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The Future of Smartphone Platforms

February 24, 2009 by

In 1985, I got my very first home computer: a Commodore Amiga 1000. At the time, it was awesome: great graphics, great sound, “real” multitasking, and so forth. Never mind that you spent half your life shuffling floppy disks around. Never mind that I kept my head full of Epson escape codes to use with my word processing program to get what I wanted out of my printer. No, no, the Amiga was wonderful stuff.

Let’s look at the Amiga’s generation. Starting with the IBM PC in 1981, the PC industry was in the midst of the transition from 8-bit micros (Commodore 64, Apple 2, Atari 800, BBC Micro, TI 99/4a, etc.) to 16/32-bit micros (IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, etc.). These new machines each ran completely unrelated operating systems, and there was no consensus as which would be the ultimate winner. In 1985, nobody would have declared the PC’s victory to have been inevitable. Regardless, we all know how it worked out: Apple developed a small but steady market share, PCs took over the world (sans IBM), and the other computers faded away. Why?

The standard argument is “network effects.” PCs (and to a lesser extent Macs) developed sufficient followings to make them attractive platforms for developers, which in turn made them attractive to new users, which created market share, which created resources for future hardware developments, and on it went. The Amiga, on the other hand, became popular only in specific market niches, such as video processing and editing. Another benefit on the PC side was that Microsoft enabled clone shops, from Compaq to Dell and onward, to battle each other with low prices on commodity hardware. Despite the superior usability of a Mac or the superior graphics and sound of an Amiga, the PC came away the winner.

What about cellular smartphones then? I’ve got an iPhone. I have friends with Windows Mobile, Android, and Blackberry devices. When the Palm Pre comes out, it should gain significant market share as well. I’m sure there are people out there who love their Symbian or OpenMoko phones. The level of competition, today, in the smartphone world bears more than a passing resemblance to the competition in the mid-80’s PC market. So who’s going to win?

If you believe that the PCs early lead and widespread adoption by business was essential to its rise, then you could expect the Blackberry to win out. If you believe that the software/hardware coming from separate vendors was essential, then you’d favor Windows Mobile or Android. If you’re looking for network effects, look no farther than the iPhone. If you’re looking for the latest, coolest thing, then the Palm Pre sure does look attractive.

I’ll argue that this time will be different, and it’s the cloud that’s going to win. Right now, what matters to me, with my iPhone, is that I can get my email anywhere, I can make phone calls, and I can do basic web surfing. I occasionally use the GPS maps, or even watch a show purchased from the iTunes Store, but if you took those away, it wouldn’t change my life much. I’ve got pages of obscure apps, but none of them really lock me into the platform. (Example: Shazam is remarkably good at recognizing songs that it hears, but the client side of it is a very simple app that they could trivially port to any other smartphone.) On the flip side, I’m an avid consumer of Google’s resources (Gmail, Reader, Calendar, etc.). I would never buy a phone that I couldn’t connect to Google. Others will insist on being able to connect to their Exchange Server.

At the end of the day, the question isn’t whether a given smartphone interoperates with your friend’s phones, but whether it interoperates with your cloud services. You don’t need an Android to get a good mobile experience with Google, and you don’t need a Windows Mobile phone to get a good mobile experience with Exchange. Leaving one smartphone and adopting another one is, if anything, easier than transitioning with a traditional not-smartphone, since you don’t have to monkey as much with moving your address book around. As such, I think it’s reasonable to predict, in ten years, that we’ll still have at least one smartphone vendor per major cellular carrier, and perhaps more.

If we have further consolidation in the carrier market, that would put pressure on the smartphone vendors to cut costs, which could well lead to consolidation of the smartphone vendors. We could certainly also imagine carriers pushing on the smartphone vendors to include or omit particular features. We see plenty of that already. (Example: can you tether your laptop to a Palm Pre via Bluetooth? The answer seems to be a moving target.) Historically, the U.S. carriers are somewhat infamous for going out of their way to restrict what phones can do. Now, that seems to be mostly fixed, and for that, at least, we can thank Apple.

Let a thousand smartphones bloom? I sure hope so.

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Hulu abandons Boxee—now what?

February 19, 2009 by

In our last installment, I detailed the trials and tribulations of my attempt to integrate legal, Internet-sourced video into my home theater via a hacked AppleTV, running Boxee, getting its feed from Hulu.

One day later (!), Hulu announced it was all over.

Later this week, Hulu’s content will no longer be available through Boxee. While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee, we are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move. This has weighed heavily on the Hulu team, and we know it will weigh even more so on Boxee users.

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

(emphasis mine)

On Boxee’s blog, they wrote:

two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.

