A few years back, we had an interesting discussion over whether or not distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) could be seen as a valid form of protest -- the modern equivalent of a "sit-in." There are significant similarities between a DDoS and a sit-in. And, we've seen at least one lawyer make the claim that his client was exercising his First Amendment rights when DDoSing a local city government. Law enforcement, of course, wants to take it to the other extreme, seeing DDoS attacks as being a form of hacking, or even a type of terrorist attack.

Slashdot points out that some members of Anonymous have set up a We the People petition on the White House's website, asking the government to recognize DDoS as a valid form of protest.

With the advance in internet techonology, comes new grounds for protesting. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), is not any form of hacking in any way. It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage. It is, in that way, no different than any "occupy" protest. Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time.

(Random aside before I get into the larger discussion: you would think that people posting a petition to the White House would spend at least a little more time proofreading what they write, or getting more input before posting it. While the intent is clear, the typos and grammatical structure of the petition is atrocious.)

It seems unlikely that this petition will get the necessary 25,000 votes. Or that the White House will even care if it does. The problem, as always, is that much of this depends on where you sit as well as your knowledge of technology. You can make a reasonable argument for why a DDoS is just the modern equivalent of a sit-in. But you can also make a reasonable argument for why a DDoS is like hacking a site.

But here's the larger point: When you have to petition the government to get them to tell you what form of protest is "okay," you've probably already lost the battle. And that's part of the larger problem here. It seems clear to me that many of the DDoS attacks done by Anonymous are, quite clearly, done for the purpose of expression. They are trying to make a statement, and it sometimes works (though, it frequently backfires). I'm sympathetic to the claim that it's the modern equivalent of a sit-in, and find it troubling that the government is arguing it's something much, much worse. At the same time, I often think Anonymous' rush to DDoS undermines its larger efforts at times, and simply reinforces in the minds of some that Anonymous is made up of bratty, destructive kids. But, having to ask the government to say your form of expression is legitimate expression suggests that the government has already won.

Ah, unintended consequences. TorrentFreak has been doing a fantastic job sussing out the details of how various ISPs are going to implement the infamous "six strikes" plan. Earlier, it had found that AT&T's plan was to block access to frequently visited websites, while the fourth strike will include redirections to "educational material." Time Warner Cable, for its part, has said that it will direct users to a landing page, effectively interrupting your ability to surf the web without it being crazy annoying. The latest is the discovery of the details of Verizon's plan, which will involve reducing speeds of the connection to a slow poke speed of 256kbps. I don't know if you've tried surfing the web at 256kbps lately, but it's ridiculously frustrating, because pages are optimized for much higher speeds: Comcast and Cablevision (the two other participants) haven't leaked out any details yet, but you have to imagine that the situations would be similar. One thing to note, this isn't really a "six strikes" plan at all. AT&T's more draconian actions appear to kick in after the 4th notice. Verizon's kick in after the 5th notice. I know it's been popular to call it a "six strikes" plan, but our initial read suggested that it was really more of a five strikes plan, since mitigation factors were supposed to start after five. It's interesting to see that AT&T seems to want to push that even further.

All of the ISPs, of course, will say that they're not "cutting people off" from the internet, though they are making connections barely usable. Especially troubling is that, as TorrentFreak reveals in the latest post on this, at least Verizon's responses will apply to businesses as well. So that cafe down the street that has free WiFi... may quickly be throttled down to 256kbps. That will likely mean a lot less free WiFi out there, which is a significant and worrisome consequence of this program.

All of these programs seem focused on driving people to "educational content" about copyright infringement. It will be quite fascinating to see what kind of educational content is provided. We've seen in the past that most such attempts are really bad and one-sided. Even YouTube's "copyright school" is ridiculously one-sided and perpetuates myths about copyright, and suggests that fair use is too complex for you to even bother trying to understand.

Also, as the strikes get higher, there are two things to be aware of: ISPs are then more likely to hand over info to the copyright holders, meaning that it could still lead to copyright holders directly suing. That is, the "mitigation" factors are not, in any way, the sum total of the possible consequences for those accused. On top of that, we still fully expect that at least some copyright holders are planning to insist that ISPs who are aware of subscribers with multiple "strikes" are required under law to terminate their accounts. At least the RIAA has indicated that this is its interpretation of the DMCA's clause that requires service providers to have a "termination policy" for "repeat infringers." So it's quite likely that even if the ISPs have no official plan to kick people off the internet entirely under the plan, some copyright holders will still push for exactly that kind of end result.

