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Don Marti

10 months ago

in John McCain’s Tech Policy Unveiled Today on The Technology Liberation Front
Check out the latest Broadband Properties magazine: in Salisaw, Oklahoma, municipal fiber customers can get 10Mbps up, 10Mbps down. In the real world, a lot of towns can do better than the private sector.
1 reply

11 months ago

in What the hell happened to Kleiner Perkins? on VentureBeat
Brian Aker from MySQL asked, "Look at what it cost to set up a Web site in 1995. What did it cost to set up a Web site today?"

Today you can do a web startup on Y Combinator money. Or home equity, like most other new businesses in the USA. You don't need an investment large enough to justify the overhead of a KPCB. Yes, a lot of the price cuts are thanks to the success of previous KPCB companies

11 months ago

in Silly Government Policies Do Eventually Go Away on The Technology Liberation Front
The DMCA keeps modding underground, and enough of a hassle to make most people more willing to buy the games.

Without anticircumvention, you could take your own console to a local store and get the mod chip installed ("I just want to put Linux on it."), or even order a pre-modded console online. Many players would choose to give up the manufacturer's warranty and the price of the chip plus install, in exchange for unlimited access to infringing games.

I still think anticircumvention is bad public policy. If a vendor wants a locked-down platform, they should enforce it contractually, by leasing not selling the hardware, and rely on contract law.

11 months ago

in On Google-Yahoo! as an Antitrust Problem on The Technology Liberation Front
Even if it can't build or buy a better search engine, MSFT can still buy its way into the online ad market in a way that benefits webmasters and advertisers -- by giving webmasters lucrative partner deals that Google won't do, and giving advertisers better rates and/or tools than Google will.

Or it can buy its way into the market the cheap way, by lobbying.

11 months ago

in Silly Government Policies Do Eventually Go Away on The Technology Liberation Front
Tim, would "Grand Theft Auto IV" exist without anticircumvention? The fact that it's out for consoles but not PCs implies that the lockdown matters to the company.

Without anticircumvention, online retailers could openly sell mod chips "to run Linux, nudge nudge wink wink."

True, anticircumvention shuts down more useful knowledge-building and economic activity than it promotes, but there is a constituency: makers of expensive games that appeal to wannabe thugs and are valuable offline, as hard-to-track infringing copies.

1 year ago

in Copyright Industrial Policy on The Technology Liberation Front
GTA IV is only out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

It's not necessarily the technical quality of the game that the DMCA encourages, but all the offline-usable art and story detail.

Naturally the DMCA discourages many other investments, and many of those might have been more valuable or useful to more people. It's interesting and rare to see a content creation investment that the DMCA promotes.

1 year ago

in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Well, Not Actually for Everyone . . . on The Technology Liberation Front
Yes, Google wants "neutral" access to infrastructure -- but how much of US fiber is on rights of way obtained by eminent domain, or what was originally public land given away to common carrier railroads?

1 year ago

in We're all ops people now on Behind the Times
"distributing entire machine images which communicate exclusively via the network is now a feasible way to distribute your software" -- but doesn't that put every application developer in the position of OS maintainer, and every security hole in anything you depend on becomes your security hole? If you do an old-school "configure;make;make install" release, and people make RPMs or deb packages from it, a problem in a library you use doesn't necessarily mean you have to do a new release.
1 reply
Edd Dumbill's picture
Edd Dumbill You have a good point, and it illustrates what I meant by saying that we just end up pushing problems to the next level. The transition of application developer into an operations person (ensuring their base OS is always patched, etc.) is exactly my thesis.

The problem you mention is still there with the 'old-school' release. If you compile against a library with a security flaw, as vendor it's still your problem, not the customer's.

If you distribute appliances the game changes slightly: you at least can lock the appliance down more tightly than your customer would firewall, which could mitigate a lot of security issues, but you gain a slightly enlarged set of dependencies. You could argue that fixing these becomes easier, however, as you retain control over the deployment environment.

Also, let's not concentrate exclusively on outside distribution. The vast majority of software is developed and deployed inside the firewall, not outside of it.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

1 year ago

in TCS Daily on Regulatory Policy on The Technology Liberation Front
What about competition among jurisdictions? Look at the "do business in Alabama" or "do business in North Dakota" ads in any big business magazine.

1 year ago

in Goose, Gander, Sauce, Etc. on The Technology Liberation Front
Just because an excerpt is short, it's not necessarily fair use. Someone who puts up a "blog" that just cuts and pastes Mainstream Media stories is probably infringing.

1 year ago

in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Cell Phone Contracts & Contradictions on The Technology Liberation Front
Counterexample: Pre-breakup AT&T wasn't allowed to license Unix to customers, so the variety of Unix options on the market was huge.

