January 16, 2025

Posts Comments

iPhone Unlocked; Legal Battle Looming?

August 27, 2007 by

In the past few days several groups declared victory in the battle to unlock the iPhone – to make the iPhone work on cellular networks other than AT&T’s. New Jersey teenager George Hotz published instructions (starting here) for a geeks-only unlock procedure involving hardware and software tweaks. An anonymous group called iPhoneSimFree reportedly has an easy all-software unlock procedure which they plan to sell. And a company called UniquePhones was set to sell a remote unlocking service.

(Technical background: The iPhone as initially sold worked only on the AT&T cell network – the device was pretty much useless until you activated AT&T wireless service on it. People figured out quickly that you could immediately cancel the wireless service to get an iPhone that worked only via WiFi; but you couldn’t use it on any other mobile phone/data network. This was not a fundamental technical limitation of the device, but was instead a technological tie designed by Apple to drive business to AT&T.)

Unlocking the iPhone helps everybody, except AT&T, which would prefer not to face competition in selling wireless services to iPhone users. So AT&T, predictably, seem to be sending its lawyers after the unlockers. UniquePhone, via their iphoneunlocking.com site, reports incoming lawyergrams from AT&T regarding “issues such as copyright infringement and illegal software dissemination”; UniquePhones has delayed its product release to consider its options. The iPhoneSimFree members are reportedly keeping anonymous because of legal concerns.

Can AT&T cook up a legal theory justifying a ban on iPhone unlocking? I’ll leave that question to the lawyers. It seems to me, though, that regardless of what the law does say, it ought to say that iPhone unlocking is fine. For starters, the law should hesitate to micromanage what people do with the devices they own. If you want to run different software on your phone, or if you want to use one cell provider rather than another, why should the government interfere?

I’ll grant that AT&T would prefer that you buy their service. Exxon would prefer that you be required to buy gasoline from them, but the government (rightly) doesn’t try to stop you from filling up elsewhere. The question is not what benefits AT&T or Exxon, but what benefits society as a whole. And the strong presumption is that letting the free market operate – letting customers decide which product to buy – is the best and most efficient policy. Absent some compelling argument that iPhone lock-in is actually necessary for the market to operate efficiently, government should let customers choose their cell operator. Indeed, government policy already tries to foster choice of carriers, for example by requiring phone number portability.

Regardless of what AT&T does, its effort to stop iPhone unlocking is likely doomed. Unlocking software is small and easily transmitted. AT&T’s lawyers can stick a few fingers in the dike, but they won’t be able to stop the unlocking software from getting to people who want it. This is yet another illustration that you can’t lock people out of their own digital devices.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why Was Skype Offline?

August 22, 2007 by

Last week Skype, the popular, free Net telephony service, was unavailable for a day or two due to technical problems. Failures of big systems are always interesting and this is no exception.

We have only limited information about what went wrong. Skype said very little at first but is now opening up a little. Based on their description, it appears that the self-organization mechanism in Skype’s peer-to-peer network became unstable. Let’s unpack that to understand what it means, and what it can tell us about systems like this.

One of the surprising facts about big information systems is that the sheer scale of a system changes the engineering problems you face. When a system grows from small to large, the existing problems naturally get harder. But you also see entirely new problems that didn’t even exist at small scale – and, worse yet, this will happen again and again as your system keeps growing.

Skype uses a peer-to-peer organization, in which the traffic flows through ordinary users’ computers rather than being routed through a set of central servers managed by Skype itself. The advantage of exploiting users’ computers is that they’re available at no cost and, conveniently, there are more of them to exploit when there are more users requesting service. The disadvantage is that users’ computers tend to reboot or go offline more than dedicated servers would.

To deal with the ever-changing population of user computers, Skype has to use a clever self-organization algorithm that allows the machines to organize themselves without relying (more than a tiny bit) on a central authority. Self-organization has two goals: (1) the system must respond quickly to changed conditions to get back into a good configuration soon, and (2) the system must maintain stability as conditions change. These two goals aren’t entirely contradictory, but they are at least in tension. Responding quickly to changes makes it difficult to maintain stability, and the system must be engineered to make this tradeoff wisely in a wide range of conditions. Getting this right in a huge P2P system like Skype is tricky.

