Broadcast and audio flags, learn from history

The recording and movie industries want to force a "broadcast flag" and "audio flag" into TV and radio transmissions, and require all electronic manufacturers to enforce these flags to prohibit unauthorized copying and redistribution of such content. These flags have been entered into Sen. Stevens' telecom reform bill, and Sen. Sununu has a proposed amendment to take them out. This issue is being discussed in committee today, so if you've got a Senator on this list, call them today and ask them to support the Sununu amendment to remove both flags from the bill (there's a separate Sununu amendment that only removes the audio flag):

Chairman Ted Stevens (AK), (202) 224-3004                                
John McCain (AZ), (202) 224-2235                                         
Conrad Burns (MT), Main: 202-224-2644                                    
Trent Lott (MS), (202) 224-6253                                          
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), (202) 224-5922                                
Gordon H. Smith (OR), (202) 224 3753
John Ensign (NV), (202) 224-6244                                         
George Allen (VA), (202) 224-4024                                        
John E. Sununu (NH), (202) 224-2841                                      
Jim DeMint (SC), (202) 224-6121                                          
David Vitter (LA),(202) 224-4623                                         
Co-Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (HI), (202) 224-3934                        
John D. Rockefeller (WV), (202) 224-6472                                 
John F. Kerry (MA), (202) 224-2742                                       
Barbara Boxer (CA), (202) 224-3553                                       
Bill Nelson (FL), (202) 224-5274                                         
Maria Cantwell (WA), (202) 224-3441                                      
Frank R. Lautenberg (NJ), (202) 224-3224                                 
E. Benjamin Nelson (NE), (202) 224-6551                                  
Mark Pryor (AR), (202) 224-2353

The Consumer Electronics Association has a new advertisement out that shows the lunacy of the arguments for these flags based on the past record of these industries crying wolf about the dangers of new technology:

“I forsee a marked deterioration in American music…and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines…” -John Philip Sousa on the Player Piano (1906)

“The public will not buy songs that it can hear almost at will by a brief manipulation of the radio dials.” -Record Label Executive on FM Radio (1925)

“But now we are faced with a new and very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the videocassette recorder.” -MPAA on the VCR (1982)

“When the manufacturers hand the public a license to record at home…not only will the songwriter tie a noose around his neck, not only will there be no more records to tape [but] the innocent public will be made an accessory to the destruction of four industries.” -ASCAP on the Cassette Tape (1982)

Matt Stoller refuses to come clean

Matt Stoller at MyDD wrote a blog post titled "Please lie to me about Net Neutrality" in which he repeated Tom Foremski's statement about Cox blocking Craigslist with a "blacklist," even though he was already aware that the issue had nothing to do with a blacklist. Now that the facts are well-known and accepted (including by Craig Newmark), he now insists that he never said anything to imply that Cox was intentionally blocking Craigslist, contrary to the written record, and accuses George Ou and David Berling at ZDNet of being "lying liars."

Look, Matt--why don't you just show some integrity and admit that you were mistaken to continue to repeat Foremski's statement after you knew there was no blacklist, and mistaken to claim that this issue has something to do with the kind of discrimination that network neutrality regulations intend to prohibit. When caught uttering falsehoods that you should have known were falsehoods, you should come clean and apologize, rather than engage in ad hominem arguments against those who point it out. Your continued demonization of your adversaries damages your credibility.

The future of connectivity options

Telco 2.0 has a nice list of types of connectivity options from a business and pricing model standpoint:

Name	Technical relationship of service and connectivity	Financial relationship of service and connectivity	Examples
vertically integrated interactive service	Integrated	Integrated	PSTN, mobile voice, SMS
vertically integrated broadcast service	Integrated	Integrated	FM radio, DVB-H
stand-alone best-effort connectivity	Separate	Separate	dial-up, today's broadband
QoS and billing enhanced connectivity	Application-aware; session/control plane integrated	Integrated	IMS
service-funded connectivity	Application-aware; no technical integration	Integrated	Skype Zones
user- or community-built free connectivity	Separate	Separate	Open Wi-Fi, basic muni service, mesh
local unrouted connectivity	Varies	No monetary exchange	Bluetooth, Family Radio Service
other connectivity	Application-agnostic	Tiered	Paris Metro pricing

They go on to give projections of the relative significance of each of these options from today through 2016--they foresee huge declines in the vertically integrated interactive service model and expansion of all of the others, with the greatest growth in the stand-alone best-effort connectivity model. That much is a pretty easy prediction based on the replacement of the PSTN with IP.

What's notable, though, is that there are other models besides stand-alone best-effort connectivity which they also see growing substantially, with QoS and billing enhanced connectivity the largest of those, through next-gen telco services like IMS.

Those who advocate network neutrality regulations should be careful not to endorse rules which would prohibit or impair the possibility of innovations using business models other than stand-alone best-effort connectivity.