At least I’m not to blame. Clearly, those who own content are threatened by the ideas we discussed before. Why overpay for cable when you can get the three shows you care about from Hulu for free?

Also interesting to note is the acknowledgment that there was no formal relationship between Hulu and Boxee. That’s the power of open standards. Hulu was publishing bits. Boxee was consuming those bits. The result? An integrated system, good enough to seriously consider dropping your cable TV subscription. Huzzah.

Notable by its absence: Hulu content is also supported on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 via PlayOn, which serves pretty much the same niche as Boxee. Similarly, there’s an XBMC Hulu plugin (recall that Boxee is based on the open-source XBMC project). We don’t know whether Hulu will continue to work with these other platforms or not. Hulu seems to be taking the approach of asking Boxee nicely to walk away. Will they ask the other projects to pull their Hulu support as well? Will all of those projects actually agree to pull the plug or will Hulu be forced to go down the failed DRM road?

It’s safe to predict that it won’t be pretty. My AppleTV can run XBMC just as well as it can run Boxee, which naturally returns us to the question of the obsolescence of cable TV.

There’s a truism that, if your product is going to become obsolete, you should be the one who makes it obsolete. Example: hardwired home telephones are going away. In rich countries, people use their cell phone so much that they eventually notice that they don’t need the landline any more. In poor countries, the cost of running wires is too high, so it’s cheaper to deploy cellular phones. Still, guess who runs the cell phone networks? It’s pretty much the same companies who run the wired phone networks. They make out just fine (except, perhaps, with international calling, where Skype and friends provide great quality for effectively nil cost).

Based on what I’ve observed, it’s safe to predict that cable TV, satellite TV, and maybe even over-the-air TV, are absolutely, inevitably, going to be rendered obsolete by Internet TV. Perhaps they can stave off the inevitable by instituting a la carte pricing plans, so I could get the two cable channels I actually care about and ignore the rest. But if they did that, their whole business model would be smashed to bits.

For my prediction to pan out, we have to ask whether the Internet can handle all that bandwidth. As an existence proof, it’s worth pointing out that I can also get AT&T U-verse for a price competitive with my present Comcast service. AT&T bumps up your DSL to around 30Mb/sec, and you get an HD DVR that sucks your shows down over your DSL line. They’re presumably using some sort of content distribution network to keep their bandwidth load reasonable, and the emphasis is on real-time TV channel watching, which lowers their need to store bits in the CDN fabric. Still, it’s reasonable to see how U-verse could scale to support video on demand with Hulu or Netflix’s full library of titles.

U-verse does a good enough job of pretending to be just like cable that it’s completely uninteresting to me. But if their standards were open and free of DRM, then third parties, like TiVo or Boxee, could build compatible boxes and we’d really have something interesting. I’d drop my cable for that.

(One of my colleagues has U-verse, and he complains that, when his kids watch TV, he can feel the Internet running slower. “Hey you kids, can you turn off the TV? I’m trying to do a big download.” It’s the future.)

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TiVo, AppleTV, Boxee, and the future of HD television delivery

February 17, 2009 by

I don’t watch as much TV as I once did. Yet, I’m still paying Comcast every month, as they’re the only provider who will sell me HD service compatible with my TiVo-HD. Sadly, Comcast is far from ideal. I’m regularly frustrated at their inability to debug their signal quality problems. (My ABC-HD and PBS-HD signals are right on the edge, in terms of signal quality, so any slight degradation makes those channels unwatchable through the MPEG block errors, which seems to happen on an irregular basis.) Comcast customer service wants me to sit around all day waiting for a tech to come out when the problem has nothing whatsoever to do with my house. When I’ve attempted to report the signal strength measurements I’ve taken and how they vary from channel to channel, I’ve found I might as well be speaking to a brick wall.

Yes, I know I could put an old-school antenna on the roof and feed it into my TiVo. That would do pretty good for the local channels, but then why am I paying Comcast at all? Answer: for the handful of shows that we watch from cable channels. More than one person has asked me why I don’t just download these shows online and cut the cable. You can get Comedy Central programming from their web site. You can get all sorts of things from Hulu.com. All free and legal!

To that end, I’ve hacked my AppleTV with the latest patchstick, a remarkably painless process, and now my AppleTV, running Boxee, based on the open-source xbmc project, can play DVD rips from my file server (including DVD menus), just about anything I download from BitTorrent [see sidebar], and can get at content from a variety of streaming providers, including Comedy Central and Hulu.com, theoretically covering enough ground that I could legitimately consider dropping the Comcast subscription altogether.

