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Posted Sunday, August 31, 2003 Back to Plain Text for Multi-recipient Email?I think that one solution to spam would be to revert to plain text as the standard email format. No HTML, no attachments. Spam filters would be much harder to fool in such a world, and of course plain text email will not have viruses and worms in it. People who want to send pictures, or fancy-looking documents, or spreadsheets would have to use a different protocol. But that protocol would not have a "cc" function. To get a picture or a spreadsheet to a large list, you would have to direct them to a web page. So, my spam solution is this: reconfigure email servers so that a sender can either send email that includes attachments or send email to multiple recipients, but not both. If you want to send email to multiple recipients, you must use only plain text, with no attachments. If you want to send email to just one recipient, then use HTML and attachments to your heart's content. If you want to send HTML and attachments to a lot of people, set up a web page, and use the email to point to the web page. Or use some other protocol. Would that work? See Frankston. See also Gillmor. See also Mayfield. . . . . . .
The John Locke BandwagonI said that he was the real Internet candidate. Now Eugene Miller explains why. He divides philosophers into four quadrants, depending on whether they emphasize the benefits or harms of technology and on whether or not they view controls as beneficial.
This quadrant, which emphasizes benefits and opposes controls, describes the attitude that many of us have toward the Internet, and for me it extends to the economy and to technology in general (I mean, there are some state controls that I favor, but I'm for less control than most people).
Not to belabor the point, but many of Howard Dean's supporters are in the opposite quadrant. The environmental radicals emphasize the harms of technology and advocate strong controls. Their economic policies also are highly statist. Thus, in my view, he is not the Internet candidate. . . . . . .
Posted Friday, August 29, 2003 Software Patents?My view is that the success of business processes--including software--depends on subtle issue of execution, rather than on the concepts that you can explicitly patent. So I think I'm sympathetic to Paul David, et al, who argue against a proposal for the EU that would encourage software patents.
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Real World Telecom RegulationAn illustration of the fact that in the real world it's hard to tell "the people" from the "special interests" is telecom regulation. Here is a story from today's Washington Post.
If Verizon is on one side, then you might assume that "the people" are on the other side. Instead,
So on one side you have Verizon, and on the other side you have WorldCom. You won't find "the people" represented anywhere. What is under discussion are rules that force local phone companies to allow competitors to provide services using the local phone wires. State regulators set the prices that local phone companies charge competitors. In some cases, those prices are arbitrarily low, and competitors are subsidized. Nobody knows the "right" wholesale price for telephony. The only sure winners from the regulations are lawyers and consultants. . . . . . .
Posted Thursday, August 28, 2003 Academia and IdeologyHow did Krugman wind up on the left while I wound up on the right? I speculate that is because I spent more time taking Real World 101.
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Flat-rate PricingEd Felten makes the case for it succinctly. Talking about music, he says,
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Why Microsoft has Security HolesBecause people like new brother Boyd value stuff like this.
This introduces a whole new realm of integration into Microsoft software, which my instinct tells me leads to a whole new realm of security holes. . . . . . .
Government and IncumbentsDo you need to be protected from voice-over-IP-telephony? Your friendly regulators think so, as Jeff Pulver found.
Take this easy pop quiz. Government regulation serves to protect: (a) the public; or (b) incumbents? You are well along the path to wisdom if you understand that the correct answer is (b) much more often than (a). . . . . . .
Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2003 How Regulations Evolve
This is an excellent example of what I call Real World 101--the insights into organizational behavior that one gains from actually working for a corporation or government, as opposed to hiding behind the Ivy walls. Organizations create rules, and legislatures enact laws, in response to past failures. Occasionally, the rules and laws actually fix a systemic problem. However, most of the time, they create meaningless overhead. All too often, they induce new pathologies that are even worse than the ones that they are intended to correct.
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Posted Monday, August 25, 2003 It's Not 1995
I see this as a non-event. My guess is that all the AOL users who are anxious to have blogs already have them. The marginal inducement to blog will be small. In 1995 with the Web, it was the opposite. AOL users were demanding that AOL offer access to the Web. And there was no easy alternative (unless you count Prodigy, which offered Web access about 6 months before AOL did). Without AOL, you had to install a TCP/IP stack on your computer--something even I had trouble with (the President of my ISP came over in a driving rain one night to help me. That was back in the day.) When AOL finally offered Web access in August of 1995, the Web changed overnight from a college playground to a mainstream medium. Don't look for the same thing to happen to blogs eight years later. . . . . . .
Posted Sunday, August 24, 2003 Computer Viruses and Binary TrustBob Frankston says that on the Net if we expect to treat trust as a simple binary operation we will suffer from bad computer security.
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Posted Saturday, August 23, 2003 Satellite TVApparently, a lot of people use it.
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Posted Thursday, August 21, 2003 My ManifestoI don't know what came over me. My view is that everyone on the Internet writes manifestos that nobody else wants to read. And then I went ahead and wrote one, anyway.
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Posted Wednesday, August 20, 2003 Eliminate Mass Email?Brother Mayfield may be on to something.
Let's think about this. Suppose you created a new email protocol which somehow forced every mail server to be configured not to send more than n copies of any email. Maybe n=1 is the only number that will work. Ideally, though, you would set n large enough to minimize inconvenience to non-spammers but low enough to make spam prohibitively expensive to send. Non-spammers who want to reach more than n people at a time would have to use something other than email. Perhaps some new protocol, or something hacked using some other protocol (a web service?). Suppose that I read some publications that now come as email lists. These would migrate to something else. As a reader, I might use a web interface to set up this "something else." I set up permissions that control the publications that I read--locking spammers out. I set up rules for how I want to be notified of new information in my "publication box"--maybe I get an email once a day telling me what has arrived, or maybe there are some publications where I want to be notified instantly by email or instant message. Sounds like an interesting idea. I'd be curious what others think. Meanwhile, I really like the fact that the head of the FTC had the nerve (euphemism) to tell Congress that their anti-spam legislation won't work. I'm sure he'll take a lot of grief (euphemism) for speaking truth to power. UPDATE: more from Brother Mayfield--email is dead . . . . . .