This is a bit crazy. After a security researcher pointed out that Nokia's Xpress Browser is basically running a giant man in the middle attack on any encrypted HTTPS data you transmit, the company played the whole situation down by saying, effectively, sure, that's what we do, but it's not like we look at anything. This is, to put it mildly, not comforting. Just the fact that they're running a man in the middle attack in the first place is immensely concerning. The reason they do it is that this is a proxy browser, similar to Opera, that tries to speed up browsing by proxying a lot of the content -- meaning that all of your surfing goes through their servers. In some cases, this can be much faster for mobile browsing. But, the right way to do such a thing is to only do the proxying on unencrypted traffic. With encrypted traffic, you're just asking for trouble.

After sensing the backlash, Nokia pushed out an update of the browser that appears to remove the man-in-the-middle attack, even as it had tried to claim there was nothing wrong in the first place. However, the original researcher who discovered this, Gaurang K Pandya, updated his post to note that it's not all good news.

Just upgraded my Nokia browser, the version now is 2.3.0.0.48, and as expected there is a change in HTTPS behaviour. There is a good news and a bad news. The good news is with this browser, they are no more doing Man-In-The-Middle attack on HTTPS traffic, which was originally the issue, and the bad news is the traffic is still flowing through their servers. This time they are tunneling HTTPS traffic over HTTP connection to their server

Modern civilization wouldn't be where it is today without the means to store food for long periods of time. Before refrigerators, food spoilage was a daily concern for just about everyone. Now, we can keep leftovers in a fridge for far too long -- and forget about it until some really furry mold is obviously thriving. Here are just a few links on keeping food from going bad.

• Food dehydration is an ancient technique that isn't just for Ronco infomercials. It's not all about beef jerky, but there is a lot of waiting around and chewy goodness. [url]
• Preserving foods can alter taste dramatically, especially when intense heat is used to sterilize delicate (and volatile) flavors. Adding artificial flavorings as masking agents doesn't sound very appetizing, but there are some alternative preservation methods that involve zapping foods with electrical current that might help retain fresher flavors. [url]
• A deep-sea submersible vessel accidentally sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic off the coast of Massachusetts, and the crew escaped... but their lunches didn't. When the ship was re-surfaced months later, the crew's lunches were almost perfectly preserved by the hyperbaric storage.[url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

If one were to make a short list of the top great ideas that were implimented horribly, unbelievably wrong, Hulu would have to be somewhere between The View and the United Nations (I'll let you decide what goes where, exactly). Hulu was the once promising entertainment venture that has ugly-morphed its way into a mere excuse for entertainment studios to claim they offer people what they want. All the while there's been some discussion about whether or not the studios that own Hulu are purposefully trying to tank it to keep people from cutting the cable cord. And throughout all of this, Hulu has never really caught on with the same kind of fevered pitch as Netflix or even Amazon for streaming service customers.

Reader Vidiot writes in about a Business Insider piece detailing all the reasons why Hulu may have one foot in the grave and the other foot hovering just over it. Amongst the less-than-awesome facts on Hulu's list are items such as a new request for $200 Million from investors, reported losses of $30 Million per quarter, and that Hulu is trying to compete against Netflix while spending one-tenth the money on original content and one-ninth the paid subscriber base. The article announces that because of all that, it's time to conclude that Hulu is a failure, but don't blame corporate leadership.

The fact is (CEO Jason) Kilar had an almost impossible job from the very beginning. Hulu doesn't own the content it distributes, so it only gets to keep a small portion of its revenues. Hulu is, in fact, owned by the companies that own said content. And those owners have little incentive to create healthy margins for Hulu at the expense of their own. The fact is, Kilar has, in a couple years, built a Web brand that you have heard of. Yes, this was done on the back of free TV and a big marketing budget. But it's still decently impressive.

I'm not sure how we went from failure to impressive in less than a hundred words (which is impressive, by the by), but I am sympathetic to Hulu's raw deal from the studios that own it -- something Mike has been pointing out for nearly four years. That said, I don't think Hulu is a failure that is so far failed that it can't be brought back from fail-dom. After all, I've heard that Justin Timberlake is taking some time away from bringing sexy back to work on bringing Myspace back and if that mess of a social network can rise from the internet grave, Hulu can too.

