Blog: Technology

Maybe it's the criticism Verizon has been getting on blogs, in the press, from academics, and in Congress for its anticompetitive behavior. Maybe it's pressure from activist groups like Save the Internet. Maybe it's the upcoming spectrum auction, where the FCC implemented some (but not enough) rules to encourage mobile competition, and Verizon sees the writing on the wall. Maybe it's because they refused to launch the iPhone on their network, and instead Apple ended up with an exclusive with AT&T. Maybe it's Google's recent announcement of their open Android platform.

Whatever the reason, yesterday Verizon—the most control-freak-ish of mobile carriers, the one that cripples phones to disable WiFi or Bluetooth or anything that might compete with their high-priced service add-ons, the one that refused to give NARAL SMS access, whose BREW system locks out all but the deepest-pocketed developers—that same Verizon Wireless yesterday announced that it will open up its network to any phone, the "cellular Carterfone" Tim Wu has been advocating.

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Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal calls out the telephone companies for stifling innovation and limiting consumer choice. The telcos claim that their market is competitive, that they are empowering rather than restricting their customers, but unlike Congress, Mossberg isn't fooled. (Mossberg doesn't receive tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the telcos.)

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 ... severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world.

That's why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the "Soviet ministries." Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.

Great framing by Mossberg, and great that someone of his stature is laying out the facts.

The Bush administration has been remarkably successful at spreading false information simply by repeating it over and over. And according to a few recent psychological studies reported in the Washington Post, even if the false information is being labeled false on a flyer or being debunked by a public official, just repeating the statement to rebut it can actually reinforce it in people's minds.

In a nation built on free speech, and where civil libertarians are fond of saying that "the solution to bad speech is more speech," these findings illuminate the difficulty of fighting misinformation. Appropriately, two days ago the Yale Law Journal ran a set of online articles discussing ways to fight Internet harassment such as the defamatory material on AutoAdmit.com that roiled the law school community last year.

Most of the Yale Law Journal articles suggest regulation such as imposing notice-and-takedown rules on search engines, but none of the proposed solutions would really fix the problem, and James Grimmelmann argues against censoring search engines, effectively and rightly in my opinion. The Post article suggests a few better ways to argue without repeating the false information, like "Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11" rather than "Saddam Hussein did not attack us, Bin Laden did", but acknowledges that such transformations may not be possible.

In both cases, we're still stuck with the problem that it's easier to anonymously defame someone than for the victim to clear his or her name, and it's easier to mislead the American public than to stand up for the truth.

Advocates of a completely unregulated broadband ISP market argue that left to its own devices, ISPs will offer the array of products to consumers that best fit consumers' needs at the optimal price points.

Yet for millions of people who live in Comcast's service area, there is only one choice for fast Internet - Comcast. And Comcast gives customers two choices: residential cable Internet for around $60/month, or business Internet for $1500/month. But residential cable has a secret bandwidth limit, and as Consumer Affairs reports, if customers exceed the limit, Comcast cuts them off. Want to pay more for twice the download capacity, like you can on with cell phone minutes? Too bad, no.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Justice believes that everything is peachy keen in Internet land. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge debunks the DOJ, comparing the range of broadband Internet choices in the U.S. (for most people, that's just one, and for lucky people, two) with the huge array in the UK. The Consumerist arranges it into a nice side by side comparison chart.

Why can't we have a real market with real competition, instead of ideologues like those at the DOJ using "free market" rhetoric to actually stifle the development of an actual free market? Sounds like the people at the DOJ didn't get past the first chapter in their economics textbooks, to the part where it explains how barriers to entry are one of the primary impediments to a healthy market.

We've all sat in a hot, stuffy room, uncomfortable, and know the amazing feeling of a brief gust of wind blowing fresh air into the room, cutting through the muggy feel just briefly before subsiding, leaving us craving more. Last night's Democratic debate felt that way. CNN opened a window - brief, limited, controlled - but they opened it, and the refreshing feel of the outside air tasted so delicious.

I had the opportunity to attend last night's South Carolina Democratic debate in person. The room looked and felt like any other produced, managed television event. The candidates started out rehearsed, giving their prepared sound bites in response to each question. But the questions were real, as were the questioners, and as the debate went on, the candidates changed. Not radically, but they began to respond more directly to the questions. They started talking to the questioners. They resisted when Anderson Cooper tried to force them to discuss trivialities like whether they have chartered campaign planes instead of the real issues of global warming. While of the campaign videos followed tired old campaign commercial patterns, a few were funny and felt genuine.

Television still dominates politics and candidates still speak in a way that will play on TV. Last night was one debate, but cable news continues to fill tens of thousands of hours with content controlled by a small group of journalists. Still, last night, we could see a glimmer of a better way where candidates speak to citizens. Briefly, a gust of fresh air was swirling through that large auditorium. The Internet is blowing this fresh air through the rooms of our politics, our economy, and our culture. Anyone can blog, or sell their own t-shirts, or release their own music.