Which brings us to the story of last week’s failure, as described by Skype. On Tuesday August 14, Microsoft released a new set of patches to Windows, according to their normal monthly cycle. Many Windows machines downloaded the patch, installed it, and then rebooted. Each such machine would leave the Skype network when it shut down, then rejoin after booting. So the effect of Microsoft’s patch release was to increase the turnover in Skype’s network.

The result, Skype says, is that the network became unstable as the respond-quickly mechanism outran the maintain-stability mechanism; and the problem snowballed as the growing instability caused ever stronger (but poorly aimed) responses. The Skype service was essentially unavailable for a day or two starting on Thursday August 16, until the company could track down the problem and fix a code bug that it said contributed to the problem.

The biggest remaining mystery is why the problem took so long to develop. Microsoft issued the patch on Tuesday, and Skype didn’t get into deep trouble until Thursday. We can explain away some of the delay by noting that Windows machines might take up to a day to download the patch and reboot, but this still means it took Skype’s network at least a day to melt down. I’d love to know more about how this happened.

I would hesitate to draw too many broad conclusions from a single failure like this. Large systems of all kinds, whether centralized or P2P, must fight difficult stability problems. When a problem like this does occur, it’s a useful natural experiment in how large systems behave. I only hope Skype has more to say about what went wrong.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

OLPC Review Followup

August 16, 2007 by

Last week’s review of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) machine by twelve-year-old “SG” was one of our most-commented-upon posts ever. Today I want to follow up on a few items.

First, the machine I got for SG was the B2 (Beta 2) version of the OLPC system, which is not the latest. Folks from the OLPC project suggest that some of the problems SG found are fixed in the latest version. They have graciously offered to send an up to date OLPC machine for SG to review. SG has agreed to try out the new machine and review it here on Freedom to Tinker.

Second, I was intrigued by the back-and-forth in the comments over SG’s gender. I had originally planned to give SG a pseudonym that revealed SG’s gender, but a colleague suggested that I switch to a gender-neutral pseudonym. Most commenters didn’t seem to assume one gender or the other. A few assumed that SG is a boy, which generated some pushback from others who found that assumption sexist. My favorite comment in this series was from “Chris,” who wrote:

Why are you assuming the review was written by a boy?
At 12 we’re only two years from 8th grade level, the rumored grail (or natural default) of our national publications. SG, you’re clearly capable of writing for most any publication in this country, you go girl! (even if you are a boy)

Third, readers seem to be as impressed as I was by the quality of SG’s writing. Some found it hard to believe that a twelve-year-old could have written the post. But it was indeed SG’s work. I am assured that SG’s parents did not edit the post but only suggested in general terms the addition of a paragraph about what SG did with the machine. I suggested only one minor edit to preserve SG’s anonymity. Otherwise what you read is what SG wrote.

Though sentences like “My expectations for this computer were, I must admit, not very high.” seem unusual for a twelve-year-old, others show a kid’s point of view. One example: “Every time you hit a key, it provides a certain amount of satisfaction of how squishy and effortless it is. I just can’t get over that keyboard.”

SG is welcome to guest blog here in the future. Kids can do a lot, if we let them.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

One Laptop Per Child, Reviewed by 12-Year-Old

August 10, 2007 by

[I recently got my hands on one of the One Laptop Per Child machines. I found the perfect person to review the machine. Today’s guest blogger, SG, is twelve years old and is the child of a close friend. I lent the laptop to SG and asked SG to write a review, which appears here just as SG wrote it, without any editing. –Ed]

I’ve spent all of my life around computers and laptops. I’m only 12 years old though, so I’m not about to go off and start programming a computer to do my homework for me or anything. My parents use computers a lot, so I know about HTML and mother boards and stuff, but still I’m not exactly what you would call an expert. I just use the computer for essays, surfing the web, etc.

Over the last few days, I spent a lot of time on this laptop. I went on the program for typing documents, took silly pictures with the camera, went on the web, played the matching game, recorded my voice on the music-making application, and longed for someone to join me on the laptop-to-laptop messaging system. Here is what I discovered about the OLPC laptops:

My expectations for this computer were, I must admit, not very high. But it completely took me by surprise. It was cleverly designed, imaginative, straightforward, easy to understand (I was given no instructions on how to use it. It was just, “Here. Figure it out yourself.”), useful and simple, entertaining, dependable, really a “stick to the basics” kind of computer. It’s the perfect laptop for the job. Great for first time users, it sets the mood by offering a bunch of entertaining and easy games and a camera. It also has an application that allows you to type things. The space is a little limited, but the actual thing was great. It doesn’t have one of those impossible-to-read fonts but it was still nice. When the so-so connection allows you to get on, the internet is one of the best features of the whole computer. With a clever and space-saving toolbar, it is compact, well designed, accessible, and fast.

