Information freedom for open source users.

gollum123 writes “US regulators may dedicate spectrum to free wireless Internet service for some Americans to increase affordable broadband service nationwide, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday. The FCC provided few details about how it would carry out such a plan and who would qualify, but will make a recommendation under the National Broadband Plan set for release next week. The agency will determine details later. One way of making broadband more affordable is to ‘consider use of spectrum for a free or a very low-cost wireless broadband service,’ the FCC said in a statement.” Nobody has more than a couple of paragraphs on this story. None of the press coverage mentions the obvious likelihood that any such free network would be heavily filtered, censored, and monitored.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kkleiner writes “For many years countless individuals in the US have had to watch with envy as dogs and horses with joint and bone injuries have been cured with stem cell procedures that the FDA has refused to approve for humans. Now, in an exciting development, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Colorado has found a way to skirt the FDA and provide these same stem cell treatments to humans. The results have been stunning, allowing many patients to walk or run who have not been able to do so for years. There’s no surgery required, just a needle to extract and then re-inject the cells where they are needed. There has always been a lot of hype around stem cells, but this is the real deal. Real humans are getting real treatment that works, and we should all hope that more companies will begin offering this procedure in other states soon.”

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An anonymous reader writes “The European Parliament is preparing to take on ACTA. A joint resolution (DOC) has been tabled by the major EP parties that threatens to go to court unless things change. The EP is calling for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searches at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple’s suit against HTC could end one of two ways.

Either Apple becomes the next SCO, which ran itself aground claiming rights to Linux, or it becomes the next Microsoft, which is prospering while claiming to own Linux.

The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case.

You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued. While the suit is actually about the Android operating system Google sponsors, the company has been careful to only go after one of its OEMs, a Taiwanese one at that.

That’s a strike-at-the-weak strategy. You get the best deal you can with a weak player and then use that against the strong. The emphasis here is on the word weak.

On the other hand there is every indication Apple is willing to go to trial. As Larry Dignan noted last week, this could quickly put it into court against both Google and Microsoft. It would be a legal Vietnam.

Jason Perlow wrote last week about a technical cure for any problems caused by the suit — virtualization. You can’t sue what’s common, and virtualization could make a fight against rivals like trying to grab clouds.

The real cost in going to trial and claiming to own the smartphone space is more subtle. Apple could become a laughing stock, as SCO did. The intent of our patent and copyright regimes is to encourage innovation, not discourage it, and seeking control of the whole smartphone market does not encourage innovation.

There are enormous public relations risks in becoming a public plaintiff in patent court. Many people will, as a result of such a suit, avoid the plaintiff’s products as a way of weighing-in. This is what really happened to SCO — its sales dried up.

Had Apple sued Google directly, I might give credence to this. SCO sued IBM. You go after the strong when you seek to run the patent table.

Could that happen to Apple? Yes, I do. At least one market researcher thinks Android sales could pass those of the iPhone in two years.

Which brings me back to Microsoft.

I have written here that the way Microsoft views its own patent efforts, like its recent agreement deal with Amazon, is as a way to take patents off the competitive table. Microsoft is using legal threats to create patent peace between it and its rivals, freeing its engineers to concentrate on creating things, not dealing with lawyers.

Apple doesn’t really innovate. Apple doesn’t really litigate. Apple markets.

If Apple can settle these suits under favorable terms it can also win patent peace with Microsoft. This would free it to create iPhones as the market directs, rather than within constraints of lawyers and patent rights.

That’s the way I think it will play. Apple will settle. Apple is not stupid.

schwit1 sends this quote from the Wall Street Journal:
“Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain. Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal US workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker. … A person familiar with the legislative planning said the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said. The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor.”

