NASA is admitting that laptop brought to the international space station in July apparently contained a virus designed to swipe user passwords, though they're not sure how it happened. The computers don't control anything mission critical, but are used by astronauts to send email and to track their nutritional programs. The computers were never connected to the internet, so NASA is guessing that an astronaut had an infected USB key or something that resulted in the virus getting onto the computer.

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For the last few years, various connectivity providers sold "unlimited" data plans when the reality was the plans weren't unlimited at all. Many providers are now changing the plans and instituting more clear caps, but it still seems a bit ridiculous to have marketed unlimited data plans and then pulled the rug out from under those who bought exactly what you sold them. Up in Canada, it seems that TELUS is taking it a step further. Not only did it sell people "unlimited" plans that it now regrets, it's exercising some vague language in its contract that allows them to simply cancel the plans of those who had bought into the "unlimited" plan even just a short while ago. The company is forcing users to switch from a $75 unlimited plan to a $65 plan that is limited to just one GB per month, and dumping anyone who won't switch. That would seem to be a pretty strong bait-and-switch claim. Sure, perhaps the telcos oversold these unlimited plans, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be required to live up to what they sold.

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The 463 blog points us to an interview with Mitch Kapor of Lotus and EFF fame, in which he makes the case for a national Chief Technology Officer. The idea seems to be that technology policy in the United States is currently fragmented among a bunch of different positions, and having a designated top technologist in the government would help to bring coherence to the nation's technology policy. It sounds like a reasonable idea at first blush, but on closer examination it might create more problems than it solves.

To start with, it's important to distinguish between two jobs that are really quite different. One job is to coordinate the government's own IT infrastructure. Currently, IT decisions are made by the various federal agencies and departments within the federal government. A national CTO could conceivably set guidelines or policies related to IT infrastructure that would apply across the executive branch. The other job is to advise the president on substantive tech policy issues like network neutrality, patents, copyrights, etc. The two jobs are very different, and it's not at all clear it would make sense to have the same guy doing both. But let's consider each position in turn.

It's not clear how significant the potential savings or efficiency gains would be from having a single guy in charge of all government IT deployments. Up to a certain point, there are efficiency gains to be had from greater IT integration, but the federal government is probably so large that those economies of scale have already been exhausted. That's especially true when we consider that the different parts of the government have widely different requirements. Some parts, such as the FBI and NASA, have offices all over the country, while others are located almost entirely in Washington. Federal agencies do different kinds of work and need a wide variety of software packages. The current arrangement, in which each agency manages its own IT infrastructure, seems likely to give each agency more flexibility to choose technologies that meet its specific needs.

The idea of a designated tech policy advisor is more promising, but that also has potential downsides. A good choice could help bring coherence and vigor to a president's tech agenda, but, given enough power, a bad choice could cause just as much mischief. Therefore, if the next president does create a CTO position, he ought to limit its function to advising the president, rather than pursuing an independent policy agenda. A good model for this is the president's Council of Economic Advisors, which advises the president on economic policy and produces an annual report on the state of the economy but doesn't wield any significant authority in its own right.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The Associated Press has been having a hard time keeping up with the times. While there was the highly publicized situation where it threatened some bloggers with its own, highly questionable definition of fair use, a much bigger deal is that it's increasingly competing with its own member newspapers by doing things like cutting deals with Google that take traffic away from those member papers' own sites. Apparently, some of those newspapers are paying attention. Romenesko points us to the news that the Star Tribune in Minnesota has alerted the AP that its canceling its membership. It will be worth watching to see if other newspapers start joining in as well. The AP has had many years to learn how to adapt and change in the internet era, and so far it's failed repeatedly. Seeing its member newspapers leaving is just the inevitable result of its botched strategy.

