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January 16, 2003
Subscribers to AT&T broadband are having their email addresses switched for the third time in a year. Now they’ll be [email protected].
My guess is that there is no technical reason why the domain names are being switched. Rather, Comcast is using its customers as vehicles for its “brand. This is the clearest example I’ve seen of the confluence of the marketing and cattle farmer’s sense of “branding.”
January 15, 2003
The opposite of permission is generosity
January 11, 2003
I heard from Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. He teaches a graduate course in “Mind, Media and Society” at the University of Toronto, my alma mater. He writes: “Essentially the course teaches people to think like Marshall McLuhan did… you know… come up with cute aphorisms, predict the future, that sort of stuff…” The course has a blog jam-packed with ideas. Here’s part of an entry:
We began the “Applied McLuhanistics” course last evening. If the nature of the discussion at the first class is any indication, this will be a lively and most interesting term! We left the seminar with the following probe: The invention of the phonetic alphabet changed us from a primarily oral culture to a primarily literate culture (starting in ancient Greek times, and accelerated by Gutenberg). The effect of this transition was, among other things, to create private, silent reading (via books), hence private ideas and therefore personal identity and individuality. Now that the acceleration of instantenous, multi-way communications has put us back into “acoustic space” (centre is everywhere/anywhere, boundaries are nowhere), we are regaining our oral culture. (This is one aspect that led Marshall McLuhan to note that we are “retribalizing” in the sense that we move back to acoustic space, from which the Global Village metaphor emerged.) What effect might the nature of Internet as acoustic space have on personal identity, individuality, privacy and so on? Do we still have privacy, or is there a new medium of “publicy” that emerges?
Whew! Nice paragraph!
January 9, 2003
If you’re going to join the lunch on Friday the 10th celebrating the first anniversary of Halley’s blog – also, an excuse for Boston bloggers to get together – please note that the location has changed. We’ are now meeting at Yenching Chinese Restaurant in Harvard Square at noon. See you there! (Map)
Here is Kevin Werbach’s reply (in email) to the speculation that I repeated here, that the FCC’s reversal on providing competitive access to telephone networks might have something to do with national security. Says Kevin, a former FCC wonk:
I’m pretty confident, based on my personal knowledge of the FCC and Michael Powell, that this isn’t what’s going on. I’m not a defender of what the FCC is doing. But they are removing one mechanism for competitors to use Bell company networks, which has only been in existence for three years or so, not eliminating the right of competitors to interconnect and buy unbundled elements from the Bells (which is mandated by the 1996 Telecom Act).
Whatever Poindexter and his cronies may be cooking up, I don’t believe the FCC is deliberately trying to limit the number of carriers. The closest thing one could claim is that the FCC thinks some of the competitors exist only because of un-economic artificial subsidies.
There was a lively debate post-9/11 about whether what happened in Lower Manhattan proved that we need to strengthen the monopoly local carriers (Verizon’s argument) or just the opposite, because diversity of networks allowed for greater resiliency and faster disaster recovery (the CLEC argument). It’s important to continue fighting this battle. But the arguments will get much less credence if they are couched in terms of the TIA bogeyman.
January 7, 2003
The Norwegian kid being tried for playing DVDs on his computer, bypassing the DeCSS encryption, has been found innocent by the court.
Woohoo!
I can’t remember where I read this — email? blog? — but someone has pointed out that while overall music CD sales were down in 2002, the average sale per CD went up, and in a down market no less.
Has anyone ever pointed out that the RIAA is a lying sack o’ ordure?
Jonathan Peterson writes in the comments to this blog entry:
You’re probably thinking of George Zimmerman’s RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add Up to Piracy
Along that line, if you purchased retail CDs between 1995 and 2000 you should sign up for the settlement against RIAA for price fixing.
Thanks, Jonathan.