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coondoggie writes “Looking to facilitate what it calls free speech rights in countries that don’t look favorably at such liberties, the US government today said it would ease the regulations around exporting Internet-based applications to Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Specifically, the Treasury Department said it would add general licenses (PDF) authorizing the exportation of free, personal, Internet-based communications services – such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking – to those three countries. The amendments also allow the exportation of related software to Iran and Sudan, the department said in a release (the US Commerce Department controls software exports with Cuba). Until now all such exports would have broken federal laws.”

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President Obama recently announced several appointments to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, including data visualization expert Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The purpose of the panel is to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose aim is “To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information.” Tufte said on his website, “I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.”

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parkland writes “Federal CIO Vivek Kundra described some dismaying government inefficiencies in a speech on Thursday at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs in Seattle. It takes 160 days to process benefits for veterans, he said, ‘because the Veteran’s Administration is processing paperwork by passing manila folders from one desk to another.’ Another example bound to make you grind your teeth is why it takes the Patent and Trademark Office 3 years to process a patent. ‘One reason,’ says Kundra, ‘is because the USPTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system.’”

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crowfeather notes an interview with cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt that Wired’s Thread Level conducted this week. “Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing. ‘There is no cyberwar,’ Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. ‘I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,’ Schmidt said. ‘There are no winners in that environment.’ Instead, Schmidt said the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage. His stance contradicts Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence who made headlines last week when he testified to Congress that the country was already in the midst of a cyberwar — and was losing it. … There’s been much ink spilled in recent years over the turf battles in D.C. over whether the NSA (representing the military) or DHS (on the civilian side) takes the lead role in cybersecurity. But… “I haven’t seen that tension,” Schmidt said. As for which will take the cybersecurity lead, Schmidt simply says it’s a shared effort.”

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The 311 service has been a “red headed stepchild” for American cities practically since it was launched in the mid-1990s as a phone service.

(Picture from Moonbattery, a conservative blog.)

The idea was to make 311 the 911 for non-emergency calls. A burning building call 911, a burning question call 311. But that charge was so broad that most cities did not know what to do with it.

Since it required Bell cooperation to implement, and did not deliver the Bells revenue, many cities (like Atlanta, where I live) ignored it. Many ignore it still.

The launch of Open311 as an open API by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (right) and Obama CIO Vivek Kundra will not change this right away.

Think of it instead as a last chance to interest cities in something the phone companies tossed over the side long ago.

There are several reasons for past 311 failures, some of which the open source API addresses, some of which it doesn’t:

• The choice of what to offer on it is often a political decision, and inertia rules cities as well as Washington.
• It takes money to publicize and draw consumer interest to a 311 service.
• Political boundaries. Should individual suburbs have their own 311 services, or should they get together and make it a county service? Politics again.
• Implementation still takes money. An OpenAPI can help here by lowering costs and drawing interest through applications.

Mainly, 311 takes political leadership, and requires that someone invest political capital that might better be invested elsewhere.

In their press event Newsom and Kundra emphasized mobile apps. There’s an app for city government. But believe it or not smart phone penetration isn’t that enormous, especially in the poor neighborhoods that most need quick access to services.

Web interfaces are going to be important here. So may be the cooperation of schools and libraries, cooperation that may come with a price. The schools and libraries may want the bulk of the services without investing heavily in development.

The risk is that open source may be labeled, as Kundra himself has been, as a phony if things don’t work out.

I’m personally more jazzed by the participation of  Newsom, because the San Francisco mayor is term-limited and looking for a place to land his career. There are ongoing reports he may run for Lt. Governor, maybe even for President.

But rather than run for anything at a time when being in public service is assumed to disqualify you for it, he might be better served seizing the opportunities Open311 affords. A foundation to run the .org, a company to run the .com, and the same charismatic gentleman on top of both. Government’s answer to Dries Buytaert, with better clothes.

Sounds like a better political plan to me. He can gain standing without taking responsibility for running anything, since actual implementation remains in the hands of local governments. He can take credit for success without risking much blame for failure. And he can make money doing it.

