is worth the police state it would take to enforce it. And unenforced/unenforceable laws poison society by teaching people not to respect the law.
This leads more or less to my understanding of the Pirate Party sentiment, something like “There’s nothing wrong with copyright per se, but any civil liberties infringement in the name of copyright protection is totally unacceptable.”
I recommend Friedman’s essay, but of course the reason I write is to complain … about the second half of the essay’s last sentence:
Therefore I favor accepting the inevitable as soon as possible, so that we can find new ways to compensate content producers.
This closing both gives comfort to producerists (but in the beginning of the essay Friedman says that people love to create — I agree, see paying to create — and Tom W. Bell has a separate argument that should result in less concern for producers that I’ve been meaning to blog about, but should be obvious from the title — Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy) and is a stretch — copyright might make alternatives less pressing and interesting, but it certainly does not prevent experimentation.
I’ve complained before here that blog search stinks and isn’t getting better. Now I know why — in addition to blog search being a difficult and expensive service to run — there isn’t much demand. The blog search focused sites I mentioned in the “stinks” post each seem to have gained no traction since then, excepting Technorati, which itself is constantly rumored to be troubled.
To end on a positive note, perhaps blog search is a good use case for distributed search, as it isn’t economic for a centralized entity to do well. This reminds me, whatever happened to various P2P syndication proposals?
So the real winner is Wikipedia — a news and knowledge aggregator… using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator… it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge —not the primary source of reporting. Just like prediction markets feed on polls and other advanced indicators.
The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s stupid campaign against online gambling is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.
Antigua (actually the jurisdiction of Antigua and Barbuda) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.
I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is The Mouse That Roared or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction markets.
The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.
A recent article in The Economist includes the following chart:
At a glance (apologies for a complete lack of rigor), two perceived traits set the two currently leading candidates (Clinton and Giuliani) apart from the rest: “strong leadership” and lack of “morality”. In other words, voters want an abominable person as their temporary dictator. If I could only ratchet down my cynicism, I would be disappointed and fearful.
The chart above in conjunction with the YouGov survey data it is based on make for great fodder for those who believe “the media” is suppressing Ron Paul: he is the only candidate in the relevant part of the survey not presented in the chart.
The Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution that is a step toward Wikipedia migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I have an uninteresting interest in this due to working at Creative Commons (I do not represent them on this blog), but as someone who wants to see free knowledge “win” and achieve revolutionary impact, I declare this an important step forward. The current fragmentation of the universe of free content along the lines of legally incompatible but similar in spirit copyleft licenses delays and endangers the point at which that universe reaches critical mass — when any given project decides to use a copyleft license merely because then being able to include content from the free copyleft universe makes that decision make sense. This has worked fairly well in the software world with the GPL as the copyleft license.
Copyleft was and is a great hack, and useful in many cases. But practically it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be a more welcome expansion than Daniel J. Bernstein’s release of his code (most notably qmail) into the public domain. Most of the practical benefit (including his code in free software distributions) could have been achieved by released under any free software license, including the GPL. But politically, check out this two minute video of Bernstein pointing out some of the problems of copyright and announcing that his code is in the public domain.
New York Magazine cites an interview with Universal Music CEO Doug Morris from the WIRED December issue (not yet online) that supposedly shows that Morris and his industry are utterly clueless. The excerpt from NYMag, emphasis added:
“There’s no one in the record industry that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”
Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.”
Actually, knowing your limitations is pretty smart. Too bad the industry did not stick to the strategy of not hiring technology people. Music startups would’ve flourished, and the industry could have snapped up the obvious winners. Instead, Morris and friends eventually fell for a complete bullshit story — DRM — that killed nascent startups and paved the way for Apple’s much-hated dominance.
Copyright turns even really smart technologists into disingenuous and even dangeroustechnology idiots (including me on occasion — the claims I dismissed in that last link, while overblown, may have some substance), so non-technologists should be really wary, and consistently so.
Update 20071128: The WIRED article is now online. Despite its sneering tone, I think Morris comes off as a shrewd businessperson.