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Want to know when someone is preparing to take away your First Amendment rights? It's when they claim that they have a proposal that involves "balancing" those rights with other events (sent to us by Eric Goldman). In this case, the proposal comes from a professor from Brigham Young University, Cheryl B. Preston, who's proposing the idea for an Internet Community Ports Act (ICPA), which would create special "zones" online where it would be okay for "adult" material to reside, and other zones that would be kid friendly. Apparently, this is needed to: Find a reasonable balance among the values of the First Amendment, the appeal of an unfettered technological frontier, the right to be free of unwanted speech, and the right of parents to have the aid of the government in protecting children from age-inappropriate sexually explicit content online. We've seen similar proposals in the past that haven't gone very far. And, this proposal seems quite similar to that older proposal -- except presented by a law professor in a law review, rather than a local business man. Like that last proposal, this one focuses on having all adult content be accessed over a specific port. As we noted when that earlier proposal came out, the problem isn't with the idea of a "red light" district, but with determining what is and is not considered reasonable or "harmful." Given how badly many online filtering services "over filter" content, this could be a real problem.

Yet Preston brushes this very big issue aside: Much of the debate about regulating pornography has stymied on the esoteric impossibility of drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable content. However, "definitions" is a diversionary argument. Not only do we know it when we see it, we now have codified the scope of it and relied for federal court purposes on the ready identification of it by a range of observers. Not quite. While it is, perhaps, possible to have courts judge these things for professional publications, when you're talking about a communications medium where everyone is a publisher and decisions need to be made in real time, that "definition" problem is very, very real. Much of the rest of the argument in favor of this law, again, seems to miss out on this important factor, acting as if the rules that have been set up for traditional publishing systems can equally be applied to real-time communications. That's simply not true.

But, of course, with the latest smack down against the COPA law, you can bet that politicians will eventually be looking for the next big "protect the children on the internet" law -- so don't be surprised if you see a version of this proposed law bubble up at some point.

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Apparently Judy Estrin, a well-known Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and exec, is coming out with a new book warning that the infrastructure needed for innovation in Silicon Valley is going away. The complaint basically appears to be that there's too much emphasis on the short-term, with companies focusing on the quick flip rather than the long haul trends that need to be satisfied to drive real innovation.

I can absolutely understand where this is coming from -- but I think it's wrong. There absolutely are a bunch of folks in Silicon Valley who are focused on the quick flip and the easy cash out. Those folks have been around for a while. They get a lot more attention in the boom years, and during the down cycles you see them fleeing for somewhere else. But that doesn't mean that the overall culture of innovation is in trouble.

In some sense, the argument sounds similar to the complaints we hear from long-time journalists bemoaning bloggers, or professional television producers whining about YouTube. The tools of innovation have changed the marketplace, allowing many more entrants -- and not all of those entrants are all that serious about it, or even that good at it. So, there's a ton of crappy blog content, and millions upon millions of videos that would never, ever show up on a television. Yet, there are also plenty of gems exposed by these systems that would never have come out otherwise.

And the same is true for innovation culture in Silicon Valley.

The "tools" for creating a startup make it easier and cheaper than ever before to simply throw something up and see if it sticks. And, yes, much of it is terrible -- just like plenty of online content is terrible -- but out of that some great stuff evolves. The fact that there are plenty of short term thinkers just throwing stuff quickly at the wall isn't necessarily bad for innovation -- it just means that innovation is taking a slightly different path. There are plenty of folks in Silicon Valley still thinking about the long haul, and looking at the trends and understanding them. But the ability to throw something up and see if it sticks is valuable as well, as it allows a lot more testing of ideas in the real world, without having to make huge initial investments. That isn't to say that short-term thinking is a good thing. It's not. But some folks doing short-term thinking doesn't preclude others from using those lessons to build real long-term innovation.

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One of the more well-publicized lawsuits involving the RIAA was the Howell case, which got a lot of press when some folks misread the RIAA's filings against Howell. Either way, that point became meaningless when the judge ruled in Howell's favor that "making available" is not infringement by itself. Of course, that argument was just for the RIAA's attempt at a summary judgment. So the case still went on, and it turns out that Howell was caught destroying evidence -- a big no-no. So, despite all of this, it's no surprise that the RIAA has prevailed in the overall case. It does make you wonder why people who have strong evidence against them still end up fighting the RIAA. It's completely admirable to fight the RIAA if they're using faulty or flimsy evidence and you're innocent, but when the evidence suggests otherwise, what good does it possibly do to fight them in court? In the meantime, the RIAA will certainly talk up this "victory" but will skip over the part that it wasn't on the actual issues, but over Howell's decision to destroy evidence.

