Losing our Edge?

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Tom Friedman writes about a recent trip to Silicon Valley:

Still others pointed out that the percentage of Americans graduating with bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan, and that U.S. government investments are flagging in basic research in physics, chemistry and engineering. Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.
The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I’ve been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can’t wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.

Curriculum was and is a hot topic in the Madison School District.
Further, the tech industry has been playing footsie with Hollywood (ironic, given the size of the tech industry vs Hollywood) regarding our fair use rights. Dan Gillmor has recently published a draft version of his upcoming book: Making the News. Chapter 11 includes some very troubling quotes:

  • Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America): “And he was adamant that technology in the future — including personal computers — will have to be modified to prevent people from making unauthorized copies.. The result: “Give the copyright holders the ability to “fix” all of its perceived infringement problems, and you give copyright holders unprecedented control over tomorrow’s information, over culture itself. Here’s an example: It is currently illegal to copy a snippet of video directly from a DVD to use as part of another work. But you can do this with a piece of text, though the e-book industry is working to prevent even a small cut and paste. If we need permission, or have to pay, simply to quote from other works, scholarship will be only one casualty.”
  • No technology company has done more to curry favor with the copyright cartel than Microsoft, a company that repeatedly ignored copyright law in building its own powerful business. Here’s how Cory Doctorow put it:

    When Microsoft shipped its first search-engine (which makes a copy of every page it searches), it violated the letter of copyright law. When Microsoft made its first proxy server (which makes a copy of every page it caches), it broke copyright law. When Microsoft shipped its first CD-ripping technology, it broke copyright law.
    It broke copyright law because copyright law was broken. Copyright law changes all the time to reflect the new tools that companies like Microsoft invent. If Microsoft wants to deliver a compelling service to its customers, let it make general-purpose tools that have the side-effect of breaking Sony and Apple’s DRM, giving its customers more choice in the players they use. Microsoft has shown its willingness to go head-to-head with antitrust people to defend its bottom line: next to them, the copyright courts and lawmakers are pantywaists, Microsoft could eat those guys for lunch, exactly the way Sony kicked their asses in 1984 when they defended their right to build and sell VCRs, even though some people might do bad things with them. Just like the early MP3 player makers did when they ate Sony’s lunch by shipping product when Sony wouldn’t.
    Unfortunately, Microsoft’s answer has been to build Digital Rights Management — the more appropriate term is “Digital Restrictions Management” — into just about everything it makes.

  • Microsoft, Intel and several other major technology companies are now working on a “Trusted Computing” initiative, putatively designed to prevent viruses and worms from taking hold of people’s PCs and to keep documents secure from prying eyes. Sounds good, but the effect may be devastating to information freedom. The premise of these systems is not trust; it’s mistrust. In effect, says security expert Ross Anderson, trusted computing “will transfer the ultimate control of your PC from you to whoever wrote the software it happens to be running.” He goes on:


    [Trusted Computing] provides a computing platform on which you can’t tamper with the application software, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other. The original motivation was digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a TC platform, but which you won’t be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won’t be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you’ll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.

    But now consider the ways it could be used, beyond simple tracking by copyright holders of what they sell. Anderson writes:

    The potential for abuse extends far beyond commercial bullying and economic warfare into political censorship. I expect that it will proceed a step at a time. First, some well-intentioned police force will get an order against a pornographic picture of a child, or a manual on how to sabotage railroad signals. All TC-compliant PCs will delete, or perhaps report, these bad documents. Then a litigant in a libel or copyright case will get a civil court order against an offending document; perhaps the Scientologists will seek to blacklist the famous Fishman Affidavit. A dictator’s secret police could punish the author of a dissident leaflet by deleting everything she ever created using that system – her new book, her tax return, even her kids’ birthday cards – wherever it had ended up. In the West, a court might use a confiscation doctrine to `blackhole’ a machine that had been used to make a pornographic picture of a child. Once lawyers, policemen and judges realise the potential, the trickle will become a flood.

    The Trusted Computing moves bring to mind a conversation in early 2000 with Andy Grove, longtime chief executive at Intel and one of the real pioneers in the tech industry. He was talking about how easy it would soon be to send videos back and forth with his grandchildren. If trends continued, I suggested, he’d someday need Hollywood’s permission. The man who wrote the best-seller, “Only the Paranoid Survive,” then called me paranoid. Several years later, amid the copyright industry’s increasing clampdown and Intel’s unfortunate leadership in helping the copyright holders lock everything down, I asked him if I’d really been all that paranoid. He avoided a direct reply.

I’ve often wondered if our tech industry & hollywood’s attempts to impose their fair use & big brother controls on PC’s will destroy their export business (and our jobs). China and intel recently battled over a wireless security spec.

EFF honors Pioneer Award Winners

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently announced the recipients of its 2004 Pioneer awards:

Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed the winners of the Thirteenth Annual Pioneer Awards.
Focusing on the area of electronic voting security and accountability, they have highlighted the work of Kim Alexander, the president of the California Voter Foundation, David Dill, a Stanford Professor and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, and Avi Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored the highly publicized Diebold report of 2003.

From Slashdot.