In practice, the Internet TV experience was a let-down. I’ve got AT&T’s “Elite” DSL package (“up to 6Mb”, which is pretty close to what I see in practice), so I’ve got enough bandwidth for streaming. What I actually see is not utilizing that bandwidth. Comedy Central is not giving anywhere near 30 frames per second. It’s jumpy, unwatchable. Hulu has moments of greatness (i.e., higher resolution and quality relative to the non-HD channels that Comcast feeds me, but nowhere near broadcast HD) but Hulu also freezes up, sometimes for seconds at a time. If Boxee implemented TiVo-like Season Passes, they could download my shows in advance and yield a real winner of an experience. Or TiVo could implement Hulu support, as they already have batch downloads of Internet video content, mostly from Amazon, albeit with low SD quality and unacceptable self-destructing DRM.

Astute readers will note that I have several other options left to pursue. I could sign up for an unlimited Netflix subscription and have access to their streaming library (either to my TiVo or to my Boxee/AppleTV). I could also “subscribe” to the shows that I care about through Apple’s iTunes Store. (That’s how I’ve been watching Entourage, since I can’t otherwise justify the $20/month that I’d have to pay Comcast for HBO. See also the sidebar.)

Netflix doesn’t have the current TV shows that I want, and the iTunes store is pretty pricey. Those Entourage episodes are $2 each for 30 minutes of SD quality video. iTunes HD content, when available, is pretty much broadcast HD quality. Good stuff. iTunes SD content looks fine on an iPhone, but has a variety of problems on a proper HD set, most notably that any dark colors are pulled down to 100% black, presumably to improve compression. Very distracting. Regardless, friends I have with Netflix streaming seem to swear by it, and the iTunes Store clearly provides a good experience, albeit with high prices.

Clearly, Comcast is in deep trouble. Their product is expensive. Their customer service is lacking. Similar issues can be expected for other cable TV vendors, much less the satellite people. The Internet already has sufficient capacity to deliver the non-broadcast shows that I follow, directly to my TV. All the pieces are in place and they’re starting to work well together. The only missing piece is the business model for the future of online TV delivery. Hulu.com, for example, probably thinks they have to require video streaming so they can force you to watch ads. If you could download it, you could skip the ads and there goes their revenue.

I figure the one true hope in all of this is the ever-declining cost of serving up content. At some distant point in the future, the cost of delivering tens of megabits per second of video, for several hours every day, to all of the homes who might want it, will eventually be small enough to not matter any more. Once we get there, the people who make shows can sell them direct to the consumer, insert occasional and targeted ads, and still come out ahead. It could be a long wait.

[Sidebar: BitTorrent is a brilliant system, from a technical perspective, but it was never designed to provide any anonymity to its users. If you join the torrent for, say, an HBO show, HBO can trivially observe that you (or, at least, your IP address) is there, giving them grounds to go after you in one form or another. From that perspective, you’d have to be insane to download a mainstream movie or TV show from BitTorrent, or you’d have to do something terribly anti-social, like tunnel your entire BitTorrent session through Tor, which Tor was never designed to handle, although there are several designs to improve Tor or anonymize BitTorrent. So then, what shows do I feel safe to download via BitTorrent? So far, only the latest episodes of the BBC’s Top Gear. They air in the U.K. six months to a year ahead of their appearance on BBC America and availability on the U.S. iTunes Store. If there were a way to get these shows in the U.S. simultaneous with their British release, I’d happily pay for the privilege, even the $2 rate at the iTunes Store, but I’m not given that option at any price.]

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Rethinking the voting system certification process

February 11, 2009 by

Lawsuits! Everybody’s filing lawsuits. Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) is suing SysTest, one of the EAC’s testing authorities (or, more properly, former testing authorities, now that the EAC is planning to suspend their accreditation). There’s also a lawsuit between the State of Ohio and Premier over whether or not Premier’s voting systems satisfy Ohio’s requirements. Likewise, ES&S is being sued by San Francisco, the State of California, and the state of Oregon. A Pennsylvania county won a judgment against Advanced Voting Systems, after AVS’s systems were decertified (and AVS never even bothered showing up in court to defend themselves). And that’s just scratching the surface.

What’s the real problem here? Electronic voting systems were “certified”, sold, deployed, and then turned out to have a variety of defects, ranging from “simple” bugs to a variety of significant security flaws. Needless to say, it takes time, effort, and money to build better voting machines, much less to push them through the certification process. And nobody really understands what the certification process even is anymore. In the bad old days, a “federally certified voting system” was tested by one of a handful of “independent testing authorities” (ITAs), accredited by the National Association of State Election Directors, against the government’s “voluntary voting system guidelines” (the 2002 edition, for the most part). This original process demonstrably failed to yield well-engineered, secure, or even particularly usable voting systems. So how have things improved?