Apps are not forced to do this. A number of good apps will let people see the data, even put it in feeds, without you having to “install” and thus give up all your privacy to the app. What I wish is that more of us had pushed back against the bad ones. Frankly, even if you don’t care about privacy, this approach results in lots of spam which is trying to get you to install apps. Everybody thinks having an app with lots of users is going to mean bucks down the road, with Facebook valued as highly as it is.
But a lot of it is plain old spam, but we’re tolerating it because it’s on Facebook. (Which itself is no champion. They have an extremely annoying email system which sends you an e-mail saying, “You got a message on facebook, click to read it” rather than just including the text of the message. To counter this, there is an “E-mail me instead” application which tries to make it easier for people to use real E-mail. And I recently saw one friend add the text “Use E-mail not facebook message” in her profile picture.)
The title of this post was my first Facebook status message earlier this year. In other words, social networking sites are all about lowering social boundaries. I am completely comfortable sending messages to people I barely know (if that) on Facebook that I would only consider (and often not) send to close friends and regular correspondents via email or instant messaging.
Ironically social networks could be used to fight spam and otherwise bootstrap reputation systems. I am mildly surprised that although trust is perhaps the most interesting feature of social networks, as far as I know nobody has done anything interesting with them (at least social networking sites) in this respect. An occasional correspondent even suggested recently that reputation is a kind of anti-feature for social networking sites, and reputation features tend to be hidden or turned off.
My other (unoriginal, but older) observation about social networking sites is that while at first blush the sector should be winner-take-all driven by network effects, but instead we’ve already seen a few leaders surpassed, and I highly doubt Facebook will take all. I have two explanations. First, the sites don’t have much power to lock users in, even though it is hard to export data — users have contact information for remotely valuable contacts outside the site, in address books, buddy lists, and email archives, and can recreate their network on a new site relatively easily. Second, social networking sites don’t yet have a killer application. Although Facebook has allowed many third party apps on its platform, I have yet to see one that I would miss, and very few I return to. I doubt I’d miss Facebook (or any other social networking site) much period if I were banned from it (I know that many students would disagree about Facebook and musicians about MySpace).
The World Wide Web Consortium and particularly its Semantic Web efforts do great, valuable work. I have one massive complaint, particularly about the latter: they ignore the Web at their peril. Yes, it’s true, as far as I can tell (but mind that I’m one or two steps removed from actually working on the problems), that the W3C and Semantic Web activities do not appreciate the importance of nor dedicate appropriate resources to the Web. Not just the theoretical Web of URIs, but the Web that billions of people use and see.
My belief is that trust must be considered far earlier and that it largely comes from usage and the wisdom of the crowds, not from technology. Trust is a social problem and the best solution is one that involves people making informed judgements on the metadata they encounter. To make an effective evaluation they need to have the ability to view and explore metadata with as few barriers as possible. In practice this means that the web of data needs to be as accessible and visible as the web of documents is today and it needs to interweave transparently. A separate, dry, web of data is unlikely to attract meaningful attention, whereas one that is a full part of the visible and interactive web that the majority of the population enjoys is far more likely to undergo scrutiny and analysis. This means that HTML and RDF need to be much more connected than many people expect. In fact I think that the two should never be separate and it’s not enough that you can publish RDF documents, you need to publish visible, browseable and engaging RDF that is meaningful to people. Tabular views are a weak substitute for a rich, readable description.
Earlier this year prior to visiting a city I asked someone who recently lived in that city and since returning to San Francisco has been on a vegan diet whether they knew of any great vegan restaurants in the city I would visit. Their reply was something like “no, I’ve only been vegan since I returned.” Which strikes me as odd — as if one would not eat at a Chinese restaurant because one is not Chinese.
I’ve encountered (mostly through overhearing) this strange attitude before — people who think that going to a vegan or merely vegetarian restaurant is crazy unless one is a vegan or vegetarian, or just maybe if a crazy veg*n friend or relative drags one along. I’ll chalk this up to a combination of general lack of imagination and negative reaction to vegan identity entrepreneurs.