But whoever is going to try to bring Hulu back from the prep-coffin, it appears it isn't going to be the afore mentioned Jason Kilar, because he's decided to bail. By all accounts, Kilar tried, really tried to make this thing work, but despite some successes it's not wrong to say that Hulu hasn't turned out to be what some folks thought it would. Given the raw deal that Hulu has gotten, the conflicts of interest heading up the company, I don't blame Kilar one bit for leaving. Hulu needs to innovate despite its issues, or else we can get the funeral march going.

Last summer, we talked about a site that Time Warner Cable had launched called Time Warner Cable Conversations, which it insisted would be a "conversation" between it and the public. As they put it, the goal was "to interact with our customers and to contribute to the on-going conversation about cable." Except... as we noted at the time, they didn't seem to want to discuss what most customers wanted to talk about. The "conversation" was limited to discussions about TV network deals, just as they were fighting with Time Warner Cable about how much the various networks would cost. If anyone wanted to "converse" about things they didn't like about Time Warner Cable, such as it's super low data caps, too bad. The comments on the site were limited and heavily moderated. Even friendly discussions about data caps were rejected.

And, now, it appears that TWC has decided to make the "conversation" even less of a "conversation." It has removed the ability to comment altogether. So, it's no longer a "conversation." It's just a marketing brochure.

This week we checked back and discovered the dialogue had decidedly turned one-way: namely from Time Warner Cable to you. The company deleted the few views that were published on cable television programming costs and removed its comment section altogether.

Of course, this is how companies like TWC view "a conversation." They talk. You shut up and listen.

After a 20 month investigation, the FTC -- whose boss made it clear he absolutely wanted to bring down Google if he could -- couldn't find any evidence that Google's search results were somehow anticompetitive. All of the evidence pointed to the same basic thing: what Google did was for the benefit of its users. While some competitors were upset about it, antitrust should not be about propping up competitors who can't compete, especially if consumers are not being harmed. Besides, if you actually look at the "competitors" who complained the loudest, many of them are doing quite well these days.

Of course, those competitors who spent so much effort pushing to force Google through the antitrust gantlet were pretty upset about the end result. However, they knew what was coming next and warned that Europe would come out with an answer that was more to their liking. And the latest on the EU antitrust investigation suggests that, indeed, European bureaucrats somehow believe that they know better than Google what its search results should look like, and they're planning to force Google to change its results to the bureaucrats' liking.

[Europe's antitrust chief Joaquin] Almunia said in the interview: "We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic," adding: "They are monetising this kind of business, the strong position they have in the general search market and this is not only a dominant position, I think -- I fear -- there is an abuse of this dominant position."

I'm not quite sure how one "diverts" traffic if the solution being provided is reasonably deemed to be better for the consumer. You can only show so many things on a search page, and Google spends a lot of effort figuring out which way seems to get the best results. No matter what, it's going to "divert" traffic from those it doesn't pick to those it does. But that's the business. The better it diverts traffic to help consumers, the better off the public is. And I'm not sure how the user is made "better off" by European politicians determining where Google needs to point people with its results.

A few months ago in writing about my interview with Trent Reznor, I mentioned that what Reznor was working on with Beats by Dre would be much more interesting than most people thought (at the time, most people were guessing something having to do with headphones). More of the details are starting to come out. First off, there are the two things that everyone in the press is focusing on, the announcement that Trent Reznor has officially been named Chief Creative Officer and Ian Rogers has jumped over from being CEO of TopSpin to be CEO of this new project, called Daisy.

This is great news for a variety of reasons -- I can't think of two better people to team up on such a project (if you're unfamiliar with Ian, you should read this brilliant profile in Wired, and then know that many of us who know Ian think that the article wasn't nearly glowing enough). The fact that these two (and some others who know what they're doing) are teaming up to work on this project is, by itself, big news.

But those high profile announcements seem to be obscuring some of the other news that came out at the same time about the project, which actually reveals a bit more about where this is actually heading. Since Beats bought failed music service MOG for $14 million, many have been expecting a new version of that with some new paint, but it seems a lot more likely that the purchase was more about buying the licenses, and then building something new from scratch, without having to waste time negotiating. Last month, Reznor had hinted that the music service would add more value beyond what today's streaming services offer.

