Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2013

Trying to prevent another “flash crash”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Tim Harford discusses high speed trading and its potential problems:

“High-frequency trading” is a rich environment of algorithms, of predators and prey, all trying to make money by trading financial products at tremendous speed. But the basic proposition is simple to state. When the price of a share rises in New York, the price of related contracts will rise in Chicago just as soon as the news arrives. But if everyone else gets the news on the regular cable, and you’re renting space on the faster cable, you can see into everyone else’s future by (say) 0.7 milliseconds, plenty of time to buy soon-to-rise assets and then, less than a thousandth of a second later, to sell them again.

You don’t have to be a socialist to find this kind of thing discomfiting. There are three concerns. The first is that scarce resources are being spent on high-speed connections that have no social value in what is at best a zero-sum game. The second is that high-frequency traders may be making money at the expense of fundamental investors. The third problem is that such trading appears to introduce systemic risks. The “flash crash” of May 2010 is still poorly understood, which should ring alarm bells — especially since the need for speed means most high-frequency algorithms are simple and therefore stupid.

What, then, should be done? Rather than trying to slow down the algorithms, why not slow down the market? Most financial exchange markets run continuously, effectively assuming that traders can react instantaneously, withdrawing out-of-date offers and replacing them with up-to-the-picosecond prices. It’s this flawed premise — that all trades could be instantaneous — that means that no matter how fast the computers get, there will always be an incentive to go faster still.

A simple way for an exchange to improve matters would be to run an auction once a second, batching together all the offers to buy and sell that have been submitted during that second. Unsuccessful bids and asks would be published and would remain on the books for the next auction, unless withdrawn. One auction a second ought to be enough for anyone; it would deliver a stream of well-behaved data to regulators — currently unable to figure out what is going on — and it is plenty of time for a computer to weigh its options.

July 5, 2013

And now, a five-minute sales pitch for Thorium nuclear reactors

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

A short video of Kirk Sorensen taking us through the benefits of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, a revolutionary liquid reactor that runs not on uranium, but thorium. These work and have been built before. Search for either LFTRs or Molten Salt Reactors (MSR).

FAQ
The main downsides/negatives to this technology, politics, corrosion and being scared of nuclear radiation. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors were created 50 years ago by an American chap named Alvin Weinberg, but the American Government realised you can’t weaponise the by-products and so they weren’t interested.

Another point, yes it WAS corrosive, but these tests of this reactor were 50 years ago, our technology has definitely improved since then so a leap to create this reactor shouldn’t be too hard.

And nuclear fear is extremely common in the average person, rather irrational though it may be. More people have died from fossil fuels and even hydroelectric power than nuclear power. I added this video for a project regarding Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, watch and enjoy.

No, it would not collapse the economy… just like the use of uranium reactors didn’t… neither did coal… This is because you wouldn’t have an instant transition from coal… oil… everything else to thorium. We could not do that. Simply due to the engineering. Give it 50 years we might be using thorium instead of coal/oil (too late in terms of global warming, but that’s another debate completely), but we certainly won’t destroy the earths economy. Duh.

And yes he said we’d never run out. Not strictly true… bloody skeptics … LFTRs can harness 3.5 million Kwh per Kg of thorium! 70 times greater than uranium, 10,000 greater than oil… and there is over 2.6 million tonnes of it on earth… Anyone with a calculator, or a brain, will understand that is a lot of energy!!

H/T to Rob Fisher for the link.

July 4, 2013

Virtual reality hardware coming to your local big box electronics store

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

In The New Yorker, Joel Johnson talks about the Oculus Rift, which may be available in retail stores by the end of the year:

Luckey’s garage creation, which soon was named the “Oculus Rift,” is not far from a smartphone with a headband. An L.C.D. screen spans across a plastic mask, sitting about an inch away from a user’s eyes; a barrier divides the display in two, effectively creating one screen for each eye. Motion sensors track the position of the wearer’s head, then feed this data across an umbilical cord to a computer, typically a gaming P.C. Instead of rendering one 3-D world to a single monitor, as in a typical first-person video game, such as Call of Duty, the computer renders the same 3-D world twice, from slightly different angles. It sends those two perspectives, side by side, to the Rift, creating the illusion of depth. Motion is controlled by the direction in which the wearer is looking; instead of using a mouse or a controller to direct your gaze in the 3-D world, a person simply needs to turn his head.