To some, however, this open economy is scary and dangerous. How can we know which books are good without Barnes and Noble to select them? How can we avoid buying shoddy jewelry or fake silver without the controls retailers have in place? And what will happen to a civilized centrist political consensus when just anyone gets to speak their opinions? To some, the gust of air is chilly and brings in the salty smell of the sea and a whiff of garbage. Maybe conditioned air is best. Maybe we should leave it to the professional HVAC technicians to manage our air.

In the early days of the Internet, you could sign up for access through a service like AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe, which resembled shopping malls. Each piece of content was carefully selected by editors. Or, you could get direct Internet access, which had enormously more content to read, communities to join, and products to buy, but it also carried spam and other dangers, fooling people into buying worthless penny stocks or giving their bank account numbers to Nigerian scammers. More content and community, because nobody had to ask AOL for permission to be on the Internet. Spam, because even the spammers didn't have to ask permission.

Most of our communications networks work more like AOL than the Internet. Television and cable professionals decide what you see on TV. The cable companies decide what channels to offer. Radio managers choose shows for their stations. And Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile determine which phones to offer and in many cases what applications you are allowed to install on those phones. They want to keep the air clean (according to their standards). You can choose between AT&T and Sprint, between NBC and CBS, and they do compete vigorously, but within a professionally selected range of offerings. Nothing unpredictable, but little participation from citizens and limited innovation from entrepreneurs.

Without the openness of the Internet, we wouldn't be experiencing the tremendous growth of citizen involvement in politics. Without it, we couldn't learn about nearly any subject instantly from Wikipedia – even if the information hasn’t been vetted by gatekeeping Britannica editors. Without it, we couldn't buy all the many hard-to-find products on eBay from around the world – even if they don’t come with corporate guarantees of quality. Without it, millions of people wouldn't be finding love on dating sites – though they occasionally meet sketchy people as well. The market chose the freewheeling Internet model over AOL's controlled "walled garden". Internet access boomed while the managed online services went out of business. Clearly, citizens are willing to be unpredictable and take advantage of open systems. And I believe citizens are able and willing to be their own gatekeepers, which has worked on sites like Craigslist and Digg.

Many of the former gatekeepers are opening up to the idea of opening up, even if begrudgingly. Newspapers are blogging to remain relevant as subscriptions decline. Candidates are competing for supporters on Facebook and MySpace. And CNN is letting citizens write the debate questions. Meanwhile, others are fighting the trend. Many pundits and commentators attack bloggers. Books about the Internet "killing our culture" get widespread attention and praising reviews in the New York Times. The RIAA, according to Rolling Stone, is facing obsolescence because it refused to try to work with the Internet constructively.

So far, the telephone and cable companies are choosing to hold on to old, closed business models. An upcoming auction of new wireless spectrum could follow "open access" principles to create a new wireless network more like the Internet, but Verizon and AT&T so far oppose this. We should give consumers this choice between the current networks and an open one. Net Neutrality is about preserving the ability to choose an open network as new fiber-optic networks replace today's DSL and dial-up modems.

The fresh air of creative citizen participation is starting to blow into Presidential politics through the window CNN opened. And this week, we have an opportunity to open the window in telecommunications as well. Senator Dick Durbin is conducting a series of discussions on OpenLeft.com to make policy by talking to citizens.

The question we ask ourselves when choosing a President is what kind of America we want. The question we must ask ourselves and Senator Durbin is the same - what kind of network do we want? Should we leave it to the professionals to decide what applications we use and what content we see? Or do we want the Internet to keep being open, so anyone can blog or sell products or create the next Amazon or Facebook without permission? Do we want to expand that openness to mobile technology? Or do we want to return to the tight control of the AOL era, or Presidential questions being written by a small panel of Washington elites? I hope Senator Durbin will open the windows. It's awfully stuffy in here.

In fifth grade, we did a unit on advertising. During that unit, the class learned to sing classic advertising jingles in chorus, like "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener." One I remember most clearly is the Ajax tune, which Wikipedia claims is television's oldest ad jingle dating from 1948:

Use Ajax (ba dum ba)
The foaming cleanser (ba dum ba dum bum bum)
Floats the dirt right down the drain
You'll stop paying the elbow tax
When you start cleaning with Ajax

These days, Ajax is more well known as the "Asynchronous Javascript and XML" combination of technologies that lets a Web application talk to the Web server behind the scenes without requiring the user to go to a new page after every action - a technology popularized after Paul Buchheit and his team doggedly insisted on building a Javascript interface for Gmail, ignoring many objections from superiors until he proved that you can indeed build a kick-ass interface in Javascript.

I knew all the fundamentals of Ajax but never got around to actually writing an app in it, until today. I needed to do some annotating of my images as part of a project to link them to Facebook, and I wanted to be able to flip through many images quickly. After about half a day of coding, I now have a simple application that loads images behind the scenes, captures clicks appropriately, sends them back to the server, and keeps loading more images as needed.

I actually ended up having to figure through a few less simple pieces of Ajax, like how to keep a set of separate concurrent asynchronous XMLHTTPRequests going at the same time without them bumping into each other. But once you get the hang of the basics, it's quite simple to stop paying the elbow tax and start programming with Ajax.

