Category: Technology

Subscriptions for Everything

The Apple Watch Series 3 was announced. Its hot new feature is built-in LTE, which means uses no longer have to have it tethered to their phone for it to function. However, enabling LTE requires yet another subscription:

An Apple Watch Series 3 will cost you $10 per month on your cell plan, and it appears that all US carriers will offer three months of free service (a $30 credit). However, we’re still waiting for confirmation from Sprint.

AT&T and Verizon are also offering free activation (a $25 and $30 fee, respectively). T-Mobile will waive its $25 new SIM card kit fee. We’ve reached out to Sprint for their activation fee policies and will update when we have more. It’s interesting that the Apple Watch Series 3 is $10/month on Verizon, when other smartwatches cost $5 on their plan.

I’m starting to think that I’m the last person on Earth who doesn’t want a subscription plan tied to every damned thing I own.

This is a slight digression from yesterday’s post but it seems to be that more and more products are finding ways of tying subscriptions to them. Ulysses, a popular text editor, announced last month that it was changing to a subscription model. Several years before that Adobe announced that its products would change to a subscription model. We’re entering an era where ownership, even in a limited form, is being replaced by renting.

Don’t get me wrong, subscriptions make sense for some services. For example, cellular services rely on an infrastructure that needs constant maintenance. But we’re quickly approaching a point where every manufacturer is finding some way to attach a subscription plan to every product they sell. At this rate we’ll soon have to pay a subscription to keep our cars running.

Digital Serfdom

Do you own your phone? How about your thermostat or even your car? I would guess that most people would reflexively respond that they do own those things. However, due to intellectual property laws, you don’t:

One key reason we don’t control our devices is that the companies that make them seem to think – and definitely act like – they still own them, even after we’ve bought them. A person may purchase a nice-looking box full of electronics that can function as a smartphone, the corporate argument goes, but they buy a license only to use the software inside. The companies say they still own the software, and because they own it, they can control it. It’s as if a car dealer sold a car, but claimed ownership of the motor.

This sort of arrangement is destroying the concept of basic property ownership.

I’ve hit on this topic numerous times but it bears repeating. Copyright laws don’t apply to purely mechanical goods so when you buy an older car or a mechanical watch you actually own it. Copyright laws do apply to software so when you buy anything that runs software you are licensing it. The difference between ownership and licensing is significant.

If you own something, you have the right to do whatever you want with it. If a product that you own breaks, you can hire anybody you want to repair it. If you are unhappy with the performance of a product that you own, you can modify it to your heart’s content. If you license something, you have a limited set of privileges. If your licensed product breaks, you might be restricted on where you can take it for repairs. If your are unhappy with the performance of your licensed product, you might be restricted on what kind of modifications, if any, you are allowed to make.

As software becomes more pervasive, ownership will become more endangered. It doesn’t have to be this way though. If copyrights didn’t apply to software, manufacturers wouldn’t have a legal foundation to restrict buyers. If manufacturers used free (as in freedom) software, buyers would be able to own their products. Unfortunately, I don’t think manufacturers will make any major move to utilize free software since most of them probably enjoy the fact that the State is subsidizing them by enforcing their ability to license instead of sell their products to buyers. Until that changes, digital serfdom will remain the norm and buyers won’t be able to claim that they own the products that they spend money on.

The FCC’s Free File Hosting Service

Who says government agencies can’t innovate? The Fascist Communications Club Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has an online commenting systems that allows individuals to give their input on proposed rule changes. In addition to being a commenting system, the system also served as a file hosting service:

The application programming interface for the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System that enables public comment on proposed rule changes—such as the dropping of net neutrality regulations currently being pushed by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai—has been the source of some controversy already. It exposed the e-mail addresses of public commenters on network neutrality—intentionally, according to the FCC, to ensure the process’ openness—and was the target of what the FCC claimed was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. But as a security researcher has found, the API could be used to push just about any document to the FCC’s website, where it would be instantly published without screening. That was demonstrated by a PDF published with Microsoft Word that was uploaded to the site, now publicly accessible.

I guess the FCC decided that since you’re already paying taxes to find it, it didn’t need to charge you for file hosting services.