The Oculus Rift uses optical tricks to create the realistic sensation, like slightly warping the edges of the view in the computer, which is corrected by plastic lenses in the goggles. The pixels are more tightly packed directly in front of the eye, giving the perspective a roundness that feels more like human vision. It works. The Oculus Rift rivals — and will possibly exceed, when it hits the shelves sometime in late 2013 or mid-2014 — the best virtual-reality hardware available, military-grade or otherwise.

[. . .]

I’ve been testing the Oculus Rift for a month, and in it, virtual reality feels a lot like scuba diving. First, there is the mask. Then there is the strange disconnect between where your body actually is and where your mind, confused by the mask, is telling you that your body is located. This sensation of discombobulation is doubled in virtual reality, since the current version of the Oculus Rift doesn’t track your body or hands, only your head.

Still, more than any of its antecedents, the Oculus Rift is convincingly engrossing. Most of the several dozen people who have tried my Rift put the goggles on as skeptics, but removed them as believers that virtual reality, as a practical phenomenon, now exists.

On YouTube, WoodenPotatoes recently posted a video where he tried out his new Oculus Rift unit with the original Guild Wars Prophecies by ArenaNet. As he points out in the video, the game is in no way optimized for use with the Rift, but is still an interesting experiment:

July 2, 2013

Better batteries through soy

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

The Economist on a promising new development in battery technology:

LITHIUM-ION batteries are hot stuff. Affordable, relatively lightweight and packing a lot of energy, they are the power source of choice for everything from mobile phones to electric cars. Unfortunately, the heat can be more than figurative. Occasionally, such batteries suffer malfunctions that lead to smoke, flames and even explosions. In gadgets, such meltdowns can be distressing and dangerous. In aircraft, they can be fatal. Earlier this year airlines grounded their entire fleet of Boeing’s next-generation 787 passenger jet after the lithium-ion batteries installed in two planes caught fire. Last month they have been permitted back in the air after being retrofitted with a protection system in the form of a tough steel box that vents directly outside in the event of a fire.

A more comforting solution, of course, would be to build a lithium-ion battery that could not burst into flames in the first place. Katie Zhong at Washington State University might have just such a device. For the last few years, she has been working on battery technology for flexible and bendable electronic gadgets. By blending a polymer called polyethylene oxide (PEO) with natural soy protein, she had made a solid electrolyte for lithium ion batteries that could be bent or stretched to twice its normal size without affecting its performance.

Like all batteries, lithium-ion rechargeables consist of two electrodes separated by an electrolyte. In a typical lithium-ion cell, the electrolyte is a solution of lithium salts and organic solvents. Charging drives lithium ions from the electrolyte into a graphite anode. On discharge, the reverse happens, with a balancing flow of electrons through the device being powered.

British high speed railway run

Filed under: Britain, Railways, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:22

As part of the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s record breaking 126mph run in 1938, sister loco 4464 Bittern was temporally permitted to exceed from 75mph to 90mph on the mainline. This was to be a rare look at steam running at higher speeds, following recent high speed test runs. On June 29th Bittern hauled a London-York special “The Ebor Streak” which ran along the A4’s native racing ground the East Coast Mainline.

4464 is first seen at Langford in Bedfordshire running like a greyhound at 90mph! Well…I think it was doing a little more than 90! After a high octane pursuit on the A1 carriageway, the next location is what better place to see an LNER A4 would be Doncaster. Ending on a high note, the A4 whistles and echoes past Doncaster Works where she, Mallard, Flying Scotsman and all other LNER locos were built.

