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2008 Predictions

January 7, 2008 by

Here are the official Freedom to Tinker predictions for 2008, based on input by Alex Halderman, David Robinson, Dan Wallach, and me.

(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.

(2) Copyright issues will still be gridlocked in Congress.

(3) No patent reform bill will be passed. Baby steps toward a deal between the infotech and biotech industries won’t lead anywhere.

(4) DRM-free sales will become standard in the music business. The movie studios will flirt with the idea of DRM-free sales but won’t take the plunge, yet.

(5) The 2008 elections will not see an e-voting meltdown of Florida 2000 proportions, but a bevy of smaller problems will be reported, further fueling the trend toward reform.

(6) E-voting lawsuits will abound, with voters suing officials, officials suing other officials, and officials suing vendors (or vice versa).

(7) Second Life will jump the shark and the cool kids will start moving elsewhere; but virtual worlds generally will lumber on.

(8) MySpace will begin its long decline, losing customers for the first time.

(9) The trend toward open cellular data networks will continue, but not as quickly as optimists had hoped.

(10) If a Democrat wins the White House, we’ll hear talk about reinvigorated antitrust enforcement in the tech industries. (But of course it will all be talk, as the new administration won’t take office until 2009.)

(11) A Facebook application will cause a big privacy to-do.

(12) There will be calls for legislation to create a sort of Web 2.0 user’s bill of rights, giving users rights to access and extract information held by sites; but no action will be taken.

(13) An epidemic of news stories about teenage webcam exhibitionism will lead to calls for regulation.

(14) Somebody will get Skype or a similar VoIP client running on an Apple iPhone and it will, at least initially, operate over AT&T’s cellular phone network. AT&T and/or Apple will go out of their way to break this, either by filtering the network traffic or by locking down the iPhone.

Feel free to offer your own predictions in the comments.

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New York Times Magazine on e-voting

January 6, 2008 by

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has an article by Clive Thompson on electronic voting machines. Freedom to Tinker‘s Ed Felten is briefly quoted, as are a small handful of other experts. The article is a reasonable summary of where we are today, with paperless electronic voting systems on a downswing and optical scan paper ballots gaining in popularity. The article even conveys the importance of open source and the broader importance of transparency, i.e., convincing the loser that he or she legitimately lost the election.

A few points in the article are worth clarifying. For starters, Pennsylvania is cited as the “next Florida” – a swing state using paperless electronic voting systems whose electoral votes could well be decisive toward the 2008 presidential election. In other words, Pennsylvania has the perfect recipe to cause electoral chaos this November. Pennsylvania presently bans paper-trail attachments to voting systems. While it’s not necessarily too late to reverse this decision, Pennsylvania’s examiner for electronic voting systems, Michael Shamos, has often (and rightly) criticized these continuous paper-tape systems for their ability to compromise voters’ anonymity. Furthermore, the article cites evidence from Ohio where a claimed 20 percent of these things jammed, presumably without voters noticing and complaining. This is also consistent with a recent PhD thesis by Sarah Everett, where she used a homemade electronic voting system that would insert deliberate errors into the summary screen. About two thirds of her test subjects never noticed the errors and, amazingly enough, gave the system extremely high subjective marks. If voters don’t notice errors on a summary screen, then it’s reasonable to suppose that voters would be similarly unlikely to notice errors on a printout.

Rather than adding a bad paper-tape printer, the article explains that hand-marked optical tabulated ballots are presently seen as the best available voting technology. For technologies presently on the market and certified for use, this is definitely the case. A variety of assistive devices exist to help voters with low-vision, zero-vision, and other issues, although there’s plenty of room for improvement on that score.

Unfortunately, optical scanners, themselves, have their own security problems. For example, the Hart InterCivic eScan (a precinct-based optical scanner) has an Ethernet port on the back, and you can pretty much just jack in and send it arbitrary commands that can extract or rewrite the firmware and/or recorded votes. This year’s studies from California and Ohio found a variety of related issues. [I was part of the source code review team for the California study of Hart InterCivic.] The only short-term solution to compensate for these design flaws is to manually audit the results. This is probably the biggest issue glossed over in the article: when you have an electronic tabulation system, you must also have a non-electronic auditing procedure to verify the correctness of the electronic tabulation. This is best done by randomly sampling the ballots by hand and statistically comparing them to the official totals. In tight races, you sample more ballots to increase your confidence. Rep. Rush Holt’s bill, which has yet to come up for a vote, would require this nationwide, but it’s something that any state or county could and should institute on its own.

