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Archives for September 2007

Why Don't NFL Teams Encrypt Their Signals Better?

September 14, 2007 by

Yesterday the National Football League punished the New England Patriots and their coach, Bill Belichick, for videotaping an opposing team’s defensive signals. The signals in question are used by coaches to tell their on-field defensive unit how to line up and which tactics to use for the next play. The coach typically makes hand signals and arm movements that the on-field players know how to interpret. (The offense also needs to send signals to players from the sidelines before each play, but they use radios.) The opposition gets an advantage if they know what play is coming, so they will try to figure out what the signals mean.

This is essentially a weak form of cryptography. The coaches apply a kind of encryption to translate the desired play into a ciphertext, which is a sequence of hand and arm movements. They transmit the ciphertext (by making the indicated movements) to the on-field players, who then decrypt it, recovering the original play that the coaches wanted to send. An adversary who can see the ciphertext is supposed to be unable to recover the original message.

I don’t know what systems NFL teams use, but Belichick and the Patriots apparently thought they had a chance of breaking their opponents’ code.

There’s an interesting technical problem here: how to encrypt defensive plays into sideline signals securely, in a way that’s practical for real coaches and players in a game situation. I can think of at least one solution that is secure and practical. (Exercise for geeky readers: How would you do this?)

You might think that any solution would be too complicated for a mere football player to decode. If you think that, you’re underestimating the players involved. NFL defensive captains already cope with complex information and plans, and their teams’ current signaling systems already require decoding of symbols. Clever solutions can be pretty simple.

Crypto applies not only to designing a team’s signals, but also to analyzing rivals’ signals. Who will be the first NFL team to hire a cryptographer?

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iPhone Unlocking Secret Revealed

September 12, 2007 by

The iPhone unlocking story took its next logical turn this week, with the release of a free iPhone unlocking program. Previously, unlocking required buying a commercial program or following a scary sequence of documented hardware and software tweaks.

How this happened is interesting in itself. (Caveat: This is based on the stories I’m hearing; I haven’t confirmed it all myself.) The biggest technical barrier to a software-only unlock procedure was figuring out the unlocking program, once installed on the iPhone, could modify the machine’s innermost configuration information – something that Apple’s iPhone operating system software was trying to prevent. A company called iPhoneSimFree figured out a way to do this, and used it to develop easy-to-use iPhone unlocking software, which they started selling.

Somebody bought a copy of the iPhoneSimFree software and reverse engineered it, to figure out how it could get at the iPhone’s internal configuration. The trick, once discovered, was easy to replicate, which eliminated the last remaining barrier to the development and release of free iPhone unlocking software.

It’s a commonplace in computer security that physical control over a device can almost always be leveraged to control it. (This iceberg has sunk many DRM Titanics.) This principle was the basis for iPhoneSimFree’s business model – helping users control their iPhones – but it boomeranged on them when a reverse engineer applied the same principle to iPhoneSimFree’s own product. Once the secret was out, anyone could make iPhone unlocking software, and the price of that software would inevitably be driven down to its marginal cost of zero.

Intellectual property law had little to offer iPhoneSimFree. The trick turned out to be a fact about how Apple’s software worked – not copyrightable by iPhoneSimFree, and not patentable in practice. Trade secret law didn’t help either, because trade secrets are not shielded against reverse engineering (for good reason). They could have attached a license agreement to their product, making customers promise not to reverse engineer their product, but that would not be effective either. And it might not have been the smartest thing to rely on, given that their own product was surely based on reverse engineering of the iPhone.

Now that the unlocking software is out, the ball is in Apple’s court. Will they try to cram the toothpaste back into the tube? Will they object publicly but accept that the iPhone unlocking battle is essentially over? Will they try to play another round, by modifying the iPhone software? Apple tends to be clever about these things, so their strategy, whatever it is, will have something to teach us.

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Intellectual Property and Magicians

September 10, 2007 by

Jacob Loshin has an interesting draft paper on intellectual property among magicians. Stage magic is a form of technology, relying on both apparatus and technique to mislead the audience about what is really happening. As in any other technical field, innovations are valuable, and practitioners look for ways to cash in on their inventions. They do this, according to Loshin, without much use of intellectual property law.

