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Is the FCC Ruling Out VoIP on PCs?

May 23, 2005 by

The FCC has issued an order requiring VoIP systems that interact with the old-fashioned phone network to provide 911service. Carriers have 120 days to comply.

It won’t be easy for VoIP carriers to provide the 911 service that people have come to expect from the traditional phone system. The biggest challenge in providing 911 on VoIP is knowing where the caller is located.

In the traditional phone system, it’s easy to know the caller’s location. The phone company strings wires from its facility to customers’ homes and offices. Every call starts on a phone company wire, and the phone company knows where each of those wires originates; so they know the caller’s location. The phone company routes 911 calls to the appropriate local emergency call center, and they provide the call center with the caller’s location. One big advantage of this system is that it works even if the caller doesn’t know his location precisely (or can’t communicate it clearly).

Things are different in the VoIP world. Suppose I’m running a VoIP application on my laptop. I can make and receive VoIP calls whenever my laptop is connected to the Internet, whether I’m at home, or in my office, or in a hotel room in Zurich. My VoIP endpoint and my VoIP phone number can be used anywhere. No longer can the carrier map my phone number to a single, fixed location. My number goes wherever my laptop goes.

How can a VoIP carrier know where my laptop is at any given moment? I’m not sure. The carrier could try to see which IP address (i.e., which address on the Internet) my packets are coming from, and then figure out the physical location of that IP address. That will work well if I connect to the Net in the simplest possible way; but more sophisticated connection methods will foil this method. For example, my VoIP network packets will probably appear to come from the Princeton computer science department, regardless of whether I’m at my office, at home, or in a hotel somewhere. How will my VoIP carrier know where I am?

Another approach is to have my laptop try to figure out where it is, by looking at its current IP address (and other available information). This won’t work too well, either. Often all my laptop can deduce from its IP address is that there is a fancy firewall between it and the real Internet. That’s true for me at home, and in most hotels. I suppose you could put a GPS receiver in future laptops, but that won’t help me today.

We could try to invent some kind of Internet-location-tracking protocol, which would be quite complicated, and would raise significant privacy issues. It’s not clear how to let 911 call centers track me, without also making me trackable by many others who have no business knowing where I am.

Tim Lee at Technology Liberation Front suggests creating a protocol that lets Internet-connected devices learn their geographic location. (It might be an extension of DHCP.) This is probably feasible technically, but it take a long time to be adopted. And it surely won’t be deployed widely within 120 days.

All in all, this looks like a big headache for VoIP providers, especially for ones who use existing standard software and hardware. Maybe VoIP providers will take a best-effort approach and then announce their compliance; but that will probably fail as stories about VoIP 911 failures continue to show up in the media.

Of course, VoIP carriers can avoid these rules by avoiding interaction with the old-fashioned phone network. VoIP systems that don’t provide a way to make and receive calls with old-fashioned phone users, won’t be required to provide 911 service. So the real effect of the FCC’s order may be to cut off interaction between the old and new phone systems, which won’t really help anyone.

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Why I Can't Tinker with my Household Cleaner

May 20, 2005 by

John Mark Ockerbloom emailed an interesting story about Federal regulation of tinkering with household chemicals, which I quote here with permission:

I just washed our kitchen floor tonight. And (I admit guiltily)I haven’t done it in a while– usually I “let” my wife do it. So I look at the small print on the label of our Lysol All-Purpose Cleaner to remind me what to do, as I fill a bucket with water. And there I see the words “It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.”

And I get to wondering: what law? And why? It’s all well and good that, for now at least, I can tinker with my digital TV signal, and I’m right with you at wanting to be able to tinker with my software. But supposing I like hacking cleaners or chemicals instead of code– why can’t I tinker with my cleaner like I should be able to with my computer?

Maybe, I think, it’s just like one of those overbroad warnings you sometimes see affixed to copyright notices. And I start to think about what the *real* regulation might be– using it to make a drug? An explosive? Poison? What can I really do with this, and what can’t I? And why?

15 minutes after firing up Google, I think I have my answer. Technically, under federal law I really *can’t* do anything with it other than what the label tells me to do– unless it’s to use a lower dose than what’s on the label. The relevant law appears to be in Title 7, Chapter 6, Subchapter II: Environmental Pesticides. 7 USC 136j tells me it really is illegal to use pesticides in a manner inconsistent with the labeling. And “pesticide” is defined in 7 USC 136 (u). I don’t see that it obviously includes my Lysol bottle, but another web page tells me that the EPA considers this definition to include disinfectants. My Lysol bottle claims to disinfect, so I gather this makes it a pesticide, and therefore subject to this federal law, and thus illegal to hack, as it were.

