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The rise of the "nanostory"

June 12, 2009 by

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I offer a review of Bill Wasik’s excellent new book, And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. Cliff’s notes version: This is a great new take on the little cultural boomlets and cryptic fads that seem to swarm all over the Internet. The author draws on his personal experience, including his creation of the still-hilarious Right Wing New York Times. Here’s a taste from the book itself—Wasik describing his decision to create the first flash mob:

It was out of the question to create a project that might last, some new institution or some great work of art, for these would take time, exact cost, require risk, even as their odds of success hovered at nearly zero. Meanwhile, the odds of creating a short-lived sensation, of attracting incredible attention for a very brief period of time, were far more promising indeed… I wanted my new project to be what someone would call “The X of the Summer” before I even contemplated exactly what X might be.

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Internet Voting: How Far Can We Go Safely?

June 5, 2009 by

Yesterday I chaired an interesting panel on Internet Voting at CFP. Participants included Amy Bjelland and Craig Stender (State of Arizona), Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat (Overseas Vote Foundation) Avi Rubin (Johns Hopkins), and Alec Yasinsac (Univ. of South Alabama). Thanks to David Bruggeman and Cameron Wilson at USACM for setting up the panel.

Nobody advocated a full-on web voting system that would allow voting from any web browser. Instead, the emphasis was on more modest steps, aimed specifically at overseas voters. Overseas voters are a good target population, because there aren’t too many of them — making experimentation less risky — and because vote-by-mail serves them poorly.

Discussion focused on two types of systems: voting kiosks, and Internet transmission of absentee ballots.

A voting kiosk is a computer-based system, running carefully configured software, that is set up in a securable location overseas. Voters come to this location, authenticate themselves, and vote just as they would in a polling place back home. A good kiosk system keeps an electronic record, which is transmitted securely across the Internet to voting officials in the voter’s home jurisdiction. It also keeps a paper record, verifiable by the voter, which is sent back to voting officials after the elections, enabling a post-election audit. A kiosk can use optical-scan technology or it can be a touch-screen machine with a paper trail — essentially it’s a standard voting system with a paper trail, connected to home across the Internet. If the engineering is done right, if the home system that receives the electronic ballots is walled off from the central vote-tabulating system, and if appropriate post-election auditing is done, this system can be secure enough to use. All of the panelists agreed that this type of system is worth trying, at least as a pilot test.

The other approach is use ordinary absentee ballots, but to distribute them and allow voters to return them online. A voter goes to a web site and downloads a file containing an absentee ballot and a cover sheet. After printing out the file, the voter fills out the cover sheet (giving his name and other information) and the ballot. He scans the cover sheet and ballot, and uploads the scan to a web site. Election officials collect and print the resulting file, and treat the printout like an ordinary absentee ballot.

Kevin Poulsen and Eric Rescorla criticize the security of this system, and for good reason. Internet distribution of blank ballots can be secure enough, if done very carefully, but returning filled-out ballots from an ordinary computer and browser is risky. Eric summarizes the risks:

We have integrity issues here as well: as Poulsen suggests (and quotes Rubin as suggesting), there are a number of ways for things to go wrong here: an attacker could subvert your computer and have it modify the ballots before sending them; you could get phished and the phisher could modify your ballot appropriately before passing it on to the central site. Finally, the attacker could subvert the central server and modify the ballots before they are printed out.

Despite the risks, systems of this sort are moving forward in various places. Arizona has one, which Amy and Craig demonstrated for the panel’s audience, and the Overseas Vote Foundation has one as well.

Why is this less-secure alternative getting more traction than kiosk-based systems? Partly it’s due to the convenience of being able to vote from anywhere (with a Net connection) instead of having to visit a kiosk location. That’s understandable. But another part of the reason seems to be that people don’t realize what can go wrong, and how often things actually do go wrong, in online interactions.

In the end, there was a lot of agreement among the panelists — a rare occurrence in public e-voting discussions — but disagreement remained about how far we can go safely. For overseas voters at least, the gap between what is convenient and what can be made safe is smaller than it is elsewhere, but that gap does still exist.

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iPhone Apps: Apple Picks a Little, Talks a Little

May 27, 2009 by

Last week Apple, in an incident destined for the textbooks, rejected an iPhone app called Eucalyptus, which lets you download and read classic public-domain books from Project Gutenberg. The rejection meant that nobody could download or use the app (without jailbreaking their phone). Apple’s rationale? Some of the books, in Apple’s view, were inappropriate.

Apple’s behavior put me in mind of the Pick-a-Little Ladies from the classic musical The Music Man. These women, named for their signature song “Pick a Little, Talk a Little,” condemn Marian the Librarian for having inappropriate books in her library:

Maud: Professor, her kind of woman doesn’t belong on any committee. Of course, I shouldn’t tell you this but she advocates dirty books.