One way it may be doing so? By building the whole "connect with fans, reason to buy" concept directly into the service. While Ian left his CEO spot at TopSpin to take this new gig, there are some other TopSpin details related to this. Not only is he remaining the executive chairman of TopSpin, Beats has invested in TopSpin and Topspin is providing infrastructure for the service. TopSpin, of course, powers a bunch of artist websites and services for "direct to fan" efforts. Basically, they enable "CwF+RtB" (and, apparently, have even used one of my own CwF+RtB videos in explaining it to people).

So, if you take the guy who inspired me to come up with that formula in the first place, and pair him with the guy (and the tools) that have come pretty far along the path towards enabling it all... and what do you get? Well, TopSpin itself makes some suggestions:

Our plan is to set the standard for how consumer music services can integrate and benefit artists.

Here’s an example: When Trent Reznor uses Topspin to release music and merch on his website, his products should appear inside the streaming services, where the millions of fans listening to his catalog of songs should have the ability to connect and hear from Trent directly when he has new music, merchandise, and tour dates.

The core of this partnership, then, is a shared belief that streaming services should do a better job helping fans discover artists and connect with them directly to buy merch, tickets and other products. And so, Topspin GoDirect will become the way the Daisy service gets photos, videos and products from artists, and both companies will work together to make sure fans see those products when they listen to songs.

Three years ago, we suggested that this kind of thing was exactly what Spotify was missing: a platform to help artists do much more, both in terms of connecting with fans, but also in enabling new business models. While Spotify has tried to do some of that with its app platform, those haven't really taken off the way I had hoped. A system built from scratch with that concept in mind, however, gets very interesting very fast.

So you can see a situation where they build a service that actually is good for everyone: fans, musicians and the company itself. That seems like a pretty good deal. True, some of the other services have actually been pretty good for everyone as well, but there are still limitations, which are why there are so many complaints about services.

In the end, execution is everything. If you have a great idea and terrible execution, it won't matter. So it's possible that all of this goes nowhere, but it certainly has a lot of the right pieces to make something great. Now, if they figure out some way to bring on Zoe Keating to consult on some of her ideas about how online streaming music could create closer connections between musicians and fans, I think that would just turbocharge the whole damn thing.

A few months ago, we criticized Kickstarter for the way it handled DMCA notices -- basically just deleting the project entirely, without providing any additional info. There didn't appear to be a counternotice proposal or anything like that. That post actually resulted in a nice conversation with Kickstarter about ways in which they might improve their DMCA process. I'm happy to see that with another high profile DMCA takedown sent to the site, the situation has been handled somewhat better, though I still have some questions about it.

The takedown involved the Gamestick project, an Android-based video game console the size of a USB stick, built into a controller. It's a really cool project, which you can check out here. Not surprisingly, it has received tons of attention, buzz and (of course) donations. But, yesterday, for a brief time, the campaign disappeared for a period of time due to a DMCA takedown. Unlike in the past, the message on the missing page at least contained a little more info: Furthermore, Kickstarter also sent a notice to all backers of the project:

This is a message from Kickstarter Support. We’re writing to inform you that a project you backed, GameStick: The Most Portable TV Games Console Ever Created, is the subject of an intellectual property dispute.

The law requires that we remove the project from public view until the process is complete or the dispute is resolved. If we are not able to re-post it within 30 days, we will cancel the project, all pledge authorizations will expire, and the project will be permanently unavailable.

If you’d like to manage your pledge, you can do so through the project page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…ever?ref=email

If you have any questions, we encourage you to message the creator directly. You can also do this from the project page.

Thanks so much for your patience and cooperation,
Kickstarter

The campaign was turned back on after a little while, and the full story came out. Apparently, one of the video games that the company shows working in the video was not "cleared" for use by its creators, and they sent the takedown. Playjam edited the video in the question and Kickstarter quickly put the video back up.

All's well that end's well, though there are still a few oddities here. First off, Kickstarter's notice (while better than no notice!) isn't really accurate. The law does not require Kickstarter to remove the project from view. It does provide incentives for Kickstarter to do so, but that's not the same thing. Of course, Kickstarter has the right to remove whatever project it wants, and no one expects them to have to make a full call on each takedown notice, but it's simply not accurate to say they're required to do so. It's just that they risk losing safe harbors if they don't.