Now, NASED has been pushed aside by the EAC, and the process has been glacial. So far as I can tell, no electronic voting system used in the November 2008 election had code that was in any way different from what was used in the November 2006 election.

Regardless of whether we jettison the DREs and move to optical scan, plenty of places will continue using DREs. And there will be demand for new features in both DREs and optical scanners. And bug fixes. The certification pipeline must be vigilant, yet it needs to get rolling again. In a hurry, but with great caution and care. (Doesn’t sound very feasible, I know.)

Okay, then let’s coerce vendors to build better products! Require the latest standards! While brilliant, in theory, such a process is doomed to continue the practical failures (and lawsuits) that we’re seeing today. The present standards are voluminous. They are also quite vague where it matters because there is no way to write a standard that’s both general-enough to apply to every possible voting system and specific-enough to adequately require good development practices. The present standards err, arguably correctly, on the vague side, which then requires the testing authorities to do some interpretation. Doing that properly requires competent testing labs and competent developers, working together.

Unfortunately, they don’t work together at all (never mind issues of competence). The current business model is that developers toil away, perhaps talking to their customers, but not interacting with the certification process at all until they’re “done,” after which they pitch the system over the wall, write a big check, and cross their fingers that everything goes smoothly. If the testing authority shoots it down, they need to sort out why and try again. Meanwhile, you’ve got the Great States of California and Ohio doing their own studies, with testers like yours truly who don’t particularly care what the standards say and are instead focused on whether the machines are robust in the face of a reasonable threat model. Were the problems we found outside of the standards’ requirements? We don’t care because they’re serious problems! Unfortunately, from the vendor’s perspective, they now need to address everything we found, and they have no idea whether or not they’ll get it right before they may or may not face another team of crack security ninjas.

What I want to see is a grand bargain. The voting system vendors open up their development processes to external scrutiny and regulation. In return, they get feedback from the certifying authorities that their designs are sound before they begin prototyping. Then they get feedback that their prototypes are sound before they flesh out all the details. This necessarily entails the vendors letting the analysts in on their bugs lists (one of the California Secretary of State’s recommendations to the EAC), further increasing transparency. Trusted auditors could even look at the long-term development roadmap and make judgments that incremental changes, available in the short term, are part of a coherent long-term plan to engineer a better system. Alternately, the auditors could declare the future plans to be a shambles and refuse to endorse even incremental improvements. Invasive auditing would give election authorities the ability to see each vendor’s future, and thus reach informed decisions about whether to support incremental updates or to dump a vendor entirely.

Where can we look for a a role model for this process? I initially thought I’d write something here about how the military procures weapon systems, but there are too many counter-examples where that process has gone wrong. Instead, let’s look at how houses are built (or, at least, how they should be built). You don’t just go out, buy the lumber and nails, hire people off the street, and get banging. Oh no! You start with blueprints. Those are checked off by the city zoning authorities, the neighborhood beauty and integrity committee, and so forth. Then you start getting permits. Demolition permits. Building permits. Electrical permits. At each stage of construction, city inspectors, the prospective owners, and even the holders of the construction loan, may want to come out and check it out. If, for example, there’s an electrical problem, it’s an order of magnitude easier to address it before you put up the interior walls.

For voting systems, then, who should do the scrutiny? Who should scrutinize the scrutineers? Where’s the money going to come from to pay for all this scrutiny? It’s unclear that any of the testing authorities have the deep skills necessary to do the job. It’s similarly unclear that you can continually recruit “dream teams” of the best security ninjas. Nonetheless, this is absolutely the right way to go. There are only a handful of major vendors in the e-voting space, so recruiting good talent to audit them, on a recurring part-time basis, is eminently feasible. Meta-scrutiny comes from public disclosure of the audit reports. To save some money, there are economies of scale to be gained from doing this at the Federal level, although it only takes a few large states to band together to achieve similar economies of scale.

At the end of the day, we want our voting systems to be the best they can be, regardless of what technology they happen to be using. I will argue that this ultimately means that we need vendors working more closely with auditors, whether we’re considering primitive optical scanners or sophisticated end-to-end cryptographic voting schemes. By pushing the adversarial review process deeper into the development pipeline, and increasing our transparency into how the development is proceeding, we can ensure that future products will be genuine improvements over present ones, and hopefully avoid all these messy lawsuits.

