Toronto Harbour and Lake Ontario: the view from my window this morning.
photo © 2013 j.r.mchale
Google’s Android platform is powered by a novel technology that transcends conventional hardware and software. And just as Android hardware and software has looked to Apple for inspiration, this compelling new “flexibly adaptive logic” is also related to something that first originated within Apple. Flexibly adaptive logic, or “Flawgic,” allows the Android platform to terminate any sort of criticism before it can affect how the system performs. Flawgic is neither hardware nor software; it’s installed directly into public mindshare via a virus spread by talking heads.
A buzzworthy, anti-Android editorial (screed) at AppleInsider actually written by Daniel Eran Dilger, but which reads as if it is from Steve Jobs, writing from beyond the grave. Also a nice encapsulation of current anti-Android sentiment, as Apple begins to fight back from its recent spate of bad press.
What Google has actually done is create a powerful infrastructure. The shape of that infrastructure influences everything that goes online. And it influences the allocation of mental resources of everyone who interacts with the online world. But there isn’t much to the real human world that isn’t shaped by the mental activity of the people in it! That’s a lot of power to put in the hands of a company that now seems interested, mostly, in identifying core mass-market services it can use to maximise its return on investment. Now in the short run, that may mostly be a problem for all of us … But in the long run that’s a problem for Google. Because we tend not to entrust this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector. Network externalities are all fine and good to ignore so long as they mainly apply to the sharing of news and pics from a weekend trip with college friends. Once they concern large swathes of economic output and the cognitive activity of millions of people, it is difficult to keep the government out.
From The Economist: “Google’s Google Problem”.
I think that’s about right – given that Google already has a giant target on its back vis-a-vis U.S. and EU regulators, it certainly seems short-sighted to annoy large swaths of journalists, influencers and the like with the shutdown of Google Reader.
As a power RSS/Google Reader user, I’m disappointed in the shutdown, but as long as the sync/data backend gets replicated, I will be fine using other RSS services: Mr. Reader (iPad), Reeder (OS X), Feedly (Adroid and Firefox), and perhapds recently announced new and updated services: Digg’s upcoming RSS Reader and a revamped NetNewsWire.
The mobile market, everyone agrees, is the technology industry’s future. What’s not so clear is which company is best positioned to thrive in that future. For smartphones in particular, the traditional metrics are confusing … So who’s winning? When pondering this, I find myself thinking about dependencies. What is each company doing for itself, and in what ways does each company rely on others? I think this balance, much more than profits or market share, is what will determine long-term success.
John Siracusa at Hypercritical.co. Read the whole thing for his assessment of how the major players (Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft) stack up on this “dependency” metric.
Interesting Reads: March 20, 2013
At FastCompany: “Box’s 65-Year-Old Android Engineer Gives Your Startup Some Unsentimental Advice”
At The Walrus: “BlackBerry’s Boom: How the Canadian Smartphone Became a Nigerian Status Symbol” by Brianna Goldberg. Apparently, there is even a popular Nollywood film series ‘BlackBerry Babes’. According to Goldberg: “While North American business stories have been reporting on RIM’s spectacular decline, Africa has fallen hard for the Waterloo, Ontario, tech giant. RIM, now known simply as BlackBerry, is Africa’s number one smart phone vendor, and it is now the preferred brand in both South Africa and Nigeria, two cultural leaders for the continent. Second only to Asia’s mobile market, Africans already use 735 million cellphones.” Interesting read, but don’t be fooled: “BlackBerry 10 predicted to hold less than 5% market share through 2016”
Wired explains yesterday’s Supreme Court decision clarifying that the “first sale” doctrine of federal copyright law applies to foreign-purchase works imported into the United States: “Supreme Court Boosts Right to Resell Copyrighted Goods.” The Supreme Court’s opinion (pdf)
Interesting Reads: March 19, 2013
“How the America Invents Act will Change Patenting Forever.” Wired explains the switch from “first to invent” to “first to file” patenting, an important development for entrepreneurs and startups.
But is this change in the patent system, which took effect on March 16, 2013, a good idea? Law professor Richard Epstein argues no: “Just because the [America Invents Act] is a new piece of legislation does not mean that it is a good or useful piece of legislation. By the time the law is revealed to be the mess that it is, it will become so embedded in the legal order that it will be difficult to uproot it. Be prepared, therefore, to witness yet a further decline in the overall efficiency of the United States patent system, promoted by those whose stated intention was the opposite.” “The End of Innovation? A new and unnecessary law restructures the U.S. patent system for the worse”
Also at Wired: “Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them.” This decision of a federal judge in California to limit secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient will be appealed by the government, and the dispute will likely eventually wind its way up to the Supreme Court. As explained by Kim Zetter in Wired: “NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more. NSLs are a powerful tool because they do not require court approval, and they come with a built-in gag order, preventing recipients from disclosing to anyone that they have even received an NSL.”
“Thirty-Five Arguments Against Google Glass” at Reluctant Habits. A contrarian view on the Google Glass project. Or is that a luddite view?
On the 50th Anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright
Today marks the 50th Anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Gideon v. Wainwright decision, which held that the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees to every criminal defendant in a felony trial the right to a lawyer. But is that right really effective today? Two pieces arguing that the answer to that question is “not so much”:
“How Americans Lost the Right to Counsel, 50 Years After ‘Gideon’” by Andrew Cohen writing in The Atlantic.
“Simon Waxman on ‘Chasing Gideon’; Pleading Out: America’s Broken Public Defense System” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Supreme Court Decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)
Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do … They have a first-mover advantage. They’re more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions … They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side — it’s easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction. For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?