But, unfortunately, the internet is the only fast element of the computer. My main problem with this laptop is how very slow it is. It’s true that I am used to faster computers, but that’s not the problem. It’s just really slow. I had to wait two minutes to get onto one application. That’s just a little longer than I can accept. Also, it got slower and slower and slower the longer I went without rebooting it. I had to reboot it all the time. We’re talking once every two or three hours of use! And one of the most frustrating things about the system was that it gave no warning when it was out of power (as it was often because it lost charge very quickly) but just shut down. It doesn’t matter if you’re working on your autobiography and you had gotten all the way to the day before yesterday and forgotten to save it, it just shuts off and devours the whole thing.

This laptop is definitely designed for harsh conditions. Covered in a green and white hard plastic casing, it is designed not to break if dropped. It has a very nice handle for easy transportation and two antennas in plastic that can be easily put up. Once you open it, you see the screen (pretty high resolution) and my favorite part of the computer: the keyboard. It’s green rubber so that dust and water won’t get in under the keys, and this makes the keyboard an awesome thing to type on. Every time you hit a key, it provides a certain amount of satisfaction of how squishy and effortless it is. I just can’t get over that keyboard. There is also a button that changes the brightness of the screen. The other cool thing is that the screen is on a swiveling base, so you can turn it backwards then close it. This makes the laptop into just a screen with a handle.

All in all, this laptop is great for its price, its job, and its value. It is almost perfect. Just speed it up, give it a little more battery charge hold, and you have yourself the perfect laptop. I’m sure kids around the world will really love, enjoy, and cherish these laptops. They will be so useful. This program is truly amazing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Sony-BMG Sues Maker of Bad DRM

August 8, 2007 by

Major record company Sony-BMG has sued the company that made some of the dangerous DRM (anti-copying) software that shipped on Sony-BMG compact discs back in 2005, according to an Antony Bruno story in Billboard.

Longtime Freedom to Tinker readers will remember that back in 2005 Sony-BMG shipped CDs that opened security holes and invaded privacy when inserted into Windows PCs. The CDs contained anti-copying software from two companies, SunnComm and First4Internet. The companies’ attempts to fix the problems only made things worse. Sony-BMG ultimately had to recall some of the discs, and faced civil suits and government investigations that were ultimately settled. The whole episode must have cost Sony-BMG many millions of dollars. (Alex Halderman and I wrote an academic paper about it.)

One of the most interesting questions about this debacle is who deserved the blame. SunnComm and First4Internet made the dangerous products, but Sony-BMG licensed them and distributed them to the public. It’s tempting to blame the vendors, but the fact that Sony-BMG shipped two separate dangerous products has to be part of the calculus too. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

As it turned out, Sony-BMG took most of the public heat and shouldered most of the financial responsibility. That was pretty much inevitable considering that Sony-BMG had the deepest pockets, was the entity that consumers knew, and had by far the most valuable brand name. The lawsuit looks like an attempt by Sony-BMG to recoup some of its losses.

The suit will frustrate SunnComm’s latest attempt to run from its past. SunnComm had renamed itself as Amergence Group and was trying to build a new corporate image as some kind of venture capitalist or start-up incubator. (This isn’t the first swerve in SunnComm’s direction – the company started out as a booking agency for Elvis impersonators. No, I’m not making that up.) The suit and subsequent publicity won’t help the company’s image any.

The suit itself will be interesting, if it goes ahead. We have long wondered exactly what Sony knew and when, as well as how the decision to deploy the dangerous technology was made. Discovery in the lawsuit will drag all of that out, though it will probably stay behind closed doors unless the case makes it to court. Sadly for the curious public, a settlement seems likely. SunnComm/Amergence almost certainly lacks the funds to fight this suit, or to pay the $12 million Sony-BMG is asking for.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,