Vermont Tiger

SOPA, The Sequel

revenge of republicans

by Tom Evslin

Originally House bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Senate bill PIPA (Protect IP Act) were bipartisan bad policy. The Senate version was reported unanimously from The Judiciary Committee and was supported not only by Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) but also by the Senior Republican on the committee, Orrin Hatch (R-UT), These bills, written largely by Hollywood lobbyists, would have done great harm to Internet-enhanced freedom both in the United States and around the world. They were a massive over-reaction to the real (although not well quantified) problems of content piracy and counterfeit goods on the Internet. Oh yeah, they also helped protect Hollywood from "new media", legitimate or otherwise.

The Web Goes Dark

As a protest against U.S. legislation that would allow authorities to shut down web-sites in order to prevent piracy:

... several websites including Google, Reddit,Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Imgur and Tucows, are planning an unprecedented Internet "strike" Wednesday ... Many of the sites plan to go completely dark on Jan 18 to show opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Google will not go dark, but plans to note its opposition by sticking a protest link on its home page.
    Computerworld

The SOPA/PIPA saga was strictly back page stuff (in the argot of print) until a month or so ago when those of us for whom the internet is a transformative and liberating resource, precisely because it is largely unregulated, began to take notice and take up arms.  (Digital, of course.)

The Evil Twins: SOPA & PIPA

reader comments and useful resources

by Tom Evslin

If either House bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or Senate bill PIPA (Protect IP Act) or something in between passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the President, Internet censorship, unreachable websites, and forbidden searches will be the law of this land – just as in China.

I wrote here last week about the dangers these bills pose in return for helping Hollywood assure that none of its content is pirated. Readers have weighed in with some more data, questions, and amplifications. In addition, there is more useful information from twitter which I'll pass on below.

A Web of Censorship

SOPA & PIPA are (bipartisan) bad policy ... really bad policy.

by Tom Evslin

In China you can't get to some Internet sites: no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter. Search engines can't find the "Falun Gong" or "Tiananmen Square massacre". We would never do that kind of blocking here in the US, you say. Well, not so fast. If either House bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or Senate bill PIPA (Protect IP Act) or something in between passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the President, Internet censorship, unreachable websites, and forbidden searches will be the law of this land.

The Arab Spring has been enabled by the inability of some governments to block Internet communication. SOPA and SIPA both require that Internet blocking tools be developed and deployed here. Maybe we trust our own government not to misuse these (I don't!); but do we really want to be responsible for the proliferation of censorship and blocked communication?

Why, you ask, would our Congresspeople want to impose censorship anywhere? Why would they want to slow down the most vigorous parts of the US economy?

The answer, at least, is simple. These are bills that Hollywood wants to protect its movies from online piracy, and Hollywood makes mega-campaign contributions and even gives Congresspeople bit parts in its movies. There is nothing partisan about campaign contributions.

Big Goog Is Watching You

Google knows all about your changes in latitude.  Good thing or does it give you the creeps?  Or both?

by Geoffrey Norman

So there will, at last, be a cell tower here in town.  Actually, it is there already.  One of those things that is cleverly disguised to look like no tree that has ever grown anywhere on earth and looms over the normal forest canopy like some kind of techno-age totem. 

Which is fitting.

People have been complaining about the lack of cell coverage for so long that it has become a sort of conversational ice-breaker. Something you can use when the Red Sox haven't blown a late lead recently and the weather is too boring for words.  Now that the day is upon us – just another permitting hurdle or two to clear – the conversation is turning to what kind of phone to buy and what a fine new day is about to dawn.  And then you learn that this great liberating technology can actually be used to track your every move. 

GPS technology is, of course, the essential tool that makes this possible.  Add an app called "Latitude" that Google installs on your Android smart phone to do what some no doubt think is exceedingly cool.  As Daniel Gelernter writes, Latitude

monitors your location continuously, day and night, even if no apps are running.

And Google doesn't make it easy to escape its relentlessly prying eyes:

To prevent this, you’ll need to go to a submenu under the settings menu and disable “Google location services.” You may then feel safe from Google, since you’re using only “standalone GPS.” But it turns out that by using the GPS “you are enabling access to all location information by any third party . . . ” The privacy notice adds, ominously: “Enabling this functionality could pose certain risks to users of this device.” The risks are not enumerated.

Well, one "risk" is that it will give some people a strong case of the creeps even when it doesn't permit someone who doesn't have your best interests in mind from putting a digital tail on you.

This seems like a especially egregious intrusion here in Vermont where many people have chosen to settle precisely for the sense of privacy – even solitude – that comes with living here. 

You don't have to be a fully paid up member of the Friends of Ned Ludd to be opposed to a technology that enables round-the-clock tracking of your every move by a huge enterprise that:

a) tells you that it is for your own good

and

b) employs clever subterfuge to make it difficult for you to escape this surveillance.