Now, my question: is this legal overreaching, and if so, where exactly is the overreach? I can see a legitimate reason for a government (if not federal, than at least state) to stop people from polluting the environment, as might occur if they dump too much bug killer– or even household cleaner– into the air or water. But can they really prevent me from doing anything other than what the labeler allows with my cleaner? (Like try to mix it with other ingredients to make a safer cleaner, or doing cleaner-vs-Twinkie endurance experiments, or seeing if I can separate some ingredients from the rest– in all cases being careful to contain and control the liquid and its vapors, and keep them on my property?) Or is the EPA, or Congress, overstepping its powers somehow?

And if not, then is there anything stopping Congress from giving, say, the FCC broad powers to prohibit using, say, digital media or devices in a manner inconsistent with the labeling their manufacturers give them? (There might be the First Amendment… or there might not be. It’s not clear it would apply in all electronic tinkering cases, and cases like Pacifica show that it can overridden in some cases where it would seem to apply.)

I’d be interested in finding out more, before I start seeing notices saying “it is illegal to record this program in a manner inconsistent with the presence of commercials” on my TV…

He also notes this:

I do see that it’s possible to get an “experimental use permit” to tinker with things considered pesticides, described in 7 USC 136c. Though it sounds like it’s not trivial to get; among other things, there’s a sentence in 136c that states “The Administrator may issue an experimental use permit only if the Administrator determines that the applicant needs such permit in order to accumulate information necessary to register a pesticide under section 136a of this title.”

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Course Blog: Lessons Learned

May 18, 2005 by

This semester I had students in my course, “Information Technology and the Law,” write for a course blog. This was an experiment, but it worked out quite well. I will definitely do it again.

We required each of the twenty-five students in the course to post at least once a week. Each student was assigned a particular day of the week on which his or her entries were due. We divided the due dates evenly among the seven days of the week, to ensure an even flow of new posts, and to facilitate discussion among the students. The staggered due dates worked nicely, and had the unexpected benefit of evening out the instructors’ and students’ blog reading workload.

To be honest, I’m not sure how religiously students read the blog. Many entries had comments from other students, but I suspect that many students read the blog irregularly. My guess is that most of them read it, most of the time.

We told students that they should write 400-500 words each week, about any topic related to the course. As expected, most students wrote about the topics we were discussing in class at the moment. Some students would read ahead a bit and then post about the readings before we discussed them in class. Others would reflect on recent in-class discussions. In both cases, the blogging helped to extend the class discussion. A few students wrote about material outside the readings, but within the course topic.

One of the biggest benefits, which I didn’t fully appreciate in advance, was that students got to see the writing their peers submitted. This was valuable not only for the exchange of ideas, but also in helping students improve their writing. Often students learn about the standard of performance only by reading comments from a grader; here they could see what their peers were producing.

To protect students’ privacy, we gave them the option of writing under a pseudonym. Seven of twenty-five students used a pseudonym. Students had to reveal their pseudonym to the instructors, but it was up to them whether to reveal it to the other students in the course. A few students chose pseudonyms that would be obvious to people in the course; for example, one student used his first name. Most of the others seemed willing to reveal their pseudonyms to the rest of the class, though not everyone had occasion to do so.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing. Most of it was good, and some was top-notch. Comments from peers, and from outsiders, were also helpful. However, it seems unlikely that many outsiders would read such a course blog, given the sheer volume of postings.

The logistics worked out pretty well. We used WordPress, with comment moderation enabled (to fend off comment spam). We sent out a brief email with instructions at the beginning, and students caught on quickly.

On the whole, the course blog worked out better than expected, and I will use the same method in the future.

[If any students from the course read this, please chime in in the comments. I already submitted course grades, so you can be brutally honest.]

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Register of Copyrights Misunderstands Copyright

May 17, 2005 by

The office of the U.S. Register of Copyrights recently released its annual report for 2004. Along with some useful information about the office’s function, the report includes a sort of editorial about the copyright system, entitled “Copyright in the Public Eye.” The editorial displays a surprising misunderstanding of the purposes of copyright.

Consider, for example, this sentence:

The Founders knew what they were doing when they made explicit that Congress was to secure to authors an “exclusive Right.” They understood that individual rights, especially property-like rights, were the key to establishing a stable and productive society.

Note the subtle rewriting of the Constitutional language. The Constitution does not direct Congress to establish copyright, but merely allows it to do so. Let’s be clear: the implication that the Founders would approve of today’s copyright statute finds no real support in the historical record. The first Congress passed a copyright act, and it was vastly narrower than the one we have today.