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A few weeks back, we wrote about Ryanair's decision to cancel flight tickets that had been bought by travelers via third party websites. This made no sense to us whatsoever. These third party websites were acting as resellers, and doing something that seemed perfectly legal: providing new avenues for travelers to buy Ryanair tickets. And then to have Ryanair flat-out cancel the tickets without any refund just seemed to do the opposite: to piss off travelers who had happily paid for Ryanair tickets.

The airline is now defending the decision, but is doing an awful job of it. First, it complains that these other sites were jacking up the price on Ryanair tickets. Fair enough, but if the travelers were still willing to pay those fees, where's the problem? Everyone got what they wanted in that scenario, as opposed to the current scenario where everyone is worse off: the travelers are out money without the plane tickets they thought they had bought, Ryanair has a bunch of really pissed off customers and the third party sites are none too happy as well. How is that possibly a better situation?

Then Ryanair claims that these 3rd party sites are violating its copyright in reselling its tickets, but it's difficult to see how such a claim could stick. First of all, as long as the sites are legitimately passing on the lead or buying the tickets themselves, then where's the copyright violation? It's certainly not in visiting Ryanair's website. It's not in displaying the prices (which Ryanair admits are different than its own, and prices aren't copyrightable anyway). So, again, we're left wondering how this move could possibly make sense for Ryanair?

Update: As pointed out in the comments by discojohnson, the original article at the Independent reports that refunds were given to the websites involved, but the decision to refund the customers themselves was then left to up to those particular websites. We have corrected this post to reflect that clarification.

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Over the past few years, the "but think of the children!" crowd constantly talks up the importance of having parents monitor their kids' online activities, and often puts out studies like the following one, bemoaning the fact that not enough parents are monitoring their kids enough. Of course, the simple fact is that parents are never going to be able to fully monitor what their kids do online (at least without seriously pissing off their kids). If kids want to chat online, they're going to find a way to be able to do so. Perhaps rather than focusing so much on spying on everything that kids do, the focus should be more on educating them to the dangers that are out there, the laws that they should be aware of and the risks of not obeying them. We have this tendency in our society to overprotect kids, which often has the opposite effect: not preparing them properly to face the real world. Kids who understand the risks tend to make better choices online. As for those who are constantly spied on and overly protective? We'll again quote Richard Posner in one of his legal rulings: "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low ... It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it." Parents should be aware of what their kids are doing online by talking to them about it, and helping to educate their kids on the risks they face, but that doesn't mean spying on their every move. That will only backfire.

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I tend to be something of an innovation optimist, believing that most resource constraint problems are eventually solved through ingenuity and innovation, but there can be some hiccups in the process along the way. Here's an article looking at the airline industry, and trying to spin some scenarios of what would happen if it simply turns out that the commercial airline business is completely unsupportable. Obviously, with fuel costs so high, it's become more and more difficult to keep airlines running (and it was never all that easy back when fuel costs were cheap). However, people seem to take for granted what cheap and readily available air travel allows. It touches on so many different businesses that it's hard to fathom how deep the eventual impact would be if air travel needs to be significantly curtailed in the future.

It's not just the obvious industries: airlines, tourism, etc. It would impact things like e-commerce companies that rely on cheap shipping. It would impact conferences. It could impact all sorts of industries when sales people can't as easily go visit customers. The more you think about it, the more industries you can find hurt by a decline in the availability of cheap air travel. Of course, there are other industries that would benefit as well, such as telecom companies and video conferencing firms.

Still, the optimist in me just sees the scenario as an opportunity for innovation. In fact, all of those other industries that would be hurt by a reduction in air travel would have it in their own best interests to help fund research and development into alternatives and improvements, so the funding for such innovation could come from many, many different places. But if it takes a while to figure out the problem -- and the airlines keep screwing things up themselves, there may be a rather unpleasant interim while everything shakes out.