I don’t think it can.
Bruce Schneier writing at Wired: “Our Security Models Will Never Work — No Matter What We Do” on (i) the virtual certainty over time of successful large scale/mass casualty terrorist attacks due to weapons of mass destruction becoming cheaper and easier to produce, and (ii) creating resilient systems as an alternative to perpetually ratcheting up government surveillance and security. Read the whole thing.
Security expert (and self-described curmudgeon) Schneier’s monthly Crypto-Gram email newsletter is a great monthly read and personal favorite.
FTC Issues Reports on Digital Advertising and on Mobile Payments
“.Com Disclosure: How to Make Effective Disclosure in Digital Advertising” has been issued by the Federal Trade Commission. This March 2013 FTC report (pdf) updates and modifies the FTC’s now long-in-the-tooth May 2000 report on the same topic, and includes specific guidance on advertising via tweets (including sponsored tweets), as well as guidance, including examples, on advertising on space-constrained screens such as smartphones and tablets.
More on the Digital Advertising Report at Mashable.
The FTC this month also issued a report on its recent workshop on mobile payments: “Paper, Plastic … or Mobile?” (pdf). Anyone wondering why mobile payment mechanisms are taking so long to develop need only take a quick glance at the FTC Report. Given the multiplicity of various players (private companies – big and small, established players and startups – and state and federal regulatory bodies), and issues involved, including data security, privacy, and billing dispute resolution, it’s no wonder quick and easy mobile payment schemes are just beginning to become useful and gain traction.
More on the Mobile Payments Report at the InfoLawGroup.
“Innovation or Exploitation? The Limits of Computer Trespass Law” A presentation by Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS) on February 19, 2013, featuring Ed Felten (Princeton), Jennifer Granick (Stanford), Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Jonathan Mayer (Stanford), Alex Stamos (Artemis Internet), and Dan Auerbach (EFF): 1 hour and 51 minutes.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
“Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age,” a lecture by Harvard Law School Professor, Lawrence Lessig (February 19, 2013): 1 hour and 43 minutes.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about his new book “Antifragile,” as well as libertarianism, and “capitalism’s genius for failure.” (56 minute video from Reason.TV)
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
photo © 2012 j.r.mchale
LawProf Eric Goldman: The FTC Smartly Ends Its Google Search Antitrust Investigation
FTC Recommends Best Practices for Companies That Use Facial Recognition Technologies
PayPal becomes the latest company to ban class action suits
PayPal becomes the latest company to ban class action suits
From The Verge, how companies are limiting or eliminating the right to class action lawsuits against them in their terms of service:
“On November 1st, PayPal will follow Sony, Microsoft, Netflix, and many others in banning class action lawsuits by customers. Its new terms of service require any disputes between a user and PayPal to be resolved with arbitration, or in small claims court if they qualify. Unless users send a written opt-out notice, they’ll be barred from group suits in the US, something that’s become increasingly common for companies since last year … [T]here’s a simple reason why PayPal and others are making these changes: because they can. Until relatively recently, states could require companies to allow class action lawsuits in their terms of service. While not every state did so, the result was that companies wrote agreements to accommodate the strongest consumer protection laws and applied them across the board. In the April 2011 decision AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Arbitration Act took precedence over state laws, letting companies add clauses that limit lawsuits as they see fit. Since then, these clauses have steadily been added to terms of service and licensing agreements, taking away the user’s right to participate in a class action lawsuit … Not every business can ban class action suits. Individual exceptions in separate laws let consumers bring them against insurance companies, mortgage loan providers, and (if you’re a member of the military) payday lenders. Other consumer protections still apply across the board. But for most companies, it’s common now to add a clause banning group suits, and we’re likely to only see more of them in the coming years.”
Your computer is hacked. Can you legally counter-hack the hackers?
A vigorous debate on the answer (and deep disagreement) in a series of posts at The Volokh Conspiracy. Short answer: likely not under present (somewhat uncertain) United States law (including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).
1st post in the series (Stewart Baker) here.
2nd post (Stewart Baker).
3rd post (Orin Kerr).
4th post (Stewart Baker).
5th post (Orin Kerr).
6th post (Stewart Baker).
7th post (Orin Kerr).
The punch line is that ‘sophisticated’ investors may be the best marks. They want to believe the snake-oil claim of secret money-making formulas known only to the uber-elite … . Madoff appealed to the desire of those with money to believe that secret formulas can advance them from merely well-off to rich … . There are no secret investing formulas. Or if there were, Goldman Sachs would not share them. If there really were mysterious known-only-to-a-few money management techniques that ensure outsized returns without risk, Goldman Sachs would use these techniques to obtain vast wealth on its own, and not bother with clients. Madoff would have done the same — if his secret investing formula was real, why did he need clients? That Madoff or Goldman seeks fees from clients is, itself, proof the boys in pinstripes don’t have any super-advanced insight into financial markets.
Gregg Easterbrook in his TMQ Commentary at ESPN.
Five years ago, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile business and kicked off a seismic shift in the technology industry that continues today. But the massive success of Apple’s phone has overshadowed the grim reality of an American wireless marketplace that has become increasingly hostile to innovation — a market tightly controlled by carriers who capriciously pick winners and losers while raising prices and insisting that their use of valuable public spectrum remain free of any oversight. While the iPhone is a raging success, the wireless market is headed towards total failure.
Nilay Patel at The Verge. As they say, read the whole thing.