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Googlocracy in Action

February 3, 2004 by

The conventional wisdom these days is that Google is becoming less useful, because people are manipulating its rankings. The storyline goes like this: Once upon a time, back in the Golden Age, nobody knew about Google, so its rankings reflected Truth. But now that Google is famous and web authors think about the Google-implications of the links they create, Google is subject to constant manipulation and its rankings are tainted.

It’s a compelling story, but I think it’s wrong, because it ignores the most important fact about how Google works: Google is a voting scheme. Google is not a mysterious Oracle of Truth but a numerical scheme for aggregating the preferences expressed by web authors. It’s a form of democracy – call it Googlocracy. Web authors vote by creating hyperlinks, and Google counts the votes. If we want to understand Google we need to see democracy as Google’s very nature, and not as an aberration.

Consider the practice of “Google-bombing” in which web authors create links designed to associate two phrases in Google’s output, for instance to link a derogatory phrase to the name of a politician they dislike. Some may call this an unfair manipulation, designed to trick Google into getting a biased result. I call it Googlocracy in action. The web authors have a certain number of Google-votes, and they are casting those votes as they think best. Who are we to complain? They may be foolish to spend their votes that way, but they are entitled to do so. And the fact that many people with frequently-referenced sites choose to cast their Google-votes in a particular way is useful information in itself.

Googlocracy has been a spectacular success, as anyone who used pre-Google search engines can attest. It has succeeded precisely because it has faithfully gathered and aggregated the votes of web authors. If those authors cast their votes for the things they think are important, so much the better.

Like democracy, Googlocracy won’t always get the very best answer. Perfection is far too much to ask. Realistically, all we can hope for is that Googlocracy gets a pretty good answer, almost always. By that standard, it succeeds. Googlocracy is the worst form of page ranking, except for all of the others that have been tried.

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Safire: US Blew Up Soviet Pipeline with Software Trojan Horse

February 2, 2004 by

William Safire tells an amazing story in his column in today’s New York Times. He says that in the early 1980’s, the U.S. government hid malicious code in oil-pipeline-control software that the Soviet Union then stole and used to control a huge trans-Siberia pipeline. The malicious code manipulated the pipelines valves and other controls in a way that caused a huge explosion, ruining the pipeline.

After that, Safire reports, “all the software [the Soviet Union] had stolen for years was suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists.”

I should emphasize that as of yet there is no corroboration for this story; and the story appears in an editorial-page column and not on the news pages of the Times (where it would presumably be subject to more stringent fact-checking, especially in light of the Times’ recent experience).

From a purely technical standpoint, this sort of thing is definitely possible. Any time you rely on somebody else to write your software, especially software that controls dangerous equipment, you’re trusting that person not to insert malicious code. Whether it’s true or not, Safire’s story is instructive.

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Tennessee Super-DMCA: It's Baaaaaaack!

February 2, 2004 by

The Tennessee Super-DMCA is back. Here’s the text of the latest version.

Like the previous version, which died in a past legislative session, this bill looks like an attempt to broaden existing bans on unauthorized access to cable TV and phone service. The old version was much too broad. The new version is worded more carefully, with exceptions for “multipurpose devices”. I haven’t read it carefully enough to tell whether there are remaining problems.

Tennessee Digital Freedom is a good source for information and updates on this bill.

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Can Ownership Be Owned?

January 30, 2004 by

Julian Dibbell, at TerraNova, points out an issued U.S. Patent that seems to cover digital property systems of the type used by many multiplayer online games:

How naive must one be, in this day and age, to spend months debating the question of virtual property without once wondering whether the question itself (or at any rate the phenomenon underlying it) wasn’t already somebody’s intellectual property?

Speaking only for myself, I confess the thought never crossed my mind. Not until last week, that is, when I received a friendly email from veteran game designer Ron Martinez, who alerted me to U.S. patent 6,119,229, “Virtual Property System,” filed April 1997, granted September 2000, and jointly held by Martinez, Greg Guerin, and the famous cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

As if it weren’t freaky enough that someone could own the concept of digital property, check this out: the patent arguably covers the U.S. Patent system itself, as administered by the PTO, at least with respect to patents on network technology.

Don’t believe me? Let’s read the text of Claim 1 of the patent against the U.S. Patent system. I’ll intersperse the language of the claim (in ordinary typeface) with explanations of where each element can be found in the patent system (in italics). Ready? Here goes.

What is claimed is:

1. A digital object ownership system [the U.S. patent system], comprising:

a plurality of user terminals, each of said user terminals being accessible by at least one individual user [PCs on the Internet];

at least one central computer system, said central computer system being capable of communicating with each of said user terminals [the Patent Office’s servers];

a plurality of digital objects [U.S. patents], each of said digital objects having a unique object identification code [the patent number], each of said digital objects being assigned to an owner [patents have owners], said digital objects being persistent such that each of said digital objects is accessible by a particular user both when said user’s terminal is in communications with said central computer system and also when said terminal is not in communication with said central computer system [patents still exist even when users aren’t reading them on the Net], said object having utility [the ability to bring an infringement suit] in connection with communication over a network [assuming the patent covers subject matter connected to communication over a network], said utility requiring the presence of the object identification code and proof of ownership [infringement suit requires the use of the patent number and a proof of ownership of the patent];

wherein said objects are transferable among users [patent ownership can be transferred]; and

wherein an object that is transferred is assigned to the new owner [when transferred, patent belongs to the new owner].

Yikes! Perhaps the patent system itself is prior art that would invalidate this claim, or at least narrow its scope. This is too much to contemplate on a Friday afternoon.

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Balancing Can Be Harder Than It Looks

January 30, 2004 by

Reflecting on the recent argument about Howard Dean’s old smartcard speech, Larry Lessig condemns the kind of binary thinking that would divide us all into two camps, pro-privacy vs. pro-national-security. He argues that Dean’s balanced speech was (perhaps deliberately) misread by some, with the goal of putting Dean into the extreme pro-national-security/anti-privacy camp.

There is a special circle in hell reserved for those who try to destroy the middle ground on issues like this. Dean was clearly trying to take a balanced position, and it’s unfair to ignore the pro-privacy part of his speech to paint him as anti-privacy. Dean was advocating a reasonable balance.

But it’s not enough simply to want balance. You also have to figure out how to achieve it, or at least approximate it, by adjusting the available policy levers. And that can be difficult, especially if those levers are weak or hard to understand. Opting for balance is not the end of the policy process, but the beginning.

Rather than accusing politicians like Dean of wanting the worst for America, we can do much more good by helping them understand what the policy levers do and why it might not be such a good idea to pull that one they’re reaching for.

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