Kentucky Governor blocks state employee access to critical blogs

Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R-KY), embroiled in scandal, has had the state block access to blogs reporting on the scandal, including the BlueGrassReport. The blocking was apparently put into place the day after the New York Times mentioned the BlueGrassReport blog. The list of blogs known to be blocked:

BlueGrassRoots
http://www.bluegrassroots.org/

The Compassionate eCommunity (Jonathan Miller)
http://compassionatecommunity.blogspot.com/

Kentucky Progress (David Adams)
http://kyprogress.blogspot.com/

Kentucky Republican Voice
http://kyrepublicanvoice.blogspot.com/

The Kentucky Democrat (Daniel Solzman)
http://kydem.blogspot.com/

Fletcher's administration is currently facing 15 indictments, including three misdemeanor charges against Fletcher himself for his role in a patronage scheme, forcing Democrats out of state civil service jobs and giving the jobs to his cronies. In the process he's lost 6 of his 9 cabinet members and is on his sixth press secretary since his 2003 election.

Content providers and ISPs: who really has the stronger hand?

George Ou points out a case where the content provider is already offering content only to the ISPs who enter into agreements with the content provider, rather than an ISP only allowing connectivity to content providers who enter into agreements with the ISP. While there are lots of examples of content providers making arrangements with individual users, it has been relatively rare that the arrangements are made on the part of an entire ISP. This is extremely common, however, in the cable industry, where there have frequently been disputes between content providers and cable companies which have led to content providers denying the use of certain popular channels unless the cable companies agreed to per-user fees or to carry other additional channels. A similar dust-up occurred in March 2004 in the direct broadcast satellite business, when Viacom and EchoStar (Dish Network) could not reach an agreement to carry some additional Viacom channels. So Viacom pulled local CBS channels it owned, MTV, Comedy Central, Nick at Night, BET, and other channels, until EchoStar budged.

In this case ESPN360 only makes its video content available to selected ISPs (including Adelphia and Verizon) but not to others (such as Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, and SBC). ESPN has regularly behaved similarly with respect to cable companies.

Proposed network neutrality regulations have had nothing to say about the inability of users to obtain content because content providers block their ISPs, or surcharges on ISPs by content providers for their users to have access to premium content. And this is even though there are often real monopolies on content (only a single provider owns it, and may completely control who has access to it, at least until it gets out to P2P networks), while there aren't any real monopolies on Internet access (though some network neutrality advocates have endorsed nationalization of "backbone," which would create a government monopoly).

I think that in general, the ISP does have more overall power and influence than the content provider, but there are exceptional cases where content providers like ESPN360 may have a stronger hand against ISPs. Overall, there's a lot more money spent on communications than there is on content (as Andrew Odlyzko's 2001 "Content is Not King" essay explained), and the real drivers of that spending are business and peer-to-peer communications, not content providers.

Digital camera blocking technology

Researchers at Georgia Tech have come up with a technology for preventing video cameras from working. The setup uses sensors to detect cameras from the reflectivity and shape of CCD sensors (or is it actually detecting the lens?), then directs a beam of light (potentially a laser) at the CCDs to prevent it from recording images. The prospective uses they suggest include prevention of piracy in movie theaters and as a countermeasure against espionage. Their small-area technology is apparently close to ready for commercialization, but the large-area version still has a ways to go.

The camera-neutralization technology "may never work against single-lens reflex cameras."

Let's hope it doesn't become a technology used to prevent the documentation of abuses, governmental or otherwise.

More details on apparent NSA interception at AT&T

Salon.com has a new article on a room in an AT&T facility in Bridgeton, MO (a St. Louis suburb) that may be an NSA interception facility. The room is protected by a man trap and biometric security, and the AT&T employees who are permitted to enter it had to get Top Secret security clearances. The work orders for setting up a similar room in a San Francisco AT&T office, reported by former AT&T worker Mark Klein, came from Bridgeton.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an ongoing class-action lawsuit against AT&T over its involvement in illegal NSA wiretapping.

Who's been using "pretexting" to get your phone records?

Back on January 8, I wrote a posting titled "Cell phone call records available online." In that post, I wrote about sites on the Internet where you can pay a fee and get the calling records for cell phones and long distance call records for land lines. The companies providing these services are typically private investigators who use "pretexting"--pretending to be the legitimate owner of the phone--in order to con phone companies into turning over the data. Some also used social engineering or exploited server security flaws to gain access to phone provider online web portals.

Subsequent to the publicity around that story, there was a brief attempt to pass a law making "pretexting" illegal for telephone records as it already is for financial records. Frankly, I think unauthorized use of someone's phone provider web portal account should already be illegal under most state computer crime statutes, and obtaining phone records through misrepresentation should constitute theft by deception or violation of identity theft statutes, but I am not a lawyer.