This makes magic, like cuisine and clothing design, a thriving field that operates despite a lack of strong legal protection for innovation. Recently legal scholars have started looking harder at such fields, hoping to find mechanisms that can support innovation without the cost and complexity of conventional intellectual property law, and wondering how broadly those alternative mechanisms might be applied.

What makes magic unusual is that practitioners rarely rely on intellectual property law even though magic tricks are protectable by patent and as trade secrets. Patent protection should be obvious: patents cover novel mechanisms and methods, which most magic technologies are. Some classic tricks, such as the saw-a-person-in-half trick, have been patented. Trade secret protection should be obvious too: how to do a particular trick is valuable business information whose secrecy can be protected by the inventor. (The audience sees the trick done, but they don’t really see the secret of the trick.)

Yet Loshin, and apparently most magicians, think that patent and trade secret are a poor fit. There are basically three reasons for this. First, part of the value of a trick is that the audience can’t figure out how it’s done; but a patent must explain the details of the invention. Second, tricks are subject to “reverse engineering” by rival magicians who watch the trick done, repeatedly, from different parts of the audience, then do experiments to try to replicate it; and of course trade secrets are not protected against reverse engineering. Third, there’s a sort of guild mentality among magicians, holding that knowledge can be shared within the profession but must not be shared with the public. This guild mentality can’t easily be implemented within current law – a trade secret must be carefully protected, and so cannot be passed around casually within a loosely defined “community”.

The result is that the guild protects its secrets through social norms. You’re accepted into the guild by demonstrating technical prowess and following the guild’s norms over time; and you’ll be excommunicated if you violate the norms, for example by making a tell-all TV special about how popular tricks are done. (There’s an exception for casual magic tricks of the sort kids do.) The system operates informally but effectively.

As a policy guy, I have to ask whether this system is good for society as a whole. I can understand why those inside the profession would want to limit access to information – why help potential competitors? But does it really benefit society as a whole to have some unelected group deciding who gets access to certain kinds of information, and doing this outside the normal channels that (at least in principle) balance the interests of society against those of inventors? It’s not an easy question.

(To be clear, asking whether something is good or bad for society is not the same as asking whether government should regulate it. A case for regulation would require, at least, that the regulated behavior be bad for society and that there be a practically beneficial way for government to intervene.)

The best argument that magicians’ guild secrecy benefits the public is that tricks are more valuable to the public if the public doesn’t know how they are done. This is almost never the case for other technologies – knowing how your iPod works doesn’t make it less valuable to you – but it just might be true for magic, given that it exists for entertainment and you might enjoy it more if you don’t know how it’s done.

But I have my doubts that publishing information about tricks actually makes them less entertaining. Goldin’s patent on the saw-a-person-in-half trick – which explains pretty clearly how to do the trick – was issued in 1923, but the trick is still a staple today. In theory, anybody can read Goldin’s patent whenever they want; but in practice hardly anybody has read it, and we all enjoy the trick despite suspecting how it’s probably done. And do we really need to read Gaughan’s patent to know how a “levitating” magician stays up in the air? Gaughan’s cleverness is all about how to keep the audience from seeing the evidence of how it’s done.

One effect of the guild’s secrecy is that the public rarely learns who the great innovators are. We know who puts on a good show, but we rarely know who invented the tricks. The great innovators may be venerated within the profession, but they’re unknown to the public. One has to wonder whether the field would move faster, and be more innovative and entertaining, if it were more open.

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HR 811 Up For House Vote Tomorrow

September 5, 2007 by

H.R. 811, the e-voting bill originally introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, is reportedly up for a vote of the full House of Representatives tomorrow. Passing the bill would be an important step in securing our elections. I have supported H.R. 811 from the beginning, and I am still firmly behind it. I hope it passes tomorrow.

H.R. 811 gets the big issues right, requiring a voter-verified paper ballot with post-election audits to verify that the electronic records are consistent with the paper ballots.

The bill is cautious where caution is warranted. For example, it gives states and counties the flexibility to choose optical-scan or touch-screen systems (or others), as long as there is a suitable voter-verified paper record. Though some e-voting activists want to ban touch-screens altogether, I think that would be a mistake. Touch screens, if done correctly – which no vendor has managed yet, I’ll admit – do offer some advantages. Federalism makes sense here: let localities make their own choices, as long as basic standards, such as the paper-trail and audit requirements, are met. Down the road, we may be glad that we left room for better touch-screen systems to develop.