With special thanks to Locomotive Services Limited, DBS and Network Rail for this miracle to happen.
I’m now in high hopes in getting the next two 90mph runs on July 19th and 27th.

These shots and much much more will be included in the forthcoming documentary: “BITTERN: The Need for Speed” as part of the “MALLARD 75” celebrations. Which will include at an depth look at the preparations and build up to the main events in June & July, along with interviews with the crews & officals at this historic event in railway preservation history. See http://www.ovpsteam.co.uk/48.html

H/T to Eric Kirkland for the link.

July 1, 2013

Positive developments in Canadian government digital policy

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

Micheal Geist rounds up some good news for Canada Day:

As Canadians grapple with news of widespread secret surveillance, trade agreements that could upend intellectual property policy, and the frustrations of a failed wireless policy, there are plenty of digital policy concerns. Yet on Canada Day, my weekly technology law column argues that it is worth celebrating the many positive developments that dot the Canadian digital policy landscape. Eight of the best include:

1. The Supreme Court of Canada’s strong affirmation of user rights and technological neutrality in copyright. [. . .]

2. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s policy on network neutrality. [. . .]

3. The defeat of the government’s lawful access legislation. [. . .]

4. Canada’s promotion of user generated content. [. . .]

5. The CRTC’s pro-consumer agenda. [. . .]

6. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s aggressive investigations of top Internet companies. [. . .]

7. Canada’s notice-and-notice system for Internet providers. [. . .]

8. Canada’s balanced patent law standards. [. . .]

June 30, 2013

Social media marks the end of the red carpet

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Reason, Nick Gillespie gets to the root of Alec Baldwin’s problem with social media:

In an interview with Gothamist, the talented actor and annoying loudmouth inadvertently lays bare the real online dynamic behind his anger with new media — and it has less to do with factually incorrect journalism than you might think.

Baldwin’s real issue with new media — he slags Tumblr, Vine, MySpace, Facebook, and more — is that they level kings and queens and even celebrities into a mosh pit of direct, unmediated exchange that is hard as hell to control. It turns out that there’s really no red carpet or champagne room when it comes to the way that stars (read: world leaders, sitcom heroes, famous authors, former child actors, you name it) are treated.

In the Q&A, Baldwin says,

    Twitter began for me as a way to bypass the mainstream media and talk directly to my audience and say, “hey here’s a show I’m doing, here’s something I’m doing.”… But I realized it’s something I’m not really… it certainly isn’t worth the trouble. Rosie O’Donnell is on my podcast this week, and she said that she’s getting off of Twitter, and I said “God, I was thinking the same thing.” I said “you just end up absorbing so much hatred.” You get these body blows of all this hatred from people who… their profiles are almost identical, like “tea party mom, I love my job, I love my kids, I love my country #millitary #guns” and there’s a screaming eagle in the background of their profile, grasping some arrows and tanks rolling in the background and they all want to tell me how much they can’t stand my politics. And I go, “OK.” What kills me is these are people who want to put me out of business, so to speak, as fast as they possibly can, but they don’t want to put BP out of business, who turned the Gulf of Mexico into a cesspool….

Baldwin sputters that the very tools he can use to bypass “the mainstream media and talk directly” to his audience also empowers all those dim people out there in the dark. What’s more, his followers have minds of their own. They may enjoy his turns in Glenngarry Glenn Ross and 30 Rock and guest-hosting on Turner Classic Movies but not really find his views on fracking to be worth a damn. It’s a real kick in the pants for a celebrity to be reduced to asking, “Do you think I’m really changing anybody’s mind?”

[. . .]

Reading Baldwin’s comments, I’m struck by how his comments strongly vindicate what we’ve been stressing at Reason since the dawn of the Internet Age: That the audience has a mind of its own that it’s always been dying to express. What’s different now is that we can. Baldwin’s complaint that “there’s no journalism anymore” (except for the people he likes) and his attack on “tea party moms” who thrill to see the Gulf of Mexico foam with oil are best understood as howls of rage from the ancien regime as new-media sans-culottes storm the gates of privilege and power. Being in charge — of government, of media, of art, of business, of religion — just ain’t what it used to be.