December 30, 2002
I’d blog more, but our downstairs tenants (it’s a 2-family house) have just had their (= our) oil heater turned off by The Officials. Jeez, like a some smoke and sparks ever hurt anyone!
So, now it’s off to spend the rest of the day and thousands of dollars getting it fixed. Gas conversion here we come!
December 29, 2002
December 27, 2002
Lord bless Bryan Field-Elliot over at NetMeme. Bryan is a founder of PingID,
a member-owned, technology-neutral network that is facilitating the business framework necessary for the accelerated deployment of federated identity services.
He’s also a straightforward guy. In response to Doc‘s call for “full-power” digital IDs in order to give power back to “consumers,” Bryan writes:
There’s an important relationship here with DRM (Digital Rights Management), which I think has been danced around quite enough, and should be brought into the spotlight. The relationship is, quite simply, that “Strong Identity” (what Doc calls “full power”) is synomymous with Digital Rights Management. You can’t have one without the other.
Why not? Bryan explains:
In both cases, one party (individual, or content megaconglomerate) produces digital content (personal info, or a $100mln movie), and makes it available for consumption by other parties, but only with some assurance that the information won’t be copied or applied in undesired ways. The two problem patterns, and their range of solutions, appear pretty much identical to me.
…by the nature of information (which “wants to be free”, it’s said), we can never have Doc’s “full power” identity infrastructure without some enforcement teeth.
As far as I can see, only hardware enforcement, or legal enforcement, will provide such a bite, and in both cases, likely to be circumventable by the sufficiently determined.
It’s good to see the relationship of DRM and digID made explicit. Too often those pushing for digID avoid acknowleding the relationship.
So, let’s get yet more clear about the relationship of DRM and digID. Bryan is not saying (I assume) that the two can’t be distinguished the way you can’t separate “automobile” from “car” or “wet” from “liquid water.” Rather, he says, “you can’t have one without the other.”
And here I disagree. We could have digIDs that are used solely for enabling us prove we’re the one that sent an email, to enable online voting, and to prove that we are the holder of the credit cards we use to buy stuff online. And, as Bryan acknowledges, we can have DRM without digID; DRM just wouldn’t “have teeth.”
But it all depends on what you mean by teeth. Bryan says he accepts “legal enforcement” as a type of tooth. You don’t need digIDs to crack down on pirates who are taping movies on their first day of release and posting the files on the Net or to arrest the pirates who are mass producing bootleg CDs. You can even crack down on Kazaa “super nodes” or students at the Naval Academy who are downloading MP3s. You only need digIDs if you want to make it technologically nigh impossible to do what you want with the content you’ve downloaded. You only need digIDs if you want your ownership rights to be regulated at the bit level by the people from whom you’ve bought the content. You only need digIDs if your idea of DRM is CPPSROSE: “Content Providers’ Post-Sale Rigid and One-Sided Enforcement.” For more reasonable digital rights management we don’t need digIDs.
So, it’s good to surface the fact that when many people talk about digital IDs, they’re often really talking about DRM. But, IMO we need to be damn sure not to define DRM solely as the right of content providers to prevent us from using the content we’ve bought in the ways we see fit within the bounds of law.
Now Bryan, who understands this stuff 100x better than I, can set me straight…
Bryan’s posted a response. Here’s what he says (from an email to me):
I think we disagree mostly because I didn’t make clear enough in my original post, the difference between using DigID to “prove who you are” (what we do today), vs. using DigID to “control others’ use of your personal info” (which we don’t have today, and which Doc has variously named “Strong Identity” or “Sovereign Identity”). I believe, your response to me assumes I’m comparing the former to DRM, when actually I’m comparing the latter to DRM.
In his blog, Bryan says: “In classic security terms, we’re talking about taking authentication as a given, and moving up the chain to a flexible authorization system for access to personal information.” DRM gives the vendor the ability to authorize our use of the goods we buy, so I can see that formally digID and DRM are the same. Thanks for the clarification, Bryan (and did I get it right?).
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