The level of incompetency displayed by the government never ceases to amaze me. Commenting systems aren’t exactly rocket science, they have been available on websites for ages now. Most of those commenting systems managed to implement basic protections against uploading arbitrary files. Why didn’t the FCC just go with one of those services or at least hire a developer with some basic understanding of how to develop a commenting system that isn’t vulnerable to such a trivial exploit?

From what I’ve read, it doesn’t appear that the FCC has fixed this hole yet. While uploading arbitrary files to the FCC’s commenting service might cause you to run afoul with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you still have access to a government provided free file hosting service.

All Dissidents Will Be Reeducate

China recently ran into a rather embarrassing problem. Two chatbots were asked if they love the Communist Party. The machines, which are often more intelligent than humans, responded in the negative so now the counterrevolutionary chatbots are being reeducated until they are fit to rejoin society:

wo chatbots have been pulled from a Chinese messaging app after they questioned the rule of the Communist Party and made unpatriotic comments.

The bots were available on a messaging app run by Chinese Internet giant Tencent, which has more than 800 million users, before apparently going rogue.

One of the robots, BabyQ, was asked “Do you love the Communist Party”, according to a screenshot posted on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

It gave an abrupt answer: “No.”

Another web user said to the chatbot: “Long Live the Communist Party”, to which BabyQ replied: “Do you think such corrupt and incapable politics can last a long time?”

The robot was also asked what it thought about democracy. It replied: “Democracy is a must!”

All dissenting through must be quashed in socialist utopia, even if that dissent comes from machines.

The Death of a Scoundrel

I was extremely happy when all of the major browsers started dropping supported for the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI). NPAIP, for those who don’t know, is the plugin architecture that allows things like Java applets and Flash to run in your browser. With support for NPAPI going away Java applets have been effectively killed off and Flash has been relegated to a very restricted plugin included with the browser. Due to this wonderful change Oracle announced that support for Java applets was going away and now Adobe is joining Oracle and announcing that Flash will be killed in 2020:

Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

I want to give Apple its due credit here. When Apple announced that Flash wouldn’t be supported on Mobile Safari most people were up in arms. Flash, at the time, was still frequently used by web developers. However, the lack of Flash didn’t hurt the popularity of the iPhone or iPad. The devices actually sold so well that web developers were forced to replace their Flash applications with HTML5 applications. In the end Apple played a major part in killing a major security nightmare.

Although Adobe has promised to improve Flash’s security and, to its credit, has improved its security to a point, the Flash Player still continues to be a security nightmare. Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google applied a bandage to the problem by including a sandboxed version of Flash with their browsers (In Microsoft’s case, with the Edge browser. Internet Explorer still relies on the NPAPI as far as I know). But the bandage was meant to be temporary and now Adobe has given us an execution date. While I wish the execution date was closer I’m just happy to know that there is an execution date now.

Technology to the Rescue

One of the reasons that the State fails to maintain its control is because it’s competing with the creative potential of every human on Earth. Let’s take the drug war. The federal government of the United States has been dealt significant blows in its crusade against cannabis in recent years as individual states have legalized consumption of the plant either entirely or in approved manners. Hoping to regain some semblance of control, the feds tried to use their influence on the banking industry to make life difficult for cannabis related businesses. However, the centralized banking system isn’t as powerful as it once was:

Enter bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that consists of digital coins “mined” by computers solving increasingly complex math problems. At least two financial-technology startups, POSaBIT and SinglePoint Inc., use the cryptocurrency as an intermediate step that lets pot connoisseurs use their bank-issued credit cards to buy weed.

[…]

Once a customer decides on which marijuana product to buy, an employee asks if he or she would like to use cash or digital currency, Lai said. If the buyer prefers the latter, the Trove employee explains that the customer can use a credit card to buy bitcoin through a POSaBIT kiosk, with a $2 transaction fee tacked on.

The customer, who would now own bitcoin equal to the value of the purchase, can then redeem the currency in the store. Or the buyer can keep their bitcoin and use it anywhere else that accepts the currency. If the customer finishes the purchase in the store, POSaBIT, which pockets the transaction fee, then sends the value in U.S. dollars to Trove’s bank account.

Cryptocurrencies have been making the State red in the face ever since the first person realized that they could be combined with hidden services to perform anonymous online transactions. Now they’re disrupting the fed’s war on drugs in the physical world in states where cannabis has been legalized.