Given his temperament and the massive amount of abuse he seems to have taken, Baldwin’s probably right to vacate Twitter and other forums that allow direct, unmediated access to him. That’s his right to exercise. But among the costs he and other powerful people — pols, pashas, pundits, etc. — will bear is lack of engagement with exactly where the world is literally and figuratively trending.

June 29, 2013

Finding replacements for Google Reader

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

If you use Google Reader, you’ve got until Monday to find a replacement tool or give up on your RSS feeds. Lifehacker wants to help:

The first thing you’ll want to do is back up your data as an OPML file through Google Takeout. You won’t be able to access it ever again once the service shuts down, so this officially qualifies as crunch time. Luckily, it’s really simple, and we’ve shown you how to do it in three easy steps. Once you’re done, I’d also make sure you have several secure backups saved at home and on the cloud, just to be sure.

As soon as your data is safe and sound, it’s time to go shopping for a new RSS home. Feedly is the most popular alternative at the moment, but there are tons of other options if it doesn’t check all of your boxes. In case you missed it, we’ve rounded up some of the best to help make the transition a little easier. All of these services will import that all-important OPML file, but some can pull your Reader data directly off of Google’s servers while it’s still available, including starred and read items in many cases, so it’s probably worth it to set up a new account over the weekend. In fact, if you haven’t settled on one alternative yet, you might want to sign up for several to hedge your bets and preserve this valuable metadata.

I’ve been using Google Reader to stay on top of news for my weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-ups at GuildMag, so finding a replacement was necessary. I settled on The Old Reader for my GW2 feeds and I’m experimenting with Newsvibe for other feeds.

I’ve been very pleased with The Old Reader, which has been a great replacement and the transition was nearly seamless. I’m still not completely sold on Newsvibe, as it has a couple of issues that reduce its usefulness to me: the session times out very quickly (less than an hour) and it can’t handle certain RSS feeds and refuses to indicate why (it just fails to add the new subscription silently).

Jeff Jarvis calls for private encryption

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

In the Guardian, Jeff Jarvis makes the case for internet communications to be protected by encryption:

Assuring the security of private communications regardless of platform — email, VOIP, direct message — should be a top priority of the internet industry in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations that US and UK governments are tapping into the net’s traffic.

The industry needs to at least come together to offer encryption for private communications as protection against government surveillance.

Guarantee of private communications should be a matter of law already. But, of course, it is not. In the US, only our first-class physical mail is protected from government surveillance without a warrant. In the UK, it was a case of opened mail that led to the closing of the Secret Department of the Post Office. As a matter of principle, the protection afforded our physical mail should extend to any private communication using any means. Just because the authors of the Fourth Amendment could not anticipate the internet and email, let alone Facebook, that should not grant government spies a loophole from the founders’ intent.

That protection could come from Congress, but it won’t. It could come from the courts, but it hasn’t.

I argued in my book Public Parts that government may try to portray itself as the protector of our privacy, but it is instead the most dangerous enemy of privacy, for it can gather our information without our knowledge and consent — that is the lesson of Snowden’s leaks — and has the power to use it against us.

1948 and the “Black Friday” of cryptanalysis

Filed under: Books, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

In Salon, Andrew Leonard looks at the early years of the NSA:

On Oct. 29, 1948, the Soviet Union suddenly changed all its ciphers and codes. What later became known as “Black Friday” delivered a huge shock to the two U.S. intelligence agencies that had conducted the bulk of American code-breaking efforts during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Before Black Friday, the Army’s SIS and the Navy’s OP-20-G complacently assumed that they had acquired the keys to most of the world’s encrypted communications. But with a flip of the switch the U.S. was once again in the dark — just as the Cold War was heating up.