Lastly, the article has a fair amount of discussion of the Sarasota fiasco in November 2006, where roughly one in seven votes that were cast electronically were recorded as “undervotes” in the Congressional race, while far fewer undervotes were recorded in other races on the same ballot. If you do any sort of statistical projection to replace even a fraction of those undervotes with the observed ratios of cast votes, then the Congressional race would have had a different winner. [I worked as an expert for the Jennings campaign in the Sarasota case. David Dill and I wrote a detailed report on the Sarasota undervote issue. It is our opinion that there is not presently any definitive explanation for the causes of Sarasota’s undervote rate and a lot of analysis still needs to be performed.]

There are three theories raised in the article to explain Sarasota’s undervote anomaly: deliberate abstention (voters deliberately choosing to leave the race blank), human factors (voters being confused by the layout of the page), and malfunctioning machines. The article offers no support for the abstention theory beyond the assertions of Kathy Dent, the Sarasota County election supervisor, and ES&S, Sarasota’s equipment vendor (neither of whom have ever offered any support for these assertions). Dan Rather Reports covered many of the issues that could lead to machine malfunction, including poor quality control in manufacturing. To support the human factors theory, the article only refers to “early results from a separate test by an MIT professor”, but the professor in question, Ted Selker, has never published these results. The only details I’ve ever been able to find about his experiments is this quote from a Sarasota Herald-Tribune article:

On Tuesday [November 14, 2006], Selker set up a computer with a dummy version of the Sarasota ballot at the Boston Museum of Science to test the extent of the ballot design problems.

Twenty people cast fake ballots and two people missed the District 13 race. But the experiment was hastily designed and had too few participants to draw any conclusion, Selker said.

Needless to say, that’s not enough experimental evidence to support a usefully quantitative conclusion. The article also quotes Michael Shamos with some very specific numbers:

It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines “fail” in each election. “In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote,” he told me. “But they’re very disturbing to the public.”

I would love to know where he got those numbers, since many real elections, such as the Sarasota election, seem to have yielded far larger problem rates.

For the record, it’s worth pointing out that Jennings has never conceded the election. Instead, after Florida’s courts decided to deny her motions for expert discovery (i.e., she asked the court to let her experts have a closer look at the voting machines and the court said “no”), Jennings has instead moved her complaint to the Committee on House Administration. Technically, Congress is responsible for seating its own members and can overturn a local election result. The committee has asked the Governmental Accountability Office to investigate further. They’re still working on it. Meanwhile, Jennings is preparing to run again in 2008.

In summary, the NYT Magazine article did a reasonable job of conveying the high points of the electronic voting controversy. There will be no surprises for anybody who follows the issue closely, and there are a only few places where the article conveys “facts” that are “truthy” without necessarily being true. If you want to get somebody up to speed on the electronic voting issue, this article makes a fine starting place.

[Irony sidebar: in the same election where Jennings lost due to the undervote anomaly, a voter initiative appeared on the ballot that would require the county to replace its touchscreen voting systems with paper ballots. That initiative passed.]

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2007 Predictions Scorecard

January 2, 2008 by

As usual, we’ll start the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2007 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type.

(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.

We predict this every year, and it’s always right. This prediction is so obvious that it’s almost unfair to count it. Verdict: right.

(2) An easy tool for cloning MySpace pages will show up, and young users will educate each other loudly about the evils of plagiarism.

This didn’t happen. Anyway, MySpace seems less relevant now than it did a year ago. Verdict: wrong.

(3) Despite the ascent of Howard Berman (D-Hollywood) to the chair of the House IP subcommittee, copyright issues will remain stalemated in Congress.