Virtual Field Trip: The Wright Brothers

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The Apple Learning Interchange has posted a virtual field trip: The Wright Start

The invention of the airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright is one of the great stories in American history. It tells of the creation of a world-changing technology at the opening of an exciting new century, an era full of promise and confidence in the future. At the center of the tale are two talented, yet modest, Midwestern bicycle shop proprietors, whose inventive labors and achievement transformed them from respected small-town businessmen into international celebrities. The influence of their invention on the 20th century is beyond measure. The transport by air of goods and people, quickly and over great distances, and the military applications of flight technology, have had global economic, geopolitical, and cultural impact. The Wrights’ invention not only solved a long-studied technical problem, but also fashioned a radically new world.

Is American Healthcare more Productive?

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Tyler Cowen writes a useful summary of our healthcare system’s costs & productivity vs other nations:

The relevant measures were either life expectancy after treatment or measures of the quality of life. And how about the results:
The United States is more productive in all these diseases except for diabetes in the United Kingdom. [emphasis added] The reasons for this result can be traced directly to the huge differences in the way the health care sector is organized and governed across these three countries. The UK health care system is almost entirely government owned and run…The result has been that the United Kingdom has no invested as quickly in technologies that have dramatically improved the diagnostic capabilities of medicine and significantly reduced recovery time…Germany, on the other hand, has a system more like the United States had twenty years ago. In Germany, medical expenses are paid for on a task-by-task basis for services of doctors and hospitals. As a result, hospitals in Germany have no financial incentive to reduce length of stay.

Ocean Policy Report Released

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Felicity Barringer writes about the Ocean Commission’s new strategy for safeguarding the sea:

“Our oceans and coasts are in serious trouble,” the commission’s chairman, Adm. James D. Watkins, a former chief of naval operations, said at a news conference here today. The existing management system, which spreads responsibility across what he called “a Byzantine patchwork” of federal and state agencies and local fishing councils, “is simply not up to the task” of preventing degradation, Admiral Watkins said.

The Political Promise of the Internet

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Mitch Kapor writes about Korean politics, where a two year old party, The Uri (Our Party) decisively took over the National Assembly in last week’s elections:

It was done using the Net. It is no accident that the political coming-of-age of the Net came about in Korea where almost 70% of its households are broadband connected. Starting as a social movement organized through the Net, the new Uri party became a political phenomena.
In December 2002, the Uri party used the Net to go around Korea’s traditional political structures and elect Roh Moo-hyun President. Korea’s national politics have traditionally been regionally based. However, using the Net, the Uri put together a new political coalition based not on geography, but age, bringing together those under 30. Paradoxically, the Uri also used the Net to involve citizens at local face to face meetings.
The Net was used to begin to break the overwhelming political influence of Korea’s giant corporate conglomerates, the chaebols, who funded (both legally and illegitimately) much of Korea’s politics. The Uri use the Net to help fund their campaign with tens of thousands of small contributions.

Key Points: The Uri used the internet to route around the establishment (including entrenched media companies who have an interesting in keeping the establishment in power). Here’s a Saudi Blogger’s “diary of life in the “Magic Kingdom”, where the Religious Police ensure that everything remains as it was in the Middle Ages.” via Jeff Jarvis.

The Copyright Killing Fields

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J.D. Lasica writes about copyright law and its challengers:

For years, all was peaceful in the house of Horowitz. Jed Horowitz, a 53-year-old New Jersey entrepreneur with sharply chiseled features and gleaming bald head, had been running a small video operation called Video Pipeline that took Hollywood films, created two-minute trailers to help promote them, and distributed them to online retailers such as Netflix, BestBuy, and Barnes and Noble, as well as public libraries. Then one day in 2000, the Walt Disney Co. sent a cease-and-desist order, charging that Horowitz’s company was violating Disney’s copyright by featuring portions of their movies online.

FTC to evaluate “spyware”

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Or – why Windows PC’s can be unsafe at any speed. Yuki Noguchi writes

The Federal Trade Commission today is hosting a daylong workshop in Washington to discuss the effects of hidden software that may be used to control or spy on a computer without its user’s knowledge.
So far most “spyware” and “adware” programs, often placed on Windows PCs by such downloaded programs as file-sharing programs, appear to have been used for the relatively benign purpose of tracking consumer preferences, said Howard Beales, director of the FTC’s consumer protection division. The FTC is watching to see if criminals start making widespread use of this technology to steal credit-card and Social Security numbers of unwitting computer users, he said.
“So far [we] haven’t thought that it warranted regulation,” he said.

Some organizations, including the Madison schools, only support a computing monoculture – fertile ground for spyware…..

Good teaching matters….

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Alan Borsuk continues his recent series of education articles with a profile of five Milwaukee area teachers. One of them, Louise Guinn remarks:

“We push a lot for the kids to be successful.” And she is convinced all her students – all black, almost all from low-income homes – can learn “if given the right opportunities and the right environment.
She says she urges parents to limit television and to read more at home. Children are influenced by this.
But she also knows that many of her students lead challenging lives. During a class discussion of what fourth-graders can do that infants can’t, making your bed is mentioned by one student. Another says he doesn’t have to do that because he sleeps on the floor. Guinn understands that this means he doesn’t have a bed of his own.