“One of the gravest crises in the history of American cryptanalysis,” writes historian Colin Burke, led directly to the 1949 merging of the SIS and OP-20-G into the Armed Forces Security Agency. Three years later, another bureaucratic shuffle transformed the AFSA into the National Security Agency. A sense of panic induced by the “Soviets’ A-Bomb, the Berlin Blockade, the forming of the satellite bloc in Eastern Europe, the fall of China, and the Korean War” — all of which “were not predicted” by the intelligence agencies — encouraged the U.S. government to authorize the NSA to spend tens of millions of dollars on computer research, in the hope that technological advances would help crack the new Soviet codes.

Colin Burke is the author of It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s-1960s. Burke completed his history in 1994, but until last week, his volume of crypto-geekery had only a handful of readers. Part of a series produced by the NSA’s Center for Cryptological History, It Wasn’t All Magic was considered classified material until May 2013, and was only made available online on June 24.

Nice timing! With the NSA currently occupying its highest public profile in living memory, a look back at its early history is quite instructive. It is useful to be reminded that the mandate to spy and surveil and break codes was absolutely critical to the early growth and evolution of computer technology. Some things never change: The immense effort required to crack German and Japanese codes during World War II are an early example of the intimidating challenges posed by what we now call “big data.”

It’s actually quite surprising that it took the Soviets until 1948 to change their codes: from 1942 or so, Britain and the US were sharing their Enigma decryptions of top-secret German messages with the Soviet Union. Even if the information was provided without the original text, the Soviets were fully aware that this was the fruit of decryption, not human spy reports. At the end of World War 2, that Anglo-American expertise would obviously have been redeployed to other ends … and reading Soviet message traffic clearly would be one of the more interesting sources of data.

June 25, 2013

Snowden’s character doesn’t matter – Snowden’s revelations matter a great deal

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:08

Gene Healy says that it doesn’t matter what you think about Edward Snowden, you should care a lot about what he’s revealed:

Here, the most disturbing aspect of the Snowden revelations is the NSA’s comprehensive, multiyear call-records database, with communication and phone-location information on millions of Americans. Especially if combined with metadata on emails, website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that information is a potential treasure trove for political abuse — it can be used to ferret out the sort of information governments have historically used to blackmail and neutralize political opponents: who’s leaking, who’s organizing, who’s having an affair. The potential abuse of that information represents a grave threat to American liberty and privacy regardless of Snowden’s character and motivations.

In an post last week, Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith makes the key point: “You Don’t Have to Like Edward Snowden.” Snowden, Smith argues, is “a source,” and the information sources convey is far more important than their “moral status” or the “fate of [their] eternal soul[s].”

Smith mentions Mark Felt, the FBI honcho who served as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” during their investigation of the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Felt, it turned out, was simply settling scores in a bureaucratic power struggle. He had no scruples against criminal violations of privacy — in 1980 he was convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans through warrantless break-ins as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

It was important for Americans to know that their president was a crook. That Mark Felt was also a crook is neither here nor there. As Smith puts it, “who cares?”

June 22, 2013

Interesting – and probably inevitable – legal wrinkle for the NSA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

At Outside the Beltway, Doug Mataconis links to an interesting article:

It’s only been a few weeks since we learned to true scope of the National Security Agency’s data mining of the phone records of American citizens, but already lawyers in civil and criminal cases across the country are seeing the database as a potential discovery goldmine:

    The National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency finds the shoe is on the other foot. A defendant in a Florida murder trial says telephone records collected by the NSA as part of its surveillance programs hold evidence that would help prove his innocence, and his lawyer has demanded that prosecutors produce those records. On Wednesday, the federal government filed a motion saying it would refuse, citing national security. But experts say the novel legal argument could encourage other lawyers to fight for access to the newly disclosed NSA surveillance database.

    “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess,” said George Washington University privacy law expert Dan Solove. “In a way, it’s kind of ironic.”