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You may recall stories involving a small patent holding firm called Klausner Technologies, which claims to hold patents on the concept of "visual voicemail." It seems to have interpreted these patents pretty broadly to the point that it considers anyone who offers any graphical interface to voicemail as infringing. Over the years, that's meant lawsuits against AOL, Vonage, Apple, eBay, AT&T and others. Apparently, suing one by one was too much trouble, because Klausner has now sued another bunch of companies including Google, Verizon and Embarq. Of course, the company is playing up the fact that all those other companies it sued settled, but we've seen that game before. There's not much new here as this scenario is all too common. We have a company with an overly broad patent on a concept that was a natural obvious progression of the art, suing pretty much every company that actually innovates, thus making actual innovation more expensive.

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Mathew Ingram notes that Google is continuing its campaign to use television "white spaces" for Internet connectivity, a promising concept that hasn't panned out so far. I think the most interesting tidbit in Ingram's post comes from an interview with Richard Wiley, the guy who chaired the committee that developed what became the current digital television standard. Ingram says Wiley told him that one of the broadcasters' criteria for the new standard is that it use as much spectrum as possible. That sounds backwards, but it made sense for the broadcasters, because they knew they'd have to give back any spectrum they didn't use. And it's consistent with past experience; we've written before about the broadcasters' spectrum-hoarding tendencies.

Perverse incentives like this are an inevitable consequence of the FCC's Soviet-style process for assigning spectrum usage. As long as the uses for spectrum are decided by fiat by the FCC, current licensees are going to play these kinds of games to ensure they get the biggest slice they can, even if they waste spectrum in the process. A better way to handle the transition (and still a good idea today, for that matter) would have been to give the broadcasters a fixed spectrum allocation and then allowed them broad flexibility on how to use it—including the right to lease or sell unused portions to third parties. That way, if they found a way to transmit television signals with less spectrum, they would have been able to lease out the unusued portions to third parties who could put it to more productive use.

In addition to promoting more efficient spectrum use in the short run, putting more spectrum on the market (as they're doing in the UK) would have positive effects on the overall telecom market. By driving down the price of spectrum it would make it easier for new firms to get into the wireless market. So far, the relatively small number of licenses that have been put on the market has allowed incumbents to snapped them up and keep out new entrants. Putting more spectrum on the market would make this strategy a lot more difficult to pull off.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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With UK law firm Davenport Lyons ramping up its efforts to send out thousands of "pre-settlement" letters accusing folks of file sharing using flimsy evidence, it appears one lawyer wants to help those falsely accused for free. The Davenport Lyons system works in a pretty straightforward method: it makes use of evidence from Logistep, a company whose evidence is so flimsy it's been banned in other countries in Europe as illegal, and lawyers who have used its evidence have been banned from filing new cases. However, since the "pre-settlement" letters let you avoid a lawsuit for a small fee (less than it would cost to defend yourself in a lawsuit), many just pay up.

However, TorrentFreak has found a lawyer in the UK who also believes that this is unfair, and who is offering his firm's services for free to help those who have been falsely accused by Davenport Lyons. The offer is pretty specifically aimed at those who are falsely accused. He (reasonably so) doesn't seem interested in helping those who actually did infringe on copyrights, and he can only devote so much time and effort to such cases, so he may not be able to take all cases that come his way. However, for those who are falsely accused, who were afraid that it would cost more to fight than to settle, at least there's one potential option to fight back.

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Over at the Technology Liberation Front, my co-blogger Adam Thierer discusses the trade-offs between platform competition and standardization, a subject Mike has written about in the past. Adam explores the mobile phone and console markets, and points out that the proliferation of incompatible devices has created real costs for developers who want to build on top of those various platforms. He makes some good observations, but I think he's missing the importance of reverse-engineering in resolving the dilemma he identifies. If a platform is proprietary, then we really do face a trade-off between standardization and competition. But open, flexible standards allow both: many firms can offer competing products, but they all work together because they're all designed for a common platform. Moreover, if the standard is well designed, the competing products can offer a wide variety of different features, and the standard can grow and evolve over time as vendors propose and adopt new extensions. That's the story of the web, for example, which features both competition and interoperability. The standard has evolved organically, as various vendors proposed and adopted new standards and often adopted those of their competitors.