The current version of the bill allows inferior paper-trail systems, such as ones storing ballots on a continuous reel of relatively fragile thermal paper, to be used through 2010, in places where they were already in use. The full requirement of a durable, permanent, privacy-preserving paper record takes effect everywhere in 2012, but starts immediately in places not already using a paper trail. Though less than ideal, the grace period is the best reasonable choice under the circumstances. A change of this magnitude takes time, so some kind of grace period is necessary. We could argue over whether it should be two years or four years, but at this point the most important thing is to start the clock ticking, by passing a bill.

If your representative is on the fence, this is a good time to call and urge a vote for H.R. 811.

[UPDATE (Sept. 6): The schedule has slipped so the bill will not be up for vote today. So there’s still time to call your congressperson.]

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New business models in the recording industry

September 3, 2007 by

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a fascinating piece that interviews and discusses Columbia Records’ hiring of Rick Rubin as their new studio chieftain. Rubin has been a well-known music producer (among other things, he orchestrated the famous mash-up of Aerosmith and Run-DMC and worked with Johnny Cash later in his life), and is quoted in the article saying many things that Freedom-to-Tinker readers will find familiar.

For example, on DRM and spyware:

By the time [Columbia executive] Barnett first approached Rubin about coming to Columbia, Rubin had already decided that he would have nothing more to do with Columbia Records. This was because of the company’s handling of the Rubin-produced Neil Diamond record “12 Songs” in 2005. Diamond was a hero of Rubin’s, and he spent two years working on the album, persuading Diamond to record acoustically, something he hadn’t done since the ’60s.

“The CD debuted at No. 4,” Rubin told me at Hugo’s, still sounding upset. “It was the highest debut of Neil’s career, off to a great start. But Columbia — it was some kind of corporate thing — had put spyware on the CD. That kept people from copying it, but it also somehow recorded information about whoever bought the record. The spyware became public knowledge, and people freaked out. There were some lawsuits filed, and the CD was recalled by Columbia. Literally pulled from stores. We came out on a Tuesday, by the following week the CD was not available. Columbia released it again in a month, but we never recovered. Neil was furious, and I vowed never to make another album with Columbia.”

Still, Columbia managed to hire this guy and he’s now pretty much running the show. He thoroughly acknowledges that the music industry’s real problem is that its former business model isn’t going to work in the future and the solution is about completely changing the pricing model to be cheap enough and the quality of service to be good enough that piracy will no longer be rational for consumers.

Rubin has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. “You would subscribe to music,” Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you’d like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You’ll say, ‘Today I want to listen to … Simon and Garfunkel,’ and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now.”

…

Rubin sees no other solution. “Either all the record companies will get together [for a unified subscription model] or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done,” he said. “The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they’ll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing.”

I’ve always thought that something like this could be a successful business model. Of course, enforcing such a scheme (i.e., ensuring that the music dries up if you don’t keep spending your cash) requires a DRM strategy, which clearly isn’t going to fly.  Is there an alternative?  How good would a music service have to be that you would have no incentive to store local copies? If I’m totally comfortable keeping my email and calendar “out there” on the Internet, why shouldn’t I be comfortable keeping my CD collection (1500+ and growing) out there as well?

The article goes on to quote other industry experts on the difficulties of getting a subscription model correct, but I have to admire Rubin on his focus:

“I don’t want to waste time,” he said, sounding a little frustrated. “The existing people will either get smart, which is a question mark. Or new people will understand what a resource the music business is and change it without us.” Rubin paused. “I don’t want to watch that happen.”

It’s hard to argue with that. The primary focus of the article was on how Rubin is all about refining and polishing the music, and it’s great to know that somebody like that will help bring out the best in our artists. I just hope they can really sort out this whole business model thing in a technologically feasible fashion. My fear is that yet another new snake-oil company with yet another DRM scheme will promise to “solve” the piracy problem, when we all know that the real solution lies instead in completely rethinking the business model. Make the price cheap enough and the quality of the service compelling enough, and people will prefer it to the hit-or-miss world of piracy.  Let’s hope it can be a hit.  (Until then, I’ll stick with buying CDs.)

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