    Defendant Terrance Brown is accused of participating in the 2010 murder of a Brinks security truck driver. Brown maintains his innocence, and claims cellphone location records would show he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. Brown’s cellphone provider — MetroPCS — couldn’t produce those records during discovery because it had deleted the data already.

    On seeing the story in the Guardian indicating that Verizon had been ordered to turn over millions of calling records to the NSA last month, Brown’s lawyer had a novel idea: Make the NSA produce the records.

[. . .]

This particular criminal case is, of course, on where the Federal Government is a party to the case as a prosecutor. As such, the Judge must weight not simply the government’s argument that the information requested is classified and thus should not be disclosed, but also the question of whether the prosecution has a duty to turn over the evidence to the Defendant. As a general rule, the prosecution must turn over any evidence that is potentially exclupatory or which tend to call some aspect of the prosecution’s theory of the case into doubt. The rules for what must be turned over vary from state to state, and the Federal Courts have their own rules, but they all generally follow the principles set down by Brady v. Maryland, which established the general rule that Defendants are entitled to be provided with exculpatory evidence that prosecution may have against them.

Of more interest, though, is the likely hood that attorneys may try to gain access to this NSA metadata in cases where the Federal Government is not involved, such as state court criminal proceedings or even civil matters such as divorces

June 21, 2013

“Nobody is listening to your calls” … because the metadata is far more useful

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

John Naughton explains why the calming statement that “nobody is listening to your calls” is far from re-assuring:

‘To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has been collecting details of every telephone call placed in the United States without a warrant was, he intoned, no reason for Americans to be alarmed. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he cooed. The torch was then passed to Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who was likewise on bromide-dispensing duty. “This is just metadata,” she burbled, “there is no content involved.”

At which point the thought uppermost in one’s mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there’s no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people “doing intelligence on counter-terrorism”, even that Stasi-scale mob isn’t a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks.

So in this business at least, content isn’t king. It’s the metadata — the call logs showing who called whom, from which location and for how long — that you want. Why? Because that’s the stuff that is machine-readable, and therefore searchable. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an NSA operative in Fort Meade, Maryland. You have a telephone number of someone you regard as potentially “interesting”. Type the number into a search box and up comes a list of every handset that has ever called, or been called by, it. After that, it’s a matter of seconds before you have a network graph of second-, third- or fourth-degree connections to that original number. Map those on to electronic directories to get names and addresses, obtain a secret authorisation from the Fisa court (which has 11 federal judges so that it can sit round the clock, seven days a week), then dispatch a Prism subpoena to Facebook and co and make some coffee while waiting for the results. Repeat the process with the resulting email contact lists and — bingo! — you have a mass surveillance programme as good as anything Vladimir Putin could put together. And you’ve never had to sully your hands — or your conscience — with that precious “content” that civil libertarians get so worked up about.

June 20, 2013

The UK debate over online porn

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Willard Foxton says that the real problem is that the two “sides” of the argument are not even talking the same language:

Claire Perry, the Prime Minister’s “special adviser on preventing the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood”, has three demands which she claims will save the world from the horrors of porn. First, that internet service providers and other internet companies block child pornography at its source; second, that any sort of simulated rape pornography is banned; and third, that pornography is banned from public WiFi.

On the face of it, these all seem like reasonable demands. I mean, if you oppose them, you must be some kind of filth peddler or mad porn obsessive, right? Or you might just be a person who understands how the internet works, and therein lies the problem. Let’s tackle Perry’s demands one by one and explain, patiently, why she is wrong.

Firstly, her request that internet service providers block images of child abuse “at their source”. It sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? Indeed, it’s so reasonable that they already do, and indeed have been doing since 2007. It’s done through a system called Cleanfeed, which is a rare example of a British state-funded IT project that works like a charm. They way it works is, any time a website is reported as illegal to the police, it’s added to a list. Any sites on that list are inaccessible from British ISPs. It’s a very secure system, and very hard to work around – it works so well that we’ve exported it to Canada and Australia.