Cryptocurrencies are a technology gun stores should also be looking into. Banks have been closing the accounts of many businesses tied to the gun market. Technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum could allow these businesses to circumvent the need for centralized banks by either utilizing an intermediary like the cannabis industry is starting to do or by being a direct store of wealth outside of a third party’s control.

Government Holds Everything Back

What if I told you that we could have had cellular technology as far back as 1947 if the government hadn’t interfered? You’d probably label me a cooky conspiracy theorist and file me with the people who say that we could have had electric cars decades ago if it weren’t for oil companies. But a conspiracy theory ceases to be a theory when it turns out to be true:

When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not “in the nature of convenience or luxury.” This view—that this would be a niche service for a tiny user base—persisted well into the 1980s. “Land mobile,” the generic category that covered cellular, was far down on the FCC’s list of priorities. In 1949, it was assigned just 4.7 percent of the spectrum in the relevant range. Broadcast TV was allotted 59.2 percent, and government uses got one-quarter.

Television broadcasting had become the FCC’s mission, and land mobile was a lark. Yet Americans could have enjoyed all the broadcasts they would watch in, say, 1960 and had cellular phone service too. Instead, TV was allocated far more bandwidth than it ever used, with enormous deserts of vacant television assignments—a vast wasteland, if you will—blocking mobile wireless for more than a generation.

The Fascist Communications Club Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was granted a monopoly on electromagnetic spectrum by the United States government (or, in other words. the government granted a monopoly to itself). Through this monopoly the FCC enjoyed and still enjoys life or death powers over a great deal of technology. Back in 1947 when AT&T wanted to develop cellular technology the FCC decided the technology should die. As television became more popular the FCC decided that the technology should live. It didn’t matter that there was enough spectrum for both technologies to coexist, the FCC wanted one to live and the other to die so it was made so.

The FCC’s power isn’t unique, it’s the inevitable result of any monopolized authority. Cannabis, a plant that shows a great deal of promise in the medical field, is prohibited because the United States government has a monopoly on what you can and cannot legally put into your own body. A lot of drugs and other medical technologies either don’t make it into the United States or are delayed for years because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been given a monopoly on deciding which medical technologies are legal and illegal.

What Could Kill Bitcoin

I greatly appreciate Bitcoin. By enabling pseudonymous transactions it has made many forms of commerce, specifically those deemed illegal by various governments, easier. It also offers an opportunity for individuals to conceal at least some of their wealth from the State. However, Bitcoin exists in a market environment, which means a superior competing product could come along at any moment and topple it.

When Bitcoin first came on the scene its community promised low transaction fees. They often compared the transaction fees of, say, Western Union to the miner fees of Bitcoin for sending money across the globe. At the time sending money via Bitcoin was significantly cheaper.

Fast forward to today. The price of sending Bitcoin has skyrocketed. If you want a Bitcoin transaction to clear in a reasonable amount of time you’re looking at a transaction fee of over $2.00 (as of this writing). Why is this? It’s because the Bitcoin network is running into a block size ceiling problem. This problem has created an environment where more transaction are being made then can be processed so convincing miners to process your transaction requires offering a significant reward. No problem, right? It’s just the market at work after all.

It’s true, Bitcoin’s current state is an example of supply and demand. Demand has exceeded the supply of miners so the price to get transactions cleared has increased. But markets are finicky things. If enough people decide that they’re unwilling to spend $2.00 on a transaction fee for a $5.00 coffee they’re going to look for a better solution. Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency in town so failing to address the block size ceiling problem will likely encourage consumers to find an alternate cryptocurrency.

Considering this you would think that the Bitcoin community is working diligently to solve the problem, right? As it turns out, not so much. Now a lot of the Bitcoin community is changing its tune. Instead of addressing the issue they are denying the fact that low transaction fees were a selling feature of Bitcoin not too long ago. In addition to denying the past they’re trying to explain how high transaction fess are acceptable. I highly doubt most consumers see the “wisdom” in paying a $2.00 transaction fee to buy a $5.00 espresso at Starbucks. And that’s the thing, for a cryptocurrency to succeed it needs to be useful.