The other oddity: the copyright claim itself. I can't see how the video itself or anything on the campaign page would be infringing. Misleading? Perhaps, if it implied that the specific game would be on the device that wasn't fully licensed. But that's not a copyright issue. The video itself might be evidence that PlayJam itself was infringing on the nameless video game company's copyright with its use of the game. Perhaps there's an argument that whatever was seen of the game in the video would be a copyright issue, but that seems like a huge stretch. There would be strong de minimis or fair use responses in both cases. Also, unless there are significant additional circumstances, it seems odd that the video game company didn't embrace this as a way to get free publicity from a very popular Kickstarter project. So it still strikes me that the Kickstarter page and the video itself should not have been seen as infringing. That they might have been misleading is reason enough to change it, but it's unfortunate when people automatically assume that situations like this must be a copyright violation.

The problem with large government agencies is "feature creep." If given a broad enough area to cover, years of territorial expansion and absorption of "related" entities will render the agency nearly unrecognizable from its original form. Not only that, but any stated directive or focus will have been lost, abandoned or hopelessly mutated as well.

If the government agency was crafted in "response" to a tragic event, the problem is both magnified and accelerated. As Wired reports, slightly more than a decade on from its formation, the Department of Homeland Security is having trouble defining the very thing it's in charge of.

What is “homeland security?” The federal bureaucracy doesn’t know, and that’s problematic for a government that has been fighting the ill-defined “war on terror” following 9/11, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.

In short, “homeland security” is whatever the government says it is.

Thirty federal entities — among them agriculture, education, labor, treasury and social security — are receiving “homeland security” funding. The actual Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11, receives 52 percent of the “homeland security” money pie, according to the Tuesday report.

“Ten years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. government does not have a single definition for homeland security,” the report said. “Currently, different strategic documents and mission statements offer varying missions that are derived from different homeland security definitions.”

The varied definitions given by the DHS and the White House still put the main focus on "terrorism," but others list "Homeland Security" responsibilities as including border/maritime security, immigration, natural disasters and "other hazards."

According to the Congressional Research Report, posted at Secrecy News, this lack of definition undermines the very "security" the agency is supposed to be providing.

“An absence of consensus about the inclusion of these policy areas may result in unintended consequences for national homeland security operations,” the CRS report [pdf] said. “For example, not including maritime security in the homeland security definition may result in policymakers, Congress, and stakeholders not adequately addressing maritime homeland security threats, or more specifically being able to prioritize federal investments in border versus intelligence activities.”

“The competing and varied definitions in these documents may indicate that there is no succinct homeland security concept. Without a succinct homeland security concept, policymakers and entities with homeland security responsibilities may not successfully coordinate or focus on the highest prioritized or most necessary activities.”

Part of the problem here is the large number of entities who receive funding under the "Homeland Security" banner. Trying to craft a unified front is nearly impossible as each entity has its own "mission statement" to justify its funding. Speaking of which, the report thinks the funding itself could be adding layers of fuzziness to the "homeland security" definition.

At the national level, there does not appear to be an attempt to align definitions and missions among disparate federal entities. DHS is, however, attempting to align its definition and missions, but does not prioritize its missions; there is no clarity in the national strategies of federal, state, and local roles and responsibilities; and, potentially, funding is driving priorities rather than priorities driving the funding.

Unsurprising, to say the least. This sort of normal government agency behavior does very little towards cutting through the vagueness surrounding it. This lack of clarity is the last thing you want to see in the DHS, either in its role as a "protector" or as a "respondent." This results in redundancy and inefficiency which hampers proactive and reactive measures, resulting in less of the safety and security the agency was created to provide.

As a parent, some of your proudest moments occur when your children begin to talk. After several months of ear-shredding cries and indistinguishable babble, they finally begin to communicate in a language you can understand. A first word is an indescribable joy, whether it's "mama," "dada" or "roku." The future now seems to be an amazing place where you and your child will strive towards excellence together, culminating in a comfortable retirement in which you live off their immense earnings as a person of brilliance.

Shortly thereafter, you begin to rue the day they ever learned the (now) cursed language of their ancestors.

It starts with the incessant barrage of questions in a meandering quest for knowledge, followed by the barrage of questions (mainly, "Why?") that greet every suggestion, criticism or direct order. Shortly thereafter, it's followed by questions directed at your parenting skills, cultural tastes, archaic slang use, rhetorical devices and sense of direction. At the point where you're wishing their language development had followed Charlie Gordon's "learning curve," you're asked to make a surprise appearance at the school administrator's office to explain a sudden outburst of particularly inventive cursing from your former "pride and joy."