So along with the question of open source making 311 relevant, could it also make Gavin Newsom relevant?

snydeq writes “Deep End’s Paul Venezia provides an update on the City of San Francisco’s trial against IT admin Terry Childs, which — at eight weeks and counting — hasn’t even seen the defense begin to present its case. The main spotlight thus far has been on the testimony of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. ‘Many articles about this case have pounced on the fact that after Childs gave the passwords to the mayor, they couldn’t immediately be used. Most of these pieces chalk this up to some kind of secondary infraction on Childs’s part,’ Venezia writes. ‘Just because you give someone a password doesn’t mean that person knows how to use it. Childs’s security measures would have included access lists that blocked attempted logins from non-specified IP addresses or subnets. In short, it was nothing out of the ordinary if you know anything about network security.’ But while the lack of technical expertise in the case is troubling, encouraging is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle’s ‘breathless piece reporting on the mayor’s testimony’ drew comments 10-to-1 in Childs’s favor, which may indicate that ‘public opinion of this case has tilted in favor of the defense,’ Venezia writes. Of course, ‘if [the trial] drags into summer, Childs will have the dubious honor of being held in jail for two full years.’ This for a man who ‘ultimately protected the [City's] network until the bitter end.’”

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Ian Lamont writes “Microsoft’s Vice President for Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, speaking at the RSA conference in San Francisco, has floated an interesting proposal to deal with infected computers: Approach the problem of dealing with malware infections like the healthcare industry, and consider using ‘general taxation’ to pay for inspection and quarantine. Using taxes to deal with online criminal activity is not a new idea, as demonstrated by last year’s Louisiana House vote to levy a monthly surcharge on Internet access to deal with online baddies.”

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Lucas123 writes “A federal deadline that begins next year and requires hospitals to prove they’re meaningfully using electronic health records will lead to technical problems and data errors affecting patient care, say politicians and top IT professionals responsible for the deployments. Physicians and hospitals have until the end of 2011 to receive the maximum federal incentive monies to deploy the technology. If not deployed by 2015, they face penalties through cuts in Medicare reimbursements. ‘I think we have nontechnology people making decisions about technology,’ said Gregg Veltri, CIO at Denver Health. ‘I wonder if anybody understands the reality of IT systems and how complex they are, especially when they’re integrated together. You’re going to sacrifice quality if you increase the speed [of the rollout].’”

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An anonymous reader writes “On the heels of the earlier leak of various country positions on ACTA transparency, today an even bigger leak
has hit the Internet. A new European Union document [PDF] prepared several weeks ago canvasses the Internet and Civil Enforcement chapters, disclosing in complete detail the proposals from the US, and the counter-proposals from the EU, Japan, and other ACTA
participants. The 44-page document also highlights specific concerns of individual countries on a wide range of issues including ISP liability, anti-circumvention rules, and the scope of the treaty. This is probably the most significant leak to date since it goes beyond the transparency debate to include specific country positions and proposals.”

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miller60 writes “Saying 1,100 data centers is too many, the federal government has begun what looms as the largest IT consolidation in history. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has directed federal agencies to inventory their assets by April 30 and prepare a plan to reduce the number of servers and data centers, with a focus on slashing energy costs (full memo). Kundra says some applications may be shifted to cloud computing platforms customized for government use.”

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jonverve writes “In May of 2009, the White House launched an Ideascale site to gather ideas from citizens to identify ways to ’strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.’ The digital letdown was when many of the top ideas generated by the process were to legalize marijuana, solve tax issues and to reinvestigate Obama’s birth origins. Fast forward to February 6 and the same process has been repeated with individual federal agencies as the subject. This time the idea generation has been much more productive, with ideas such as establishing clear benchmarks on humanitarian progress in Sudan to the State Department, funding for open source text books and materials to the Department of Education, making it easier to access previously FOIAed documents to the Department of Justice, and creating a Wiki for NASA to share its data and to engage the public. Hackers from NASA’s Nebula cloud computing platform have created a site that aggregates 23 of these idea sites to give a quick peek into the best rated contributions in each category. Programmed in Python and using the MongoDB and Tornado web server, the Open Gov Tracker was highlighted by the open government blog Govfresh this past week as well. Jessy Cowan-Sharp, one of the creators, explained their motivation: ‘We thought that a single access point would give a sense of the participation on all the different sites, a window into the discussions happening, build some excitement, and inspire people to participate.’ The process closes on March 19th, so go and visit the site to contribute your ideas and vote!”