As predicted, not much happened in Congress on the copyright front. As usual, some bad bills were proposed, but none came close to passage. Verdict: right.

(4) Like the Republicans before them, the Democrats’ tech policy will disappoint. <ionly a few incumbent companies will be happy.

Very little changed. For the most part, tech policy issues do not break down neatly along party lines. Verdict: right.

(5) Major record companies will sell a significant number of MP3s, promoting them as compatible with everything. Movie studios won’t be ready to follow suit, persisting in their unsuccessful DRM strategy.

Two of the four major record companies now sell MP3s, and a third announced it will soon start. I haven’t seen sales statistics, but given that Amazon’s store sells only MP3s, sales can’t be too low. As predicted, movie studies are still betting on DRM. Verdict: right.

(6) Somebody will figure out the right way to sell and place video ads online, and will get very rich in the process. (We don’t know how they’ll do it. If we did, we wouldn’t be spending our time writing this blog.)

This didn’t happen. Verdict: wrong.

(7) Some mainstream TV shows will be built to facilitate YouTubing, for example by structuring a show as a series of separable nine-minute segments.

I thought this was a clever prediction, but it didn’t happen. The biggest news in commercial TV this year was the writers’ strike. Verdict: wrong.

(8) AACS, the encryption system for next-gen DVDs, will melt down and become as ineffectual as the CSS system used on ordinary DVDs.

AACS was defeated and you can now buy commercial software that circumvents it. Verdict: right.

(9) Congress will pass a national law regarding data leaks. It will be a watered-down version of the California law, and will preempt state laws.

There was talk about doing this but no bill was passed. Verdict: wrong.

(10) A worm infection will spread on game consoles.

To my knowledge this didn’t happen. It’s a good thing, too, because the closed nature of many game consoles would make a successful worm infection particularly challenging to stamp out. Verdict: wrong.

(11) There will be less attention to e-voting as the 2008 election seems far away and the public assumes progress is being made. The Holt e-voting bill will pass, ratifying the now-solid public consensus in favor of paper trails.

Attention to e-voting was down a bit. Despite widespread public unhappiness with paperless voting, the Holt bill did not pass, mostly due to pushback from state and local officials. Rep. Holt is reportedly readying a more limited bill for introduction in January. Verdict: mostly wrong.

(12) Bogus airport security procedures will peak and start to decrease.

Bogus procedures may or may not have peaked, but I didn’t see any decrease. Verdict: unclear.

(13) On cellphones, software products will increasingly compete independent of hardware.

There was a modest growth of third-party software applications for cellphones, including some cross-platform applications. But there was less of this than we predicted. Verdict: mostly wrong.

Our overall score: five right, two mostly wrong, five wrong, one unclear. Next: our predictions for 2008.

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Three Down, One to Go: Warner Music to Sell MP3s

December 31, 2007 by

Warner Music will sell music through Amazon’s online store without DRM (copy protection) technology, according to a New York Times story by Jeff Leeds. This is a big step for Warner, given that earlier this year Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman said that selling MP3s would be “completely without logic or merit.”

The next question is whether Warner will make a deal with Apple to sell MP3s on iTunes too. The NYT article says Warner plans to do so, but the LA Times implies the opposite. The two other majors that sell MP3s are split on this point, with EMI selling MP3s through multiple stores including iTunes, and Universal Music selling MP3s through other online stores but refusing to do so through iTunes. Is Warner willing to inconvenience its customers in order to undercut Apple?

By the way, the Times article makes a simple but common mistake, in saying that “the industry faces increasing pressure to bolster digital music sales as its traditional business — selling CDs — suffers a sharp decline.” CDs are digital too, and they lack DRM (attempts to add DRM to CDs failed disastrously), but news stories and commentary often ignore these facts. I guess “Warner to adopt another DRM-free digital format” wouldn’t seem quite so newsworthy.

Three of the four majors (all but SonyBMG) now sell MP3s. It’s only a matter of time before the last domino falls, and the industry can move on to the next stage in its evolution.