The question, of course, is how to reach this "sweet spot" of an open, flexible, and universal platform. Sometimes (as with the web) we just get lucky, and the designer of the initial standard has the foresight to make it open and extensible. But when that doesn't happen, and it often doesn't, the next best hope is reverse engineering: a company (e.g. IBM) develops a proprietary platform which achieves popularity and is then reverse-engineered by competitors, transforming it into a de facto open standard. The modern PC platform isn't really controlled by anybody, although Microsoft and Intel have more influence than most other vendors. And because nobody controls it, it's both fiercely competitive and highly interoperable.

Because reverse engineering is so important in transforming closed standards into open ones, we should be especially worried about laws that stand in the way of that process. I've written before that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is one such roadblock. For example, one would expect companies to be working hard to reverse-engineer Apple's iTunes-iPod ecosystem in order to sell iPod clones. We might expect the emergence of a de facto open standard around Apple's platform, with a variety of iPod clones and drop-in iTunes replacements. Unfortunately, in part because the DMCA limits the reverse-engineering of FairPlay, Apple's DRM technology, few vendors have attempted this. Hence, the DMCA is helping to perpetuate the competition-versus-standardization dilemma Adam laments.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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When old school journalists complain about the supposed "threats" from companies like Craigslist and Google or things like blogging, one of the common refrains is: "but who will pay for investigative reporting." The idea is that these other services can replace the basic news facts, but it's tough to see how true investigative reporting will get funded. Yet, as with all markets in a state of flux, we've seen that if there's a real demand, new business models will come along to handle it -- and that seems to be exactly what is happening in the investigative reporting realm. The NY Times points out a few different experiments in other forms of funding investigative reporting, with the bulk of the story talking about getting interested parties to pay up front for an investigation. In other words, if there is a concerned group of folks worried about, say, dangerous chemicals leaking into the drinking water, it could put that story up, and if enough people contribute to the investigation, a reporter can get paid and do the investigation.

While there are some concerns that this would lead to biased journalism, there's nothing saying that the journalist's results have to support the initial worry. In fact, I would imagine that in cases where folks are worried about things like chemicals in the drinking water, they'd be much more relieved to find out that it's really nothing. Either way, this model fits exactly with the business models we've discussed in the past: getting people to pay for the creation of content. The creation of new content is a scarce good, and there may be some group of people for whom its worth paying for. In this case, the example fits the business model we describe for content after it's created as well, since the organization doing these investigative reports will then offer them to newspapers for free (so long as they don't want an exclusive right -- which would not be free). That's exactly how it should be: it costs money for the initial creation, but then the content is freed, where it adds much more value (and attracts more people to fund later stories). Who knows if this particular effort will work (execution is everything, after all), but the model is sound, and shows that despite gloomy whining from old school reporters, the new business models will show up.

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J.K. Rowling has been an aggressive user of intellectual property laws against anyone who she feels has done her wrong, and Warner Bros. studio, which owns the rights to the movies has been equally aggressive at times. The latest target, as sent in by a bunch of readers, is an Indian film by the name of Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors, about a young Indian boy who gets left home alone. If anything, you almost have to wonder if the makers of the film purposely picked a bunch of recognizable themes. There is the name, which potentially plays on both Harry Potter and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (which, of course, is public domain). Then there's the story line, which seems similar to the Home Alone movies. So this film isn't copying Rowling's work, but the name certainly sounds like it could be.

The movie makers insist their Hari Puttar has nothing to do with Harry Potter. The storylines are entirely different. Hari is a popular Indian name and Puttar means "son" in Punjabi. Plus, when pronounced correctly, it doesn't even sound like Harry Potter. That doesn't mean that it wasn't done on purpose, of course. So, yes, I can understand where Warner is coming from, but that still doesn't necessarily make this a smart move. Leaving the movie as is doesn't take any money away from Rowling or Warner. If anything, all this effort is doing is providing a lot more free publicity for the Hari Puttar movie -- which may be exactly what the movie makers wanted.