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Taco Cowboy writes in with a report from The Register about a US policy shift away from keeping hands off the Internet. “According to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, Obama’s top official at the Department of Commerce, the US government’s policy of leaving the Internet alone is over. Instead, an ‘Internet Policy 3.0′ approach will see policy discussions between government agencies, foreign governments, and key Internet constituencies, with those discussions covering issues such as privacy, child protection, cybersecurity, copyright protection, and Internet governance.” Here is the presentation in which Strickling enunciated these changes.

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Hugh Pickens writes “Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government’s mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the ‘chemist’s war of Prohibition,’ the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its ‘noble experiment’ was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn’t taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program’s most outspoken opponents, liked to call it ‘our national experiment in extermination.’”

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PCM2 writes “ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. ‘Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,’ says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service’s computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he’s had ‘concern for a while’ about the issue.”

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Today Matt Asay urges government buyers to support open source, open data and open standards.

Why? Because it’s better. Because it promotes competition. Because it gives government flexibility.

But after watching government on every level, in various countries, for over half my lifetime, I can tell you the last thing any government wants is to make a decision its successor can overturn.

Every government knows its time in office is limited. What it needs are stalwart friends and a legacy. Proprietary vendors deliver both, and it is in the nature of open source that these not be provided.

You’re probably thinking this is an attack on American politicians, so let’s go offshore for our example. Let’s go instead to Great Britain and, to make it a little less partisan, to the BBC. (This might be useful to Matt since he’s now COO of a British-based company, Canonical.)

(Cue the flashback effects, please.)

About 15 years ago now, when I was at Interactive Age, the BBC asked us to send someone over to Radio House for a two-day conference on what it should do with “multimedia.”

The plan was for our publisher to give a little speech, but then the magazine was closed, most everyone left for pastures new, and this junior reporter was left with the duty.

I gave a little talk but, having nothing better to do, stayed for the whole show. Near the end the audience was broken into working groups on various topics. Mine was on the Internet.

While everyone around me argued, I noodled around on a connected PC and found an early NPR podcast of its headlines. I turned around, got their attention, started playing the file, and told them “this is your competition.”

Over the years the Beeb became an online leader. Its online budget grew. But pushback emerged from private news sources. They said the Beeb’s dominance was hurting their business prospects.

The response was to try and tie the BBC’s existing strengths in broadcasting tightly to its Web site. Politically the idea was to make them one and the same. The BBC needed a friend here, and it found one in Microsoft.

Microsoft was willing to do whatever the BBC wanted, support whatever draconian DRM regime was called for, in exchange for proprietary advantage. Its iPlayer gave the agency control over who could see what, reducing the inherent subsidy in Americans visiting the BBC News Web site.

One result is that the BBC is now locking out open source, verifying “rights” to view content by verifying the player. They have gone so far down the proprietary road that the interests of specific American companies — Microsoft and Adobe — are now the interests of the BBC.

It’s crazy if you think about it. Tieing British citizens to American technology companies, when there is solid British-based competition from Matt and his bosses, right there in London.

But open source could not have enforced rules on users as the proprietary companies could. Open source could not have the politicians’ backs as Microsoft might.

And open source could not have obligated the next government, which may be much less friendly to the BBC’s interests, to support BBC technology, lock-in and user control the way a proprietary solution does.

Lock-in is not a bug but a feature. In any political setting — and even a private company boardroom is a political setting — that can be a real advantage. It’s something open source can’t match (thank goodness) but there it is.