Time to mend some walls.

 

Prometheus Enjoined

Google's Turn to Learn That Nothing is Shovel Ready

by Tom Evslin

"Regulation can get in the way of innovation. Regulations tied to physical infrastructure sometimes defer the investment altogether." – Kevin Lo, head of access at Google, as quoted in Total Telecom.

Google is deploying fiber at its own expense in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri to demonstrate the value of one gigabit (a gigabit is a billion bits – a lot) per-second residential Internet connections and perhaps to show at&t and Verizon and the cable companies how the search giant might fight back if its growth is restricted by their restrictions or limitations. Thousands of communities competed for this bonanza including the whole State of Vermont (see the video here). Kansas City, KS won and Kansas City, MO was added later. Among the selection criteria was the ability of the community, if chosen, to move at Google speed.

Whoops. Google just learned the same lesson that President Obama learned in Stimulus 1: nothing in America is shovel ready. Even when a rich company is willing to spend its own money on a project which almost everyone agrees is of huge economic benefit (spelled J-O-B-S), red tape and entrenched interests get in the way.

Smart Meters: You Make Your Choice ...

and you save – or pay – your money

by Tom Evslin

If you stand nine feet from a smart meter for twenty-four hours/day for a year and a half, you'll get about the same dose of radiation that you get during a ten minute cellphone call when you're holding the phone to your ear. (math below).

A smart electrical grid is a good thing. It gives us consumers more information and choices, ways to save money, more net-metering opportunities for those who want to generate some of our own electricity, and the opportunity to replace oil for both home heating and transportation. Jobs will be created as businesses discover ways to reduce the energy-cost of their operations. Even if we choose not to make use of the smart grid information ourselves, we will still benefit because our local utility can use the information to fix outages faster and more cheaply than before (often before sleeping consumers even report them), reduce the amount of power which has to be purchased to meet demand, smooth out expensive peaks, and eliminate the cost of manually reading meters. Lower costs for our utilities mean lower rates for us – perhaps not lower than they have been but certainly lower than they would be otherwise.

So what's not to like?

Irene Lesson #3

Critical Data Belongs in the Cloud, Not Under It

by Tom Evslin

"As flood waters from Tropical Storm Irene swamped the Waterbury state office complex, seven employees from the Vermont Agency of Human Services rushed inside to rescue computer servers that are critical for processing welfare checks and keeping track of paroled prisoners living around the state," according to a story by Shay Totten on the 7days blog Blurt. Two of the employees - network administrator Andrew Matt and deputy chief information officer Darin Prail - lost their cars in the parking lot as the river rose but kept on working to assure that our servers were not lost. "We didn't know how much time we had," Matt said, "and our job was to save the servers."

The story continues: "The employees' quick thinking is being credited with saving the state's largest agency from disaster. AHS oversees not only the Department of Corrections but runs programs that serve thousands of Vermont children, families, senior citizens and individuals with disabilities. Within days, AHS was up and running again — its servers installed at an alternate site."

Two lessons below the fold:

$12 Million Just Doesn't Go As Far ...

as it used to:

As it sought regulators’ blessing for the [acquisition of T-Mobile], AT&T boosted lobbying spending by 30 percent to $11.7 million in the first six months of 2011 from the same period last year, according to Senate records. Its PAC gave $805,500 to federal candidates this year, more than any other company, according to ... a Washington research group.

But now, it seems, the Justice Department has sued to block the $39 billion deal on anti-trust grounds. 

Which is a good thing, in Tom Evslin's view.

Still, one wonders if AT&T is entitled to at least a partial refund from the lobbyists who couldn't get it done.

Will Googlerola Be Able to Fight Data Caps?

by Tom Evslin

"Is Google Turning Into a Mobile Phone Company?" asks the headline in Andrew Ross Sorkin's New York Times story. Wrong question, IMHO.

But is Google doing the deal at least partly to give it leverage over wireless providers? I think so. The biggest threat to the growth of Smart Phones and tablets and other Google businesses like YouTube is the imposition of data caps and metered pricing by wireless providers like at&t and Verizon Wireless.

The providers would like to charge by the number of bytes transferred – similar to the way they charge for voice minutes today. Content providers (including Google) don't want an expensive impediment in the way of their content distribution. Providers of software and hardware for tablets, Smart Phones, and computers (including Google) don't want these devices to be less useful because content delivery to the devices is expensive. Not a moral issue here but a business one, although – in the long term – I think unlimited data plans lead to more growth for everyone (and proved that to my own satisfaction with the launch of AT&T WorldNet, which popularized all-you-can eat pricing way back in dialup days).