So it is also with artificial life.

Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-contestant supercomputer, showed the world that, with the right programming, any puny human could be bested in a mildly snooty game show that handed out answers and asked for questions. However, the quest for true artificial intelligence is still ongoing.

So, in the interest of science, the whole of human knowledge (Internet Edition™) was dropped into Watson's brain and then... the problems began.

Two years ago, Brown attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary. The popular website contains definitions for terms ranging from Internet abbreviations like OMG, short for "Oh, my God," to slang such as "hot mess."

But Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity -- which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bullshit" in an answer to a researcher's query.

Well, it appears that every teacher's distrust of the internet in general is well-earned. It's nothing but quasi-facts dressed up in four-letter words, like a World Book Encyclopedia annotated by 4chan's /b/ board. (I'm not going to link to it. I won't have your misclicks weighing on my soul.) Still, it's disheartening to know that the use of the word "bullshit" (even correctly) is not considered a sign of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Sure, the word itself may be inappropriate, but under certain circumstances, it is by far the most appropriate answer.

Fortunately for Watson's team, they had the option to remove all this useful knowledge before it offended other researchers who weren't as used to being coldly called on their bullshit.

Ultimately, Brown's 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory. But the trial proves just how thorny it will be to get artificial intelligence to communicate naturally.

It also shows that artificial intelligence has one huge advantage over regular intelligence: the ability to permanently forget. We lowly humans are stuck with a brain that constantly reminds us (especially if we spend much time at places like the aforementioned /b/ board) that what is seen, cannot be unseen.

Watson, having been de-swearified and brainwashed, is now headed to a better place.

Brown is now training Watson as a diagnostic tool for hospitals.

There it will be able to use its acquired knowledge to battle health issues like cancer, AIDS, diabetes and Dissociative Facebook Identity Disorder. 

Back in June last year, Techdirt reported on the warning from the World Health Organization's Director-General that we risked entering a "post-antibiotic era". That was in part because the current patent system was not encouraging the right kind of research by pharma companies in order to develop the new antibiotics that we desperately need.

Stephan Kinsella points out that the World Economic Forum's 8th Global Risks Report (pdf), based on a survey of over 1,000 experts worldwide, has singled out precisely the same issue as one of the most serious facing humanity today:

Arguably, one of the most effective and common means to protect human life -- the use of antibacterial and antimicrobial compounds (antibiotics) -- may no longer be readily available in the near future. Every dose of antibiotics creates selective evolutionary pressures, as some bacteria survive to pass on the genetic mutations that enabled them to do so. Until now, new antibiotics have been developed to replace older, increasingly ineffective ones. However, human innovation may no longer be outpacing bacterial mutation. None of the new drugs currently in the development pipeline may be effective against certain new mutations of killer bacteria that could turn into a pandemic.

Those experts also offered their views on why they thought this worrying situation had come about. Their answer turned out to be the same as the key problem outlined in the earlier Techdirt story -- the failure of patents to encourage the development of drugs that maximized public health rather than private profits:

respondents to the Global Risks Perception Survey connected antibiotic-resistant bacteria to failure of the international intellectual property regime. This global risk is defined in the survey as "the loss of the international intellectual property regime as an effective system for stimulating innovation and investment" -- that is, going beyond the mechanisms of protecting IP to encompass the idea that the ultimate purpose of the IP system is to stimulate worthwhile innovation. The connection highlights a global market failure to incentivize front-end investment in antibiotic development through the promise of longer-term commercial reward, a failure which also applies to drugs to fight malaria and vaccines for pandemic influenza.

Rather than today's monopolistic hoarding, what we need is more sharing of knowledge, the Global Risks Report suggested:

There is also potential to use public or philanthropic funding to incentivize academic collaboration with pharmaceutical industry researchers, and more inter-company collaboration as well. Breakthroughs in antibiotic innovation will require pooling and sharing of knowledge among academia, private companies and government regulators. Companies and foundations like GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are pioneering an "open-lab" approach to research which refutes the idea that secrecy and patented monopolies are the bedrock of innovation.

Given Microsoft's fervent assertions of precisely this idea, there is a certain irony in a Bill Gates-funded organization being praised for refuting it.