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Obama's Digital Policy

December 28, 2007 by

The Iowa caucuses, less than a week away, will kick off the briefest and most intense series of presidential primaries in recent history. That makes it a good time to check in on what the candidates are saying about digital technologies. Between now and February 5th (the 23-state tsunami of primaries that may well resolve the major party nominations), we’ll be taking a look.

First up: Barack Obama. A quick glance at the sites of other candidates suggests that Obama is an outlier – none of the other major players has gone into anywhere near the level of detail that he has in their official campaign output. That may mean we’ll be tempted to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about him – but if so, I guess that’s the benefit he reaps by paying attention. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch tech primary provides the best summary I’ve found, compiled from other sources, of candidates’ positions on tech issues, and we may find ourselves relying on that over the next few weeks.

For Obama, we have a detailed “Technology and Innovation” white paper. It spans a topical area that Europeans often refer to as ICTs – information and communications technologies. That means basically anything digital, plus the analog ambit of the FCC (media concentration, universal service and so on). Along the way, other areas get passing mention – immigration of high tech workers, trade policy, energy efficiency.

Net neutrality may be the most talked about tech policy issue in Washington – it has generated a huge amount of constituent mail, perhaps as many as 600,000 constituent letters. Obama is clear on this: He says requiring ISPs to provide “accurate and honest information about service plans” that may violate neutrality is “not enough.” He wants a rule to stop network operators from charging “fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others.” I think that full transparency about non-neutral Internet service may indeed be enough, an idea I first got from a comment on this blog, but in any case it’s nice to have a clear statement of view.

Where free speech collides with child protection, Obama faces the structural challenge, common to Democrats, of simultaneously appeasing both the entertainment industry and concerned moms. Predictably, he ends up engaging in a little wishful thinking:

On the Internet, Obama will require that parents have the option of receiving parental controls software that not only blocks objectionable Internet content but also prevents children from revealing personal information through their home computer.

The idealized version of such software, in which unwanted communications are stopped while desirable ones remain unfettered, is typically quite far from what the technology can actually provide. The software faces a design tradeoff between being too broad, in which case desirable use is stopped, and too narrow, in which case undesirable online activity is permitted. That might be why Internet filtering software, despite being available commercially, isn’t already ubiquitous. Given that parents can already buy it, Obama’s aim to “require that parents have the option of receiving” such software sounds like a proposal for the software to be subsidized or publicly funded; I doubt that would make it better.

On privacy, the Obama platform again reflects a structural problem. Voters seem eager for a President who will have greater concern for statutory law than the current incumbent does. But some of the secret and possibly illegal reductions of privacy that have gone on at the NSA and elsewhere may actually (in the judgment of those privy to the relevant secrets) be indispensable. So Obama, like many others, favors “updating surveillance laws.” He’ll follow the law, in other words, but first he wants it modified so that it can be followed without unduly tying his hands. That’s very likely the most reasonable kind of view a presidential candidate could have, but it doesn’t tell us how much privacy citizens will enjoy if he gets his way. The real question, unanswered in this platform, is exactly which updates Obama would favor. He himself is probably reserving judgment until, briefed by the intelligence community, he can competently decide what updates are needed.

My favorite part of the document, by far, is the section on government transparency. (I’d be remiss were I not to shamelessly plug the panel on exactly this topic at CITP’s upcoming January workshop.) The web is enabling amazing new levels, and even new kinds, of sunlight to accompany the exercise of public power. If you haven’t experienced MAPlight, which pairs campaign contribution data with legislators’ votes, then you should spend the next five minutes watching this video. Josh Tauberer, who launched Govtrack.us, has pointed out that one major impediment to making these tools even better is the reluctance of government bodies to adopt convenient formats for the data they publish. A plain text page (typical fare on existing government sites like THOMAS) meets the letter of the law, but an open format with rich metadata would see the same information put to more and better use.

Obama’s stated position is to make data available “online in universally accessible formats,” a clear nod in this direction. He also calls for live video feeds of government proceedings. One more radical proposal, camoflaged among these others, is

…pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds exciting. If I wanted to start using wikis to make serious public policy decisions – and needed to make the idea sound simple and easy – that’s roughly how I might put it.

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