Apple's iPhone is being released today amid tremendous anticipation and publicity. Several people have asked me if I'm going to buy one. But despite the great innovation it represents in mobile technology, the iPhone is also a step backward for some of the worst practices of the mobile industry, and I'm not planning to get one.

The phone will only work on AT&T's network, unlike other GSM phones, making it impossible for a customer to lawfully purchase it and then connect it to another GSM network in the U.S. (T-Mobile) or any GSM system overseas. This is the same AT&T that recently announced its intention to built technology to spy on its customers on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA.

AT&T will charge an early termination fee if you cancel service, even though they don't subsidize the phone at all, despite the widespread claim in the mobile industry that the purpose of the ETFs is to recoup their cost of providing a free or discounted phone with activation.

And worst of all, the iPhone doesn't allow third party applications at all - even worse than Verizon's practice, the previous worst, of requiring all application writers to go through an arduous approval process and pay high costs to Verizon. The iPhone does allow AJAX Web apps to run on the phone's Safari browser, which ameliorates much of the problem, but that has many limits, most of which aren't yet known. Will the apps be able to access the camera or microphone? (Porbably not.) Will they be able to take advantage of the innovative input gestures like zooming by moving fingers closer or farther? Access the address book? Save files locally? Apple could have built an API for developers, but they've never been particularly interested in fostering a development community around their technology.

Many defenders of wireless industry practices like early termination fees and locking argue that if consumers really cared about these things, they wouldn't purchase phones and plans with them. Well, I'm not purchasing an iPhone. And I hope you won't either.

Working Assets Wireless has launched a campaign to pressure Steve Jobs to unlock the iPhone for any network and has done a terrific job of building awareness of Apple's and AT&T's anti-innovation, anti-consumer practices. I encourage you to sign their petition, and most of all, don't buy an iPhone.

This is really cool. It's a tabletop computer where you can manipulate objects with your fingers, like drawing or resizing photos and maps. Best of all, if you place a device on it, like a camera with wireless capability, it can automatically get the pictures out, or let you drag them into a phone.

Manipulating digital images is a complex task, and difficult for many people. Maybe this kind of interface can finally make it intuitive and accessible.

The result of today's meandering exploration of Wikipedia and the Web: Some esoteric programming languages such as Piet (programs look like modern art such as that created by Piet Mondrian) and Chef (programs are also recipes).

Piet "hello world", which prints "Hello, world!":

And in Chef, here's Fibonacci Numbers with Caramel Sauce, a program that generates the first 100 Fibonacci numbers and also makes a lot of caramel sauce.

Those of us who aren't women don't always realize the verbal abuse many receive from asshole men. Here's an example.

At Drinking Liberally on Thursday, Jill made an interesting point: while women can at least walk away and try to forget the harassment (not fun, for sure), when this behavior goes online, the nasty words never go away. A group of juvenile law students ran a contest in February to identify the "hottest" women at "top 14" law schools. (As Jill pointed out: why top 14? Wonder which school they were from?)

The contest organizers posted pictures from the women's online profiles, and posters on the forum quickly started denigrating the students, especially those who asked to have their pictures removed. According to the UVA Law Weekly:

AutoAdmit members continually referred to some of these UVA Law students as "whores" and "sluts," among other terms too obscene to print. In other representative threads, an anonymous AutoAdmit poster wrote about performing sex acts on them, while another told them to "[g]et raped." What's more, nearly all of these threads are accessible through any Google search that includes the students' names.

Jessica Valenti, one person who has been subjected to completely undeserved humiliation online, wrote a terrific article about sexist conduct online.

Is this what people are really like? Sexist and violent? Misogynist and racist? Alice Marwick, a postgraduate student in New York studying culture and communication, says: "There's the disturbing possibility that people are creating online environments purely to express the type of racist, homophobic, or sexist speech that is no longer acceptable in public society, at work, or even at home."

While the obscenity thrown at bloggers like Jessica and Jill is completely inexcusable, at least they have chosen to be public spokespeople and are, sadly, used to this sort of abuse. Not so the other women on the AutoAdmit contest, whose names have been withheld from press accounts but for whom an online search brings up pages of postings with titles calling them "bitches" by name and making claims about the size or genuineness of their breasts.

The women most suffering from this search-results besmirching are those who have little online presence and who have unusual names, because there are fewer conflicting pages that might beat out the defamatory ones on a search. Civil libertarians (with whom I almost always agree) like to say that the solution to bad speech is more speech, and so in this case one effective remedy is to go public (leading to news stories that will outrank the abusive posts) or write a blog.

However, all of these remedies make the subject an even more public person, and this means that privacy is often a one-way trap door. Once lost, privacy can never be regained, and some people have it taken from them in what clearly a violation of these women. Friends who have avoided making Facebook or Friendster profiles, particularly women, often cite the fear of losing this privacy. Will we read a trend story in the New York Times one day of couples giving their children common names in a deliberate attempt to create some privacy in a world where that is increasingly difficult to preserve?