1 year ago

in Shape of Libertarian IP Debate: Moebius Strip on The Technology Liberation Front
This is really another case where we need two words for "right". One for "natural right" or "human right" (right to free speech, right to keep and bear arms, right of privacy) and one for "rights within a system" (right of way, grazing right, IP right).

1 year ago

in Ideology on The Technology Liberation Front
Avoid Regular Users translates to "open" when you can make "the community" talk to the regular users for you. It translates to "closed" when you can license your software to the Phone Company and make them talk to regular users for you.

1 year ago

in Ideology on The Technology Liberation Front
The dominant ideology of Silicon Valley is Avoid Regular Users. Only talk to machines or to other nerds (who you make your "partners" or "channel" or "ISVs" on your platform or "community" of your open source project). The fewer regular users you deal with, the more 31337 you are.

1 year ago

in Insulting Our Intelligence on The Technology Liberation Front
Just to put a little perspective on this, remember Stewart Baker's Wall Street Journal piece, "Why Republicans should love Larry Lessig?"

"Viewed up close, copyright bears little resemblance to the kinds of property that conservatives value. Instead, it looks like a constantly expanding government program run for the benefit of a noisy, well-organized interest group­ like Superfund, say, or dairy subsidies, except that the benefits go not to endangered homeowners or hardworking farmers but to the likes of Barbra Streisand and Eminem."

On issues such as the DMCA and copyright expansion, it's Lessig who is talking about rolling back government intervention in the market.

1 year ago

in Larry Lessig, Demagogue? on The Technology Liberation Front
When did trying to reach a non-specialist audience make someone a "demagogue"? Was Carl Sagan a "demagogue" when he chose to use TV?

1 year ago

in Free Culture and Libertarianism, Again on The Technology Liberation Front
Why is the libertarian scene so tolerant and inclusive of rent-seekers using "property rights" rhetoric?

If the ILGWU started a DC-based lobbying organization to defend its members' "property rights" in their jobs, would that organization make the TLF blogroll?

1 year ago

in Code, Law, and Spontaneous Order on The Technology Liberation Front
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was law. Many of the "code is law" design choices are similar: they can cause big effects without necessarily implementing the lawmaker's intent.

1 year ago

in Techno Bashing on The Technology Liberation Front
This proposal to do a thesis on generating techno automatically looks like it was rejected. Too bad -- it would have saved a lot of bandwidth to generate techno on the fly locally instead of downloading.

1 year ago

in Another digital transition? Cuban says yes on The Technology Liberation Front
How granular is this decision? If, say, the citizens of Palo Alto, California recycle their last cable-connected analog TV set, could the city's cable provider cut them over to mega-broadband without breaking the analog version of the Old Government Footage of Airplanes Crashing Channel for the citizens of the next town over?

1 year ago

in IT Policy at Princeton on The Technology Liberation Front
Congratulations, Tim, and here's a World's Smallest Circumvention Device for your lab: //

1 year ago

in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » More on the DataTreasury Patents on The Technology Liberation Front
Tom, I haven't checked the TLF debating rules recently, but I think that when you get to posting that kind of you're-a-hippie-and-you-smell stuff, you automatically lose. If you check the profile, Tim works for the Cato Institute, which is a couple steps up on the public policy group food chain from your operation.

1 year ago

in OOXML: The Integrity of a Standards Body on The Technology Liberation Front
It would be appropriate to disclose here the business relationship between ACT and Microsoft.

1 year ago

in Dumb Pipes, a Dumb Idea: Net Neutrality as 21st Century Socialism on The Technology Liberation Front
Private property is private property. So no more eminent domain powers for telcos to install fiber through private property, right? If a farmer owns 40 acres in the path of a 1000-mile cable, can he now charge what the market will bear?

Hook me up with a cable that was installed without using eminent domain, and I won't ask for net neutrality on it.

1 year ago

in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » More on the DataTreasury Patents on The Technology Liberation Front
What is the business relationship between DataTreasury and Mr. Giovanetti's organization, Institute for Policy Innovation?

Any advocate for a government benefit will call his or her client's interests a "property right". That's Corporate Welfare 101. But calling it one doesn't make it one. (The Bill of Rights protects property, and Article 1 Section 8 allows, but does not require, the US to issue patents.)

Maybe ship owners will hire a think tank to put out a slick white paper about how the end of the Letters of Marque program (an Article 1, Section 8 power of Congress, like the patent system) is also a regulatory taking.

Or a "property right" in $5/acre mining patents on federal land, or a farmer's property right in sugar quotas, or hey, the longshoremen's union could find a property right in its members' jobs.

Fire up the PDF converter and book the conference center in Aspen...the possibilities are endless.
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