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I know that some like to paint me -- falsely -- as being "pro-piracy" when I talk about why various attempts to use laws to "crackdown" on piracy are a bad idea. My concern is not that this will somehow "damage" piracy -- frankly, I couldn't care much less about that -- but with two specific things:

1. These laws almost always have massive and dangerous unintended consequences that hinder innovation, speech or both.
2. More importantly, these laws don't actually work at stopping piracy.

Given those two specific facts, you would think that maybe (just maybe) that those industries so focused on "stopping piracy" might, instead, focus on more productive solutions that cause less collateral damage. That means doing things like focusing on enabling or investing in new innovation.

Some will argue with the two points above, but I've yet to see anything that disproves either of them. Just as an example, this week we talked about a study from Oxford University that showed the dangerous consequences of 3-strikes laws, or other rules that lead to kicking people offline. And, now, we have another academic study that helps make the second point. Some research on file sharing sites found that anti-piracy measures simply don't work. In the academic version:

Our data shows that current anti-piracy efforts are visible, but their overall impact appears to be rather limited. Furthermore, our analysis of the file sharing ecosystem suggests that future antipiracy measures that are currently under discussion may not be as successful as their proponents might expect.

What's scary is that this still even needs to be said, or that certain maximalists still refuse to believe it, despite the massive amounts of evidence. Yet, they still keep focusing on the single strategy that's proven not to work, and ignore the strategy that does (building innovative businesses).

As you may or may not recall, last year, pretty much all the TV networks sued Dish Networks over a new feature it had launched, PrimeTime Any Time (PTAT), with its Autohopper technology on its DVRs. PTAT is where it would automatically record all the major networks' prime time programming and hold onto it for a bit. Autohopper would then automatically skip over the commercials. It's important to recognize that these features, on their own, have been considered legal. VCRs had auto commercial skip ages ago and DVR technology (time shifting) has been called fair use plenty of times. Given that, the lawsuits aren't going well so far.

But, in a moment of pure stupidity, some very short-sighted suits at CBS made a really silly decision. As you may or may not have heard, CES -- the massive consumer electronics show -- has been going on all this week in Las Vegas. I just got back from there myself. At the show, Dish announced another merging of some of its products, adding its Slingbox (who they bought years back) to the same basic setup. Slingbox, of course, is for "place shifting" what the DVR is for "time shifting." You hook it up to your TV and it lets you access what's playing on your TV via the internet (so, via your computer, phone or tablet). It's hardly surprising that this is where Dish was heading.

And... the early reviews and buzz were definitely strong. For example, CNET wrote a glowing review in which executive editor David Carnoy suggested it may be the best DVR out there these days. The CNET crew liked the thing so much that they nominated it for their "Best of CES" award. And... then the suits at CNET parent company CBS noticed. And suddenly they told CNET that it had to remove the Dish Hopper with Sling from consideration for the Best of CES award and that it was no longer allowed to review any Dish products. CNET editors appended the following note to their review:

Editors' note: The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration for the Best of CES 2013 awards due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp. We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product.

This is monumentally stupid, for a variety of reasons. Let's see how many we can come up with.

1. Hello Streisand Effect. There were approximately one gazillion articles this week about products coming out of CES, and the place was wall to wall with journalists -- probably half of whom were coming up with their own "best of" lists. Most people were completely saturated with CES stories and would barely glance at such a story. Except... now, tons of people are suddenly finding out about this awesome Dish DVR, the Hopper with Slingbox. In fact, they're hearing that the damn thing is so good that CBS is trying to block any news of it from getting out. Talking about increasing the awareness... I have no clue whatsoever what product CNET -- or any other publication -- awarded "best of CES" to. But I sure as hell am well aware of Dish's new DVR.
2. Goodbye to the wall that separates the suits from the journalists at CBS/CNET. CBS execs have just confirmed that they don't want their journalists and reviewers to cover things based on the merits, but rather on what it means for their corporate masters.
3. Hello slippery slope. Is it really that hard to see where this heads next? Is CNET still allowed to report on the lawsuit if CBS loses? If they can't talk about the products, what about the legal issues themselves?
4. Goodbye journalists with credibility. Frankly, CNET has always had some of the strongest tech reporters in the business. For many years I've considered it one of the top tech news sites out there. I have tremendous respect for many of the reporters there. But, now I have to wonder how much the suits are interfering with their ability to report things accurately.
5. Goodbye to principled journalists who want to work for CBS. If I'm a journalist at CNET right now, I'd be seriously considering quitting in protest. This move seriously harms the brand and reputation of the site, and this is the kind of thing that journalists should stand up against. Having the suits interfere with what they can write about is generally seen as a massive offense to journalists. I would bet this leads to some of the best, most principled CNET reporters jumping ship to elsewhere.
6. Good luck to CNET hiring new journalists. Who wants to jump into that toxic situation?