Harold: Dirty books?!

Alma: Chaucer!

Ethel: Rabelais!

Eulalie: Balzac!

This is pretty much the scene we saw last week, with the Eucalyptus app in the role of Marian — providing works by Chaucer, Rabelais, and Balzac — and Apple in the role of the Pick-a-Little Ladies. Visualize Steve Jobs, in his black turtleneck and jeans, transported back to 1912 Iowa and singing along with these frumpy busybodies.

Later in The Music Man, the Pick-a-Little Ladies decide that Marian is all right after all, and they praise her for offering great literature. (“The Professor told us to read those books, and we simply adored them all!”) In the same way, Apple, after the outcry over its muzzling of Eucalyptus, reverse course and un-rejected Eucalyptus. Now we can all get Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac! on our iPhones.

But there is one important difference between Apple and the Pick-a-Little Ladies. Apple had the power to veto Eucalyptus, but the Ladies couldn’t stop Marian from offering dirty books. The Ladies were powerless because Old Man Mason had cleverly bequeathed the library building to the town but the books to Marian. In today’s terms, Mason had jailbroken the library.

All of this highlights the downside of Apple’s controlling strategy. It’s one thing to block apps that are fraudulent or malicious, but Apple has gone beyond this to set itself up as the arbiter of good taste in iPhone apps. If you were Apple, would you rather be the Pick-a-Little Ladies, pretending to sit in judgement over the town, or Old Man Mason, letting people make their own choices?

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European Antitrust Fines Against Intel: Possibly Justified

May 19, 2009 by

Last week the European Commission competition authorities charged Intel with anticompetitive behavior in the market for microprocessor chips, and levied a €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) fine on the company. Some commentators attacked the ruling as ridiculous on its face. I disagree. Let me explain why the European action, though not conclusively justified at this point, is at least plausible.

The starting point of any competition analysis is to recall the purpose of competition law: not to protect rival firms (such as AMD in this case), but to protect competition for the benefit of consumers. The key is to understand what is fair competition and what is not. If a firm dominates a market, and even drives other firms out, but does so by producing better products at better prices, they deserve applause. If a dominant firm takes steps that are aimed more at undermining competition than at serving customers, then they may be crossing the line into anticompetitive behavior.

To do even a superficial analysis in a single blog post, we’re going to have to make some assumptions. First, for the sake of this post let’s accept as true the EC’s claims about Intel’s specific actions. Second, let’s set aside the details of European law and instead ask whether Intel’s actions were fair and justified. Third, let’s assume that there is a single market for processor chips, in the sense that any processor chip can be used in any system. A serious analysis would have to consider carefully all of these factors, but these assumptions will help us get started.

With all that in mind, does the EC have a plausible case against Intel?

First we have to ask whether Intel has monopoly power. Economists define monopoly power as the ability to raise prices above the competitive level without losing money as a result. We know that Intel has high market share, but that by itself does not imply monopoly power. Presumably the EC will argue that there is a significant barrier to entry which keeps new firms out of the microprocessor market, and that this barrier to entry plus Intel’s high market share adds up to monopoly power. This is at least plausible, and there isn’t space here to dissect that argument in detail, so let’s accept it for the sake of our analysis.

Now: having monopoly power, did Intel abuse that power by acting anticompetitively?

The EC accused Intel of two anticompetitive strategies. First, the EC says that Intel gave PC makers discounts if they agreed to ship Intel chips in 100% of their systems, or 80% of their systems. Is this anticompetitive? It’s hard to say. Volume discounts are common in many industries, but this is not a typical volume discount. The price goes down when the customer buys more Intel chips — that’s a typical volume discount — but the price of Intel chips also goes up when the customer buys more competing chips — which is unusual and might have anticompetitive effects. Whether Intel has a competitive justification for this remains to be seen.

Second, and more troubling, the EC says that “Intel awarded computer manufacturers payments – unrelated to any particular purchases from Intel – on condition that these computer manufacturers postponed or cancelled the launch of specific AMD-based products and/or put restrictions on the distribution of specific AMD-based products.” This one seems hard for Intel to justify. A firm with monopoly power, spending money to block competitor’s distribution channels, is a classic anticompetitive strategy.

None of this establishes conclusively that Intel broke the law, or that the EC’s fine is justified. We made a lot of assumptions along the way, and we would have to reconsider each of them carefully, before we could conclude that the EC’s argument is correct. We would also need to give Intel a chance to offer pro-competitive justifications for their behavior. But despite all of these caveats, I think we can conclude that although it is far from proven at this point, the EC’s case should be taken seriously.