Now, we are learning who some of the major users of these services are: various offices of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, including the FBI; police departments in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, and Utah, and most likely hundreds of other police departments. These agencies are bypassing legal processes to obtain private phone records without warrants from private companies engaged in highly unethical if not illegal activity.

Hat tip: Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Update on Cox blocking of Craigslist

The original claim of a Cox "blacklist" originated from a statement by Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher. Foremski originally wrote:

Back on February 23rd Authentium acknowledged that their software is blocking Craigslist but it still hasn't fixed the problem, more than three months later. That's a heck of long time to delete some text from their blacklist.

Now, he says (quoted by George Ou at ZDNet):

I assumed there was a blacklist - I have no idea how Craigslist is being blocked

In fact, we know now that it's a combination of a bug in a firewall driver produced by Authentium software and unusual (but not incorrect) behavior by the Craigslist webserver setting the initial TCP window size to 0. The facts of the problem came out (at least between Craigslist, Cox, and Authentium) at the time the problem was first reported, was fixed in a beta release within weeks, and has only affected Cox customers who use Authentium's security suite.

BTW, I disagree with Richard Bennett and George Ou's remarks which attribute the problem entirely or largely to Craigslist--the behavior of the server is not contrary to the RFC. The initial SYN packet from the client to Craigslist is responded to by Craigslist with a SYN-ACK packet with window size of zero, which means don't send me any data, only an ACK. The client then sends an ACK (completing the three-way TCP handshake), at which point Craigslist sends an ACK packet with a larger window size which the pre-fix version of the Authentium software fails to process. The initial response of the Authentium software to slow down is a reasonable and apparently desired response by Craigslist--they want new clients to hold off transmitting data (an HTTP request) until they give the OK. Authentium took full responsibility for the problem, and they were right to do so.

The story from Foremski was uncritically repeated by Matt Stoller at MyDD, Timothy Karr at Save the Internet (and a couple of other blogs), and now in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), in a lapse from his normally good judgment about Internet-related matters (e.g., the Cox/Wyden Internet Freedom Act of 1995 and the Cox/Wyden Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998).

Stoller and Karr went on to repeat the "blacklist" claim even after having the full story, and I don't believe either of them has retracted the claim that this issue is relevant to the network neutrality debate.

Craig Newmark complains that he didn't get good responsiveness from Authentium, which Authentium disputes, but he has indicated satisfaction with Cox.

The story has been picked up by George Ou at ZDNet (here and here) and by Glenn Harlan Reynolds at Instapundit (here, here, and here).

This issue was a user software application issue that had no more to do with network neutrality than a browser incompatibility issue, a webserver disk failure, or a fiber cut. Each of these things can prevent a user from reaching some specific content, but none is imposed by the network provider or remedied by act of Congress or the FCC. Those who continue to treat it otherwise even after knowing the details are demonstrating questionable judgment and integrity.

UPDATE: Craig Newmark has now stated that there was no deliberate blocking here and the Authentium explanation is correct. I've exchanged a few emails with him asking whether the behavior of the Craigslist.org webserver is specifically intended to regulate the rate of new HTTP connections (and whether the behavior is coming from something like an application-layer switch negotiating the TCP handshake); he said he's passed that on to his technical team and I'll report here if I get confirmation or refutation on that point.

One puzzling paragraph of his latest blog post is this one:

One good outcome of this is that we flushed out a swiftboater (in the generic sense), and this helps me understand the way disinformation gangs operate. Unfortunately, in some blogs, a good guy has been linked with the swiftboater, which isn't fair, and hopefully, we can do something about that.

I'm not sure who he's calling a swiftboater, who he's calling a good guy, and who he's calling a disinformation gang. So far as I can see, the disinformation gang in this incident has been the "Save the Internet" crowd, who still have yet to admit the clear facts of the matter. I asked for clarification, but Craig declined to identify who he's referring to (except that he's not referring to Matt Stoller or Timothy Karr).

UPDATE: July 12, 2006: The Craigslist.org webserver has changed its behavior and no longer sends a SYN-ACK packet with a window size of 0; it now gives a window size of 4380. This change by Craigslist.org works as a fix to the Authentium issue. I wonder why they only made the change now.

China's mobile death vans

BLDGBLOG has some photos and information about China's mobile execution chambers, used to bring state lethal injection capability to poor localities that can't afford to build their own execution facilities. Amnesty International says they have evidence that Chinese police, courts, and hospitals are engaged in the organ trade, and suggest that the mobile death vans may be involved.

BLDBLOG cites USA Today reporting that there are 68 different crimes punishable by death in China, more than half of which are non-violent offenses such as tax evasion and drug smuggling. All executions are recorded on audio and video, and shown live to the local law enforcement authorities.

The only other country which had mobile death vans that I'm aware of was Germany under Adolf Hitler. The Einsatzgruppen's mobile killing units were known as "death vans," which used carbon monoxide gas for execution.