Perry also wants Google to “do more” to block child porn. As I’ve said before on these pages, Google (and other large search providers), already have enormous departments devoted to blocking it, with thousands of employees checking YouTube for offensive images. On top of that, very little of the material that so offends Perry is available though a simple Google search; most of the illegal stuff is hidden in Internet Relay Chat file servers or on the dark web, accessible only via anonymising browsers like Tor.

Update: At Techdirt, Tim Cushing addresses the common claim by grandstanding politicians that child pornography is easy to “stumble upon”:

How hard would it be to access child porn if you weren’t looking for it specifically? The Ministry of Truth puts your odds at 1 in 2.6 million searches. (MoT points out the odds will fluctuate depending on search terms used, but for the most part, it’s not the sort of thing someone unwittingly stumbles upon.)

All those demanding Google do more to block child porn fail to realize there’s not much more it can do. The UK already has an underlying blocking system filtering out illegal images at the ISP level, and Google itself runs its own blocker as well.

The above calculations should put the child porn “epidemic” in perspective. As far as the web that Google actively “controls,” it’s doing about as much as it can to keep child porn and internet users separated. There are millions of pages Google can’t or doesn’t index and those actively looking for this material will still be able to find it. Google (and most other “internet companies”) can’t really do more than they’re already doing already. But every time a child pornography-related, high profile crime hits the courtroom (either in the UK or the US), the politicians instantly begin pointing fingers at ISPs and search engines, claiming they’re not doing “enough” to clean up the internet, something that explicitly isn’t in their job description. And yet, they do more in an attempt to satiate the ignorant hunger of opportunistic legislators.

If Google is “the face of the internet” as so many finger pointers claim, than the “internet” it “patrols” is well over 99% free of illegal images, according to a respected watchdog group. But accepting that fact means appearing unwilling to “do something,” an unacceptable option for most politicians.

June 18, 2013

Console game industry model is broken – must be patched with huge wads of customer money

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

At Techdirt, Tim Cushing explains why the console gaming industry’s problems should not be “fixed” by taking away the customer’s rights:

If the current business model is unsustainable, why is that the consumer’s fault? More specifically, why are customers being pushed into giving up their “first sale” rights, along with being asked to plug the holes in the leaky business model with wads of hard-earned cash?

On top of this imposition is the assumption the current model is the only model [$200m movie, anyone?] and that mankind greatly benefits from “thousands of developers” crafting AAA titles. This is completely backward. The industry exists because of its customers, not despite them. AAA studios are not benevolent deities. They’re companies that exist because there’s a market for their products. If this market dies, so do they. If the prices are too high, customers buy elsewhere. Or not at all.

[. . .]

It’s beginning to look like a few members of the industry have been cribbing pages from the disastrous playbook of the recording industry. Raise prices. Blame customers. Bend the world to your business model. Is it only a matter of time before the gaming industry begins lobbying Congress to shut down secondhand sales?

Oh, and if the above twitrant weren’t galling enough, Cliff B. throws in a little something for those who find the online requirements of the Crossbone to be dealbreaker.

    “If you can afford high speed internet and you can’t get it where you live direct your rage at who is responsible for pipe blocking you,” he said.

Really? Maybe I’ll direct my rage at the entitled jackass who’s supporting a company’s decision to effectively limit its own market simply because it can’t live without some sort of DRM infection. And what if you can’t afford high speed internet? Well, you must be one of those people who live in the area marked “Whogivesashitland” in Cliffy’s mental map. And trust me, plenty of rage has been directed at the “pipe blockers,” but they care even less about their customer base than the area of the gaming industry Bleszinski represents.

Those interested in gutting the resale market to protect their margins are turning potential customers into enemies. If you can’t adapt, you can’t succeed. These moves being made by Microsoft (and supported by industry mouthpieces) are nothing more than attempts to subsidize an unsustainable business model by forcibly extracting the maximum toll from as many transactions as possible. The industry is not a necessity or a public good. If it’s going to make the changes it needs to survive, it needs to give up this delusion.

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