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The future of high school yearbooks

May 18, 2009 by

The Dallas Morning News recently ran a piece about how kids these days aren’t interested in buying physical, printed yearbooks. (Hat tip to my high school’s journalism teacher, who linked to it from our journalism alumni Facebook group.) Why spend $60 on a dead-trees yearbook when you can get everything you need on Facebook? My 20th high school reunion is coming up this fall, and I was the “head” photographer for my high school’s yearbook and newspaper, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Let’s break down everything that a yearbook actually is and then think about how these features can and cannot be replicated in the digital world. A yearbook has:

  • higher-than-normal photographic quality (yearbook photographers hopefully own better camera equipment and know how to use their gear properly)
  • editors who do all kinds of useful things (sending photographers to events they want covered, selecting the best pictures for publication, captioning them, and indexing the people in them)
  • a physical artifact that people can pass around to their friends to mark up and personalize, and which will still be around years later

If you get rid of the physical yearbook, you’ve got all kinds of issues. Permanence is the big one. There’s nothing that my high school can do to delete my yearbook after it’s been published. Conversely, if high schools host their yearbooks on school-owned equipment, then they can and will fail over time. (Yes, I know you could run a crawler and make a copy, but I wouldn’t trust a typical high school’s IT department to build a site that will be around decades later.) To pick one example, my high school’s web site, when it first went online, had a nice alumni registry. Within a few years, it unceremoniously went away without warning.

Okay, what about Facebook? At this point, almost a third of my graduating class is on Facebook, and I’m sure the numbers are much higher for more recent classes. Some of my classmates are digging up old pictures, posting them, and tagging each other. With social networking as part of the yearbook process from the start, you can get some serious traction in replacing physical yearbooks. Yearbook editors and photography staff can still cover events, select good pictures, caption them, and index them. The social networking aspect covers some of the personalization and markup that we got by writing in each others’ yearbooks. That’s fun, but please somebody convince me that Facebook will be here ten or twenty years from now. Any business that doesn’t make money will eventually go out of business, and Facebook is no exception.

Aside from the permanence issue, is anything else lost by going to a Web 2.0 social networking non-printed yearbook? Censorship-happy high schools (and we all know what a problem that can be) will never allow a social network site that they control to have students’ genuine expressions of their distaste for all the things that rebellious youth like to complain about. Never mind that the school has a responsibility to maintain some measure of student privacy. Consequently, no high school would endorse the use of a social network that they couldn’t control and censor. I’m sure several of the people who wrote in my yearbook could have gotten in trouble if the things they wrote there were to have been raised before the school administration, yet those comments are the best part of my yearbook. Nothing takes you back quite as much as off-color commentary.

One significant lever that high school yearbooks have, which commercial publications like newspapers generally lack, is that they’re non-profit. If the yearbook financially breaks even, they’re doing a good job. (And, in the digital universe, the costs are perhaps lower. I personally shot hundreds of rolls of black&white film, processed them, and printed them, and we had many more photographers on our staff. My high school paid for all the film, paper, and photo-chemistry that we used. Now they just need computers, although those aren’t exactly cheap, either.) So what if they don’t print so many physical yearbooks? Sure, the yearbook staff can do a short, vanity press run, so they can enter competitions and maybe win something, but otherwise they can put out a PDF or pickle the bowdlerized social network’s contents down to a DVD-ROM and call it a day. That hopefully creates enough permanence. What about uncensored commentary? That’s probably going to have to happen outside of the yearbook context. Any high school student can sign up for a webmail account and keep all their email for years to come. (Unlike Facebook, the webmail companies seem to be making money.) Similarly, the ubiquity of digital point-and-shoot cameras ensures that students will have uncensored, personal, off-color memories.

[Sidebar: There’s a reality show on TV called “High School Reunion.” Last year, they reunited some people from my school’s class of 1987. I was in the class of 1989. Prior to the show airing, I was contacted by one of the producers, wanting to use some of my photographs in the show. She sent me a waiver that basically had me indemnifying them for their use of my work; of course, they weren’t offering to pay me anything. Really? No thanks. One of the interesting questions was whether my photos were even “my property” to which I could even give them permission to use. There were no contracts of any kind when I signed up to work on the yearbook. You could argue that the school retains an interest in the pictures, never mind the original subjects from whom we never got model releases. Our final contract said, in effect, that I represented that I took the pictures and had no problem with them using them, but I made no claims as to ownership, and they indemnified me against any issues that might arise.

Question for the legal minds here: I have three binders full of negatives from my high school years. I could well invest a week of my time, borrow a good scanner, and get the whole collection online and post it online, either on my own web site or on Facebook. Should I? Am I opening myself to legal liability?]

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