As an alternative, I propose November 2 as “Vegan Cuisine Day” — the message is not “Go Vegan” but “go to a vegan restaurant” and discover a new cuisine.
The federal government makes an overwhelming amount of data publicly available each year. Laws ranging from the Administrative Procedure Act to the Paperwork Reduction Act require these disclosures in the name of transparency and accountability. However, the data are often only nominally publicly available. First, this is the case because it is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the data that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. If government information was made public online and in standard open formats, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the transparency and accountability that is the reason for making information public in the first place.
That’s great. But if peer produced (a more general and less inflammatory term than crowdsourced; I recommend it) scrutiny of government is great, why not of think tanks? Let’s rewrite that paragraph:
Think tanks produce an overwhelming number of analyses and policy recommendations each year. It is in the interest of the public and the think thanks that these recommendations be of high quality. However, the the data and methodology used to produce these positions are often not publicly available. First, this is the case because the data is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the analysis that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. Third, nearly everything published by think tanks is copyrighted. If think tank data and analysis was made public online in standard open formats and under open licenses, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the quality and public benefit of the policy recommendations that are the think tanks’ reason for existing in the first place.
Think tanks should lead by example, and improve their product to boot. Note the third point above: unlike U.S. government produced works, the output of think tanks (and everyone else) is restricted by copyright. So think tanks need to take an extra step to ensure openness.
(Actually think tanks only need to lead in their domain of political economy — by following the trails blazed by the Open Access movement in scientific publishing.)
“You do realize that Adobe AIR is as much about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc… as it is about Flash / Flex?”
Just as a point of feedback: I had no idea of this. I’ve seen a lot of mentions of Air around the Web of course, but not dug into its official docs. Well I assumed AIR could probably handle HTML, maybe even bits of SVG if you’ve got webkit in there, but I somehow had the impression it was primarily all about Flash. Quite probably I didn’t bother to read up on it properly because, for better or worse, I somewhat expected a Flash-centric agenda, and so didn’t take the time to investigate what I unreflectively figured was “Adobe’s new Flash-based thingy”. If it is more standards-friendly, there’s a chicken and egg problem in getting this news out to developers who may tune out when they hear “Adobe toolkit” on assumption it’ll be Flash-flash-flash. I’m happy to be re-educated anyway :)
Will Air support (interactive) SVG to any level? Or the W3C widgets work (http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/) ?
Tellingly (in terms of marketing if not reality), Brickley’s questions have gone unanswered.
Mozilla Prism: Open source and so simple that there’s almost nothing there (open a URL from a desktop icon in a browser with some web navigation features removed) that people instantly “get” it (and the bigger ideas behind it) and looooove it.
I suspect that an AIR application can accomplish the same limited functionality with just a bit more code than hello world and that AIR provides much more. But unless Adobe can effectively communicate what the heck AIR is and exactly how it works with open standards, it will be eaten for breakfast by the slow (for good reason — more fully featured web/desktop integration will raise all kinds of thorny security, synchronization and software update issues) web juggernaut. As somecommenters pointed out, the obvious thing for Adobe to do is to “work with Mozilla and other players to standardize these features.”
Then there’s the obvious joke about AIR (although that link does include the appropriate reference to vapor, it concerns something surprising and somewhat — an attempt to make Java Applets — relevant).
I am convinced by comments on the above posts and conversations since that it will take a huge shift in Wikipedia community opinion for advertising to have a chance. The time for direct argument in relevant venues is distant. If you agree with me that advertising on Wikipedia will allow the foundation to greatly speed the fulfillment of its commitment, you can make your support known without rancor:
1) When you donate, leave a comment that says “I support advertising on Wikipedia.”
2) On your Wikipedia user page (mine), add the following code, with obvious meaning (|{{PAGENAME}} may not be obvious–it’s a hack to make your name sort correctly in the relevant categorylistings):
[[Category:Wikipedians for optional advertisements|{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising|{{PAGENAME}}]]
Mozilla’s revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2006 were $66,840,850, up approximately 26% from 2005 revenue of $52,906,602. As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google. The Firefox userbase and search revenue have both increased from 2005. Search revenue increased at a lesser rate than Firefox usage growth as the rate of payment declines with volume.