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It's really amazing how many times we see companies using the DMCA to shut down and stamp out fan efforts to help promote some content. Take, for example, the latest situation pointed out by MG Siegler over at VentureBeat. Apparently, cable TV network AMC has been sending DMCA takedown notices to Twitter because some fans of its popular show Mad Men have created Twitter accounts for the main characters in the show. The fans are staying in character and adding to other fans' appreciation of the show. In some ways, this is similar to the situation we described recently where a fake representative of Exxon showed up on Twitter, even though she did a good job representing the company. Yes, the show wants to be able to control its own promotions -- and perhaps it's planning to create Twitter accounts itself, but it seems that there would be better ways to deal with this than shutting down fan-created accounts that people were enjoying.

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A few years back, we asked if it should be illegal to get hacked. In that case, we were referring to some fines that the FTC had handed out to companies that had leaked data to hackers. This raised some troubling questions -- as it's often difficult-to-impossible to stop your computer systems from getting hacked, and putting liability on the company could lead to some serious unintended consequences. Yet, at the same time, over the past few years, we've heard about large security breaches on a regular basis (thanks, in large part, to new disclosure laws) -- and often those breaches definitely seem to be due to negligence on the part of a corporate IT team that failed to lock down the data in any significant manner. That seems to be leading more people down the path of saying that companies should be liable for getting hacked.

For example, Slashdot points us to a blog post at InfoWorld, where it's suggested that companies should be criminally liable for leaking such data. I can certainly understand the sentiment, but it may go too far. Again, it's impossible to totally protect a system from getting hacked. Sooner or later there's always going to be some sort of leak. Increasing penalties could make companies take things more seriously -- especially in cases of gross negligence (which do seem all too common). But making the rules too strict can have serious negative unintended consequences as well, even to the point that some companies may stop accepting credit cards altogether, since the liability would just be too great. Would people be willing to give up the convenience of credit cards to protect their safety? From what we've seen, for most users the answer would be no. They know their credit cards are at risk, but they still use them because the benefit of the convenience still seems to outweigh the danger of the risk.

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As you recall, Hasbro's decisions on how to deal with upstart Scrabulous backfired badly. The company first threatened Scrabulous, then tried to do a deal with them. When that failed it (finally!) built its own Facebook Scrabble and then sued Scrabulous. Rather than working to Hasbro's advantage, this backfired in a huge way -- pissing off plenty of people who swore never to use Hasbro's version of the game. And then it was just a matter of days until the Scrabulous guys came out with a new game that was close to Scrabble, but different enough to likely avoid all copyright and trademark claims.

Now, Hasbro only owns the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada. Mattel owns the rights elsewhere. Now, seeing that Mattel had the distinct advantage of seeing how much backlash there was against Hasbro for its actions, and how poorly Hasbro's own Facebook Scrabble was received, you might think that Mattel would try a different path. Nope. Mattel has now forced Scrabulous offline outside of the US as well. To be fair, the guys from Scrabulous overplay their reaction as well. It's not that shocking. After all, this is how companies react these days. Rather than going with the faux outrage, why not just release WordScraper and get people to sign up for that, rather than any "licensed" version of Scrabble?

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I'm actually on a road trip across the US this week, still working along the way with a mix of EVDO and WiFi. I'm writing this post while connected to some WiFi in Cheyenne, Wyoming (nice town) and I'll be on my way into Nebraska shortly. That's why this story caught my eye: apparently the small town of Louisville, Nebraska has set up a free WiFi zone in their downtown and smartly decided to advertise that fact on the main highway that runs by the town. Yet, the State of Nebraska Roads Department has forced them to take down the sign, worried that other towns across the state might also demand that the state put up signs advertising free WiFi. Considering that the signs in Louisville weren't installed by the Roads Department in the first place, this seems like a totally misplaced worry. If other cities demand such signs, why not just tell them to put up their own signs if they want to? I might just have to swing by Louisville myself and post something using their WiFi.

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