The Constitution allows Congress to do other things, too, such as imposing taxes and regulating interstate commerce. But nobody would argue that the Founders wanted the broadest possible taxation and regulation. The Founders trusted Congress to use its power judiciously, in copyright as in other areas.

Continuing with the Register of Copyrights editorial:

[The Founders] also trusted copyright owners to use those rights for the public good by offering creative works to the public. It is important for copyright owners to fulfill their end of the bargain with the public – to use the exclusive rights they have been granted to provide the public with convenient access to copyrighted works.

The implication here is that copyright owners can choose whether to “fulfill their end of the bargain with the public.” (If the bargain is mandatory, why bother urging copyright owners to fulfill it?) In other words, the public’s ability to use copyrighted works exists only at the pleasure of copyright owners. This is contrary even to our current bloated copyright law, which carefully limits the exclusive rights of copyright owners, and says explicitly that certain types of use are not infringement.

Continuing:

How copyright is perceived will largely depend on how technological measures limit reproduction and distribution in ways that are painless and invisible to the public. New services need to earn a reputation based on the things they allow people to do with copyrighted works, rather than on what they prevent people from doing.

Even ignoring the questionable technology assumptions – that technology can limit redistribution, and can do so “in ways that are painless and invisible” – the implication here is that the law already allows copyright owners to overreach, but the Register of Copyrights hopes that they don’t do so. In other words, it’s up to the copyright owners to decide what the future of copyright should be.

And how will this situation play out? Let’s go back to the first paragraph of the editorial:

For the first time ordinary consumers come face-to-face with copyright as something that regulates them directly. In this situation, the copyright owner is more likely to see the user as an infringer than as a customer.

And they wonder why copyright is unpopular with the public.

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New Study on Effects of E-Voting

May 16, 2005 by

David Card and Enrico Moretti, two economists from UC Berkeley, have an interesting new paper that crunches data on the 2004 election, to shed light on the effect of touchscreen voting. The paper looks reasonable to me, but my background is not in social science so others are better placed than me to critique it. Here, I’ll summarize the paper’s findings.

The researchers start with datasets on county-by-county vote results in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, and county-by-county demographics, along with a list of counties that used DREs (i.e., touchscreen voting machines). It turns out that counties that used DREs tended to vote more strongly for Bush than counties that didn’t. This effect, by itself, isn’t very interesting, since there are many possible causes. For example, DREs were more popular in the South, and Bush was more popular there too.

To get a more interesting result, they redid the same calculation, while controlling for many of the factors that might have affected Bush’s vote share. To be specific, they controlled for past voting patterns (Republican and third-party voting shares in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections), for county demographics (percent black, percent Hispanic, percent religious, percent college-educated, percent in the military, percent employed in agriculture), for average income, and for county population. They also included a per-state dummy variable that would capture any effects that were the same across all counties in a particular state. After controlling for all of these things, they still found that DRE counties tended to tilt toward Bush, compared to non-DRE counties. This discrepancy, or “DRE effect” amounted to 0.21% of the vote.

So did Republicans steal the election? The researchers turn to that question next. They observe that if the DRE effect was caused by Republican cheating, then we would expect the DRE effect to be larger in places where Republicans had a motive to cheat (because the election was close), and where Republicans had an opportunity to cheat (because they controlled the election bureaucracy). Yet further analysis shows that the DRE effect was not larger in states where the election was close, and was not larger in states with Republican governors or Republicans secretaries of state. Therefore it seems unlikely that outright vote-stealing can account for the DRE effect.

The researchers next looked at how DRE use correlated with voter turnout. They found that voter turnout was roughly 1% lower in counties that used DREs, after controlling for all of the factors listed above. Interestingly, the drop in turnout tended to be larger in counties with larger Hispanic populations. (The same effect does not seem to exist for black voters.) This suggests a possible cause of the DRE effect: DREs may suppress turnout among Hispanic voters, who tend to vote for Democrats overall (although not in Florida).

Why might DREs suppress the Hispanic vote? Perhaps Hispanics are more likely to be intimidated by the high-tech DREs. Perhaps DREs are harder to use for voters who aren’t native English speakers. Perhaps DREs made people wait longer to vote, and Hispanic voters were less able or less willing to wait. Or perhaps there is some other cultural issue that made Hispanic voters wary of DREs.

It’s worth noting, though, that when the researchers estimated the magnitude of the Hispanic-vote-suppression mechanism, they found that it accounted for only about 15% of the overall DRE effect. Most of the DRE effect is still unexplained.

This is an interesting paper, but is far from the last word on the subject.

UPDATE (Thur. May 19): Steve Purpura, who knows this stuff much better than I do, has doubts about this study. See the comments for his take.

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