[Sidebar: what about protecting the vendors’ intellectual property? As I’ve argued before, this is what copyrights and patents are about. I offer no objection to vendors owning copyright on their code. Patents are a bit trickier. If the auditors decide that some particular feature should be mandatory and one vendor patents it, then every other vendor could potentially infringe the patent. This problem conceivably happens today, even without the presence of invasive auditors. Short of forbidding voting machine patents as a prerequisite for voting system certification, this issue will never go away entirely. The main thing that I want to do away with, in their entirety, are trade secrets. If you want to sell a voting machine, then you should completely waive any trade secret protection, ultimately yielding a radical improvement in election transparency.]

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Internet voting-a-go-go

December 29, 2008 by

Yes, we know that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, but the Estonians are doing their best to get as far away from perfection as possible. According to the latest news reports, Estonia is working up a system to vote from mobile phones. This follows on their earlier web-based Internet voting. What on earth are they thinking?

Let’s review some basics. The Estonian Internet voting scheme builds on the Estonian national ID card, which is a smartcard. You get the appropriate PCMCIA adapter and you can stick it into your laptop. Then, through some kind of browser plug-in, it can authenticate you to the voting server. No card, no voter impersonation. The Estonian system “avoids” the problem of voter bribery / coercion by allowing the voter to cast as many votes as they want, but only the last one actually counts. As I understand it, a voter may also arrive, on election day, at some sort of official polling place and substitute a paper ballot for their prior electronic ballot.

The threats to this were and are obvious. What if some kind of malware/virus/worm contraption infects your web browser and/or host operating system, waits for you to connect to the election server, and then quietly substitutes its own choices for yours? You would never know that the attack occurred and thus would never think to do anything about it. High tech. Very effective. And, of course, somebody can still watch over your shoulder while you vote. At that point, they just need to keep you from voting again. They could accomplish this by simply having you vote at the last minute, under supervision, or they could “borrow” your ID card until it’s too late to vote again. Low tech. Still effective.

But wait, there’s more! The central database must necessarily have your vote recorded alongside your name in order to allow subsequent votes to invalidate earlier votes. That means they’ve almost certainly got the technical means to deanonymize your vote. Do you trust your government to have a database that says exactly for whom you voted? Even if the vote contents are somehow encrypted, the government has all the necessary key material to decrypt it. (And, an aforementioned compromised host platform could be leaking this data, regardless.)

Okay, what about voting by cellular telephone? A modern cell phone is really no different from a modern web browser. An iPhone is running more-or-less the same OS X and Safari browser that’s featured on Apple’s Mac products. Even non-smart-phones tend to have an environment that’s powerful and general-purpose. There’s every reason to believe that these platforms are every bit as vulnerable to software attacks as we see with Windows systems. Just because hackers aren’t necessarily targeting these systems doesn’t mean they couldn’t. Ultimately, that means that the vulnerabilities of the phone system are exactly the same as the web system. No better. No worse.

Of course, crypto can be done in a much more sophisticated fashion. One Internet voting system, Helios, is quite sophisticated in this fashion, doing end-to-end crypto in JavaScript in your browser. With its auditability, Helios gives you the chance to challenge the entire client/server process to prove that it maintained your vote’s integrity. There’s nothing, however, in Helios to prevent an evil browser from leaking how you voted, thus compromising your anonymity. An evil election server could possibly be prevented from compromising your anonymity, depending on how the decryption keys are managed, but all the above privacy concerns still apply.

Yes, of course, Internet and cell-phone voting have lots of appeal. Vote from anywhere! At any time! If Estonia did more sophisticated cryptography, they could at least have a hope at getting some integrity guarantees (which they appear to be lacking, at present). Estonians have absolutely no privacy guarantees and thus insufficient protection from bribery and coercion. And we haven’t even scratched the surface of denial-of-service attacks. In 2007, Estonia suffered a large, coordinated denial-or-service attack, allegedly at the hands of Russian attackers. I’m reasonably confident that they’re every bit as vulnerable to such attacks today, and cell-phone voting would be no less difficult for resourceful attackers to disrupt.

In short, if you care about voter privacy, to defeat bribery and coercion, then you want voters to vote in a traditional polling place. If you care about denial of service, then you want these polling places to be operable even if the power goes out. If you don’t care about any of that, then consider the alternative. Publish in the newspaper a list of every voter and how they voted, for all the world to see, and give those voters a week to submit any corrections they might desire. If you were absolutely trying to maximize election integrity, nothing would beat it. Of course, if you feel that publishing such data in the newspaper could cause people to be too scared to vote their true preferences, then maybe you should pay more attention to voter privacy.

(More on this from Eric Rescorla’s Educated Guesswork.)

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