CBS's suits should have kept quiet and not interfered with the news side of the business. They had to know that this would backfire in a big bad way. And, if they didn't know that, they deserve to lose their jobs for being pretty clueless about things that matter.

Of course, they were probably thinking that Dish would likely use the reviews from CNET as evidence in the lawsuit, which very well may be true (and could still happen since the review did go out). But it's not hard to get around that, since the legal impact of a single review is near zilch. In the end, they didn't stifle the review, they made it more well known. They didn't do anything that helps them in their lawsuit. And they're left with an undoubtedly pissed off set of journalists who may now question how free they are to actually report the news.

Just the other day, I told you the story of some immature and racist apps in Google's Play store. In that post, I discussed how the kind of speech that offends is truly a barometer of exactly how free we want speech to be. It's one thing to embrace free speech that suits us, but it is every bit our duty to protect speech that does not suit us as well, because it is the ideal of free speech we are protecting, not the speech with which we disagree. The only other option, of course, is to become a society less permissible of speech. True, that society may yield a lower amount of speech the majority finds offensive, but what else gets caught in the drain-trap that shouldn't have? We remind one another all the time that private companies like Google aren't under obligation to the 1st Amendment and free speech, but we still have that ideal that permeates our society and so some of us choose to embrace the more open and permissible environments because we believe more information, data, and culture is always better and we'll deal with the annoyances that come along with it. Others choose to embrace the Apple App store, which gives you a wonderful idea of exactly what happens when speech and culture become more constricted.

Take one recent example: Apple's rejection of an gaming app based on the war in Syria, created to help educate others about exactly what is occurring there. The game was rejected based on Apple's not allowing apps that "solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation or any other real entity".

"This decision is a shame really as it makes it hard to talk about the real world," said designer Tomas Rawlings.

"We had hoped that Apple would be more nuanced in how they applied this rule but we got a bit worried when it had been in submission for around two weeks without a decision - we then figured that because of the controversy of using the gaming medium to cover an ongoing war meant passing the game had become an issue for them."

Rawlings insists there is nothing actually offensive in the game and notes that the response from those that got their hands on it has been generally positive. From what I can tell, the game is essentially a quick scenario decision making game told from the Syrian rebels point of view. It incorporates real world news items and events and allows the player to decide how to handle them. There's no deragatory name-calling. No over the top violence. But because they mention a "real government", it's out.

And that's exactly the problem with a less permissible garden like Apple's app store. Sure, in Google's garden (or the wider open internet, for that matter) you will occasionally have to ignore a few weeds, but you get the full spectrum of flowers to enjoy. Apple's garden may have less weeds, but they have less flowers, and the choice over which flowers you see isn't up to you. That's not the system I want to embrace.

An interesting patent has surfaced over at Quartz, detailing a method for exchanging unwanted gifts. Amazon filed this patent application in 2006 and had it granted in 2010, but so far, has yet to make use of it. (This is not to be confused with Amazon's more controversial, broadly written "method of buying gifts online" patent which was granted back in 2009.) The twist in this patent is the exchange method, which would take place prior to receiving the unwanted gift.

A number of "rules" can be set, heading off unwanted gifts before they even hit the order fulfillment queue. In the case of the hypothetical "Aunt Mildred," the user can choose to make the best of her good intentions that disguise themselves as bad gifts and eliminate her almost entirely from the gift selection process while also leaving her completely unaware that she's been cut out in favor of a checkboxed "middleman."

In addition, users can select whether to be notified and carry out the exchange manually or allow the algorithm to do all the heavy lifting. Interestingly, the patented system will also allow purchasers to place limits on exchanges, which should lead to some very interesting post-Christmas conversations, once all the behind-the-scenes gift trading has finished.


Of course, the whole setup process is wasted should gift givers decide to purchase from other services, but adding the ability to painlessly 'hot swap' yet another sweater for something you'd rather have, without having to go through the rarely painless return/exchange process could have many Amazon customers recommending the service to familial holdouts.