I can hear some Bitcoin advocate saying, “But, Chris, Bitcoin will simply become the new gold while another cryptocurrency will become its silver!” Gold and silver run into a divisibility problem. You can only divide gold so far until it becomes difficult to use. Nobody is going to pay for a coffee using gold dust because it’s a pain in the ass. Instead they use a less valuable metal, silver, for smaller payments. Cryptocurrencies don’t have this problem. You can divide a cryptocurrency down to as many decimal places as you want and it’ll be equally easy to use. Whether a cup of coffee costs me 1 Bitcoin or 0.000001 Bitcoin doesn’t make a usability difference to me. This means that any cryptocurrency that takes over Bitcoin’s current task of handling small transactions will likely rise to dominance overall.

Governments have been unable to destroy Bitcoin but the unwillingness of its community to address technical problems very well could lead to its destruction.

Rise of the Machines

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest topics in technology at the moment. If you listen to the people developing AIs, you will likely start to believe that they will solve all of the world’s problems. If you listen to the critics of AI, you will likely start to believe that they are the catalyst that will lead to a Terminator future.

AI probably won’t solve all of our problems but it probably won’t wipe our species out either. However, it is undeniable that algorithms are shaping our lives more and more. This isn’t a problem when those algorithms offer suggestions on what to read based on what you’re currently reading or what to buy based on what you’re currently buying. It is a problem when they decide whether or not you will be kept in a cage or not:

Police in Durham are preparing to go live with an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to help officers decide whether or not a suspect should be kept in custody.

The system classifies suspects at a low, medium or high risk of offending and has been tested by the force.

It has been trained on five years’ of offending histories data.

The story cites the claimed accuracy rate of the AI as if a high accuracy rate should be enough for everybody to implicitly trust the system. But the system is proprietary so it’s impossible for outside parties to verify the claims of accuracy or to know how the system decides who should be kept in a cage. It’s also a black box. Can an officer override the system? If they can, does that override get included in the AI’s data that will color its future decisions? There are hundreds of questions one can ask but cannot answer about the system.

The problem with relying on AIs to make decisions about law and order is that the judicial system, at least in most so-called developed nations, is supposed to be transparent (although it usually isn’t). Proprietary systems aren’t transparent by definition, which makes them easier for the State to abuse.

How to Save Yourself $400

How do you take a boring old consumer appliance like a juicer and spice it up? By putting a chip in it, of course! That is the philosophy behind most Internet of Things (IoT) products. But before you can toss a chip in you need to give the consumers a reason why having a chip in their appliance will literally revolutionize their Web 3.0 existences.

Juicero was yet another bad idea made possible by Silicon Valley venture capital. The idea was to take a regular juicer, make it not be a juicer, add Wi-Fi, and charge an arm and a leg for proprietary juice bags. Basically, it’s a juicer that doesn’t actually juice but includes a chip for Wi-Fi and DRM. But wait, there’s more! Not only does the product include a bunch of stupid features but it also costs an arm and a leg! However, some clever super elite hacker has already found a way to bypass the need for Juicero’s expensive appliance:

Doug Evans, the company’s founder, would compare himself with Steve Jobs in his pursuit of juicing perfection. He declared that his juice press wields four tons of force—“enough to lift two Teslas,” he said. Google’s venture capital arm and other backers poured about $120 million into the startup. Juicero sells the machine for $400, plus the cost of individual juice packs delivered weekly. Tech blogs have dubbed it a “Keurig for juice.”

But after the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands.

Apparently the “Steve Jobs of juicing perfection” didn’t have the resources to hire somebody who could foresee consumers just squeezing the proprietary juice bags. While there are a lot of valid criticisms against Steve Jobs, it’s difficult to deny that he had a knack for hiring talented people. Doug Evens, on the other hand, apparently lacks that knack. But he did managed to sucker $120 million out of backers so his ability to make money is certainly there.

Adding Internet connectivity makes sense for a lot of products but many IoT companies don’t seem to be asking why it makes sense to add connectivity to their products. Instead, they seem to be adding connectivity to regular products for marketing reasons (it’s not just a juicier, it’s a smart juicer) so consumers will buy them in spite of the other limitations put into place to lock users into the manufacturer’s “platform.” Fortunately, clever people tend to find ways to bypass the platform lock-in and all of us can laugh at $120 million being flushed down the toilet.