Outsourcing and IgnoranceConcern with outsourcing is bipartisan. There are ignoramuses on the left and on the right. Conversely, there are economists on the left and the right. I tried to explain outsourcing to a conservative audience here. Now, Brad DeLong tries to explain it to liberals.
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Posted Tuesday, August 19, 2003 Patented FailureHylton forwarded me this post about a payment system for information goods.
I guarantee that this guy will fail. It's not that his idea is such a long shot (although I think it is). But I am a firm believer in Edison's rule that invention is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. When you go out and patent an idea like this, then announce to the world that you've won the patent, you are telling me that you have Edison's rule reversed in your head. You think that having gotten the inspiration and patented it, you are 99 percent of the way there. That is so wrong. Thomas Murcko, you are wearing a big sign around your neck that says, "I don't know squat about what is involved in executing a business. I do not have the first clue about what it will take to bring my idea to market. You would have to be a total idiot to invest with me." . . . . . .
Posted Monday, August 18, 2003 Direct Tax Vs. Copyright Tax
Jay Currie says that Canada has been successful allowing music to be copied and using a tax on storage media. The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003. My guess is that this storage media tax is much more efficient than the copyright taxes that the RIAA wants to use in the U.S.--lawsuits, DRM, and the like. I really wish somebody in the U.S. would propose this. . . . . . .
Posted Sunday, August 17, 2003 Information SuperhighwayGreat one-liner from naval, talking about video on demand vs. Netflix.
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The Politics of Technological Change
The essay is based on economist Joel Mokyr's excellent history of the Industrial Revolution and its relationship to the rise of the Enlightenment and the scientific method. I recommend reading the whole essay--and the book, too, for that matter. . . . . . .
Posted Saturday, August 16, 2003 The Internet CandidateWhat political figure really gets the Internet? Hint: It's not Howard Dean. . . . . . .
Social Software CategoryI think that this is a valid category for social software, although I suspect we are a long way from really revolutionary products.
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Posted Friday, August 8, 2003 Come Back August 17Yep, I'm going on vacation again. Meanwhile, in addition to the usual suspects like Tomalak, Smartmobs, Gizmodo, and Many-to-Many, check out a couple of blogs that are more recent discoveries: Future Pundit and The Speculist (the latter sounds like an Ob-Gyn). I was particularly interested in this interview with Aubrey De Grey, who I remember as a middling sort of Othello player back in the day. He's now a leader in anti-aging research, but his heart is still with the board game.
And, of course, check TCS for new essays of mine. Like this one, where I argue that the economy is weaker than the conventional wisdom says it is.
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The Real Cause of SpamIt's the jerks who respond to it.
If you think it should be a crime to send spam, then it also should be a crime to buy from spammers. Think about it. . . . . . .
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 Information Wants to be Middle-Class?Interesting observations by James Miller on the possible distributional effects of information goods.
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Trashing Fannie MaeGosh, I never thought I would be defending Fannie Mae, the mortgage giant. But this article is just too skewed.
This analysis does not count the offsetting reduction in the value of the debt used to fund those mortgages. The net change in market value is small, and it could be a gain. The Times' spin on this fact:
What I gather from this story is that if you mark to market Fannie Mae's entire balance sheet, the affect of an increase in interest rates is small and perhaps favorable. However, if you only mark to market one side of the balance sheet--the mortgage assets--you get a big decline in value. The story implies the latter approach is more accurate. This is 180 degrees incorrect. And finally, the Times gets this wrong:
That sentence would accurately describe Freddie Mac. Not Fannie Mae, which has always held most of its mortgages in portfolio. . . . . . .
Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2003 Data Mining and TerrorismIn an essay that tries to exploit an analogy between terrorism and submarine warfare, I write,
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Who Needs Academic Journals?Today's Washington Post talks about somebody trying to come up with an alternative to expensive academic publications.
We already have open-access publishing. It's called putting your papers on your faculty web site. All we need to do to unseat the journals is to replace the function of reviewing papers to decide what's worthy. If somebody gave me a $9 million grant, I would hire 3,000 bloggers at $3,000 a year to cull through papers in their specialty and make recommendations about the importance of them. Cut out all the other nonsense. . . . . . .
Ban Government Data Mining?Randall Parker comments on a bill introduced by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden to ban data mining by the U.S. government.
It must be great to be a member of the Senate, where you can berate the intelligence agencies for failing to connect the dots and then turn around and outlaw dot-connecting. . . . . . .
Posted Friday, August 1, 2003 Libertarians Need Not ApplyCongratulations to Dr. Weinberger on becoming Senior Internet Adviser to Howard Dean. I gather that it is a position for which libertarians need not apply. I think that at some deep level it is impossible for someone as conventionally leftist as Dean to "get" the Internet. As I wrote here, it amazes me that people can champion a decentralized Internet and be in favor of statist economic policies. . . . . . .
Media ConcentrationOne approach to the issue of concentration in the media industry is to use innuendo and hints of conspiracy. The Atlantic Monthly (not yet on line) offers a James Fallows cover story on Rupert Murdoch, the evil demon. Another approach is to look at facts. Eli Noam tries to do that.
What we have in media is an industry that is distinguished from other industries by its lack of concentration. Michael Powell has been vilified on this issue, and 400 House members voted to overturn his modest deregulation proposal. But the facts happen to be on his side. . . . . . .
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