Congratulations to Mozilla. The Open Web’s prospects would look far worse if Mozilla did not have the wisdom to exploit this revenue source. Now, what about the prospects for Free Knowledge?
Addendum 20071123: The Wikimedia Fundraiser Blog is running Why Wikipedia Does Not Run Ads, a post linked to in the fundraising ad now running on Wikipedia.
As of the last day or so Facebook now allows the following (only if you’ve already logged in before from the computer you’re now using, a nice protection against doing this on a public computer):
This is a nice improvement, though there’s almost no chance it was stimulated by Gonze’s or my posts, both because it’s an obvious idea and neither of us has huge readership, and because Facebook got it wrong.
First, a minor nit about the language used — you will stay logged into Facebook on this computer — one can read megalomania into those missing words if one wants (I don’t).
Second, “until you click logout” is may not be true. It looks like Facebook login cookies expire after a month, which gets to the second part of my observation:
The real mystery is sites that do not force login every session (presumably this reduces problem of people forgetting to log out of public terminals), but something longer than a session and shorter than many years. What problem is that addressing?
It is possible that Facebook occasionally refreshes the cookies before they expire, such that “until you click logout” is true so long as you keep visiting Facebook at least once a month. Let’s pretend that it is true. What would be the point of the added complexity? Perhaps it addresses the problem of sale or other transfer of an old computer and forgetting to wipe privacy data first. But it also makes it a pain to visit Facebook less than monthly, which is surely what I want to do at some point (based on what I do with a bunch of now-passé social networks).
A few weeks ago I moderated a panel on DRM at a “music technology” conference. I wrote it up on the Creative Commons blog. Short version is a consensus from non-activists that music DRM is on its way out.
But what I want to complain about here is the use of “music industry” understood to mean the recording distribution industry and “music technology” understood to refer to use of the net by the same industry. Similarly, “future of music” understood to refer to the development or protection of recording distribution industry business models in the face of digital networks. Each of these gets under my skin.
My contention is that the future of music is determined by changes in music making technology and culture. The recording distribution industry has just about nothing to do with it. It seems that every new genre from ancient history to present has sprung from the latest in music making technology and cultural antecedents, and developed its essential forms before the recording distribution industry got a clue (or recently, started to sue).
I may be overstating my case, especially with regards to rock, but fuck rock stars.
If you’re interested in the actual future of music and want to look for it in an industry more narrow than “information technology”, it’s the musical instruments industry that you want.
It would be cool to be able to log in to a web site using just your email, without even a password. It would work just the same way that password recovery does now, except that you wouldn’t ever type in your password.
That’s it, but read the whole post for more explanation and rationale.
I just have two tiny points to add. Gonze:
I am thinking about this because Facebook constantly makes me log in, and I don’t care about it enough to memorize that password.
I’ve thought of it because I don’t know whether I can trust a site. Even if they store a hashed version of the password (I hate it when a “forgot your password?” procedure sends the one I forgot rather than generating a new password, which means they’re storing the actual password — that’s why I got a bit of a kick out of this extreme), they have access to the password I’ve selected at some point.
Of course you can effectively do this now — just register with a random password and when forced to login again, request a new password. But sites that force you to login frequently make this painful.
Why do sites force frequent logins anyway? The real mystery is sites that do not force login every session (presumably this reduces problem of people forgetting to log out of public terminals), but something longer than a session and shorter than many years. What problem is that addressing?
What about OpenID and the like? Orthogonal, and not nearly as widely deployed as email (or IM or SMS, which would also work as password recovery/routine authorization token delivery mechanisms).
On a completely different topic, check out “Cover Yourself” podcast, an awesome Gonze post I’ve been planning to say more about since July, and will eventually.
Like the acknowledgement of copyright as censorship on the Google Policy Blog a few months ago, William Patry’s Copyright is always Government Intervention is too nice to pass up, though Patry is only criticizing copyright maximalists’ selective accusation of government intervention and the Google Policy Blog said that copyright is a justifiable reason for censorship.
