Net Neutrality

You may have seen the recent cartoon on the Editorial page of the PR (01/23/14) depicting a tank in the process of demolishing a wall; the tank is labelled, “AT&T, VERIZON, COMCAST”, the wall is labelled, “NET NEUTRALITY” and the caption is, “So much for a free Internet...”. Your reaction might well have been “What the heck is Net Neutrality and what exactly is the problem?”.

Simply put, the concept of network neutrality is that: all users of the Internet should be treated fairly and equally --- this includes end users like you and me as well as giant Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like AT&T, VERIZON, and COMCAST. Until Jan 14,2014, it was assumed that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) would regulate the ISPs in much the same way they regulate the phone company providers (e.g Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc). However, one of these providers (Verizon) contested this regulation in 2011 suggesting instead a tiered Internet service whereby a user could pay more to get better, faster Internet service. On the other side of the fence, “Neutrality proponents claim that telecommunications companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality). In fact, Comcast was accused of a violation of net neutrality in 2012 when it was discovered that it was favoring delivery of its own video streaming service over competitors such as Netflix and Hulu. Interestingly, both sides claim that their model promotes innovation which will stimulate the economy.

This issue has been working its way through the court system and now the DC Circuit court has ruled the FCC “cannot subject companies that provide Internet service to the same type of regulation that the agency imposes on phone companies...because Internet service was not a telecommunications service – like telephone or telegraph– but an information service, a classification that limits the F.C.C.’s authority.” ( “The Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality”, NYTimes.com, 01/14/2014 ). So, due to a fine legal distinction between a “utility’ and an “information service”, the FCC’s authority to regulate certain media has apparently been hamstrung.

The basic issue, as I see it,is how to balance authority and responsibility between private and public enterprise. If we use history as a guide, we see that the development of the railroad and the telegraph technologies in the US were a joint venture between government and private companies. Is this still a valid economic model for telecommunications? Should the flow of information be developed and regulated like the flow of electric power? If the answer is yes, then information, whether it’s delivered over a wire or through the air, seems to be a utility. and should be regulated as such.

While I can sympathize with the concept of a tiered service (I am used to paying more for better service on airlines and the like), I hope both sides can come to agree that information leads to knowledge, knowledge is power,, and similarly to electrical power, the flow of information should be regulated by a public utility.

Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless. There seem to be three options for untangling this mess. One would be for the US government to nationalize all telecommunications services

much like France and Germany did almost 20 years ago; it would then be the responsibility of an agency like the FCC to administer and regulate such service in a manner responsible to its citizens and not to corporations. Clearly, given the current political climate, the odds of this happening are very close to nil. Second would be for the FCC to appeal to a higher court for a better ruling. Third would be for the FCC to redefine Internet services as a public utility which would require them to be more active in their regulation. If the third alternative comes to pass, the Net Neutrality advocates will have won and the provider corporations will be looking for new and better ways to increase their services..

Technology and Mischief 01/12/2014

In the old days (pre-1980), if you invested in a quality camera like a single lens reflex, the only things you bought after that were film and various accessories like camera bags and additional lenses. And, unless you dropped it from a moving car, you didn’t buy another camera for the rest of your life. Today many of us own several digital cameras, lured by the astonishing progress in the technical specifications: more megapixels which generally means higher resolution photos, more sensitive light sensors which means clearer, crisper pictures, built in telephoto lenses (up to 60x at this writing), shorter lag times between shots and smaller in size and weight --- not to mention less and less expensive giving us more bang for the buck.

Also changed is the way we take our pictures. When we had to carry rolls of fairly expensive film to record our adventures, we very carefully took one, two or at most three shots of a scene in the hope that one would turn out well. After a trip to the drugstore who sent them off to a photo lab, we waited impatiently for two weeks to get our prints and slides and negatives back before embarking on the last stage of sticking them into a photo album or carousel or shoebox to be retrieved once or twice per year at various family gatherings. Nowadays,with digital cameras that take multiple pics per second I can take 10 to 15 snaps and be quite certain one of them will be good --- blissfully unaware of all the time I will spend later on my computer winnowing them down to the one or two best shots. After that arduous process I can upload them to an online photo service and post them on their or a multitude of other free websites inviting whomever I wish to view them. If I feel a bit old school, I have prints or a photobook made.

So which is better: the old or the new photographic experience? As Tevye says in “Fiddler on the Roof” regarding the question, “Why do we have traditions”: “I’ll tell you. I don’t know.” But I do love the fact that my photo editor allows me to enhance my photos. I can crop, lighten, darken the contrast or shadows, straighten the image if it’s off kilter,retouch, take out redeye as well as apply several dozen colorizing “effects”. It also allows me to make albums and sort them into order by date taken, name, or size. It’s truly amazing how much time I can spend doing this. On the down side, photo editors can be used mischievously to alter reality.

Today technology is used by kids and others with childish minds to make mischief --- from hard-core cyber-bullying and phishing scams to trolling. A troll is a trouble-maker who joins a web discussion whose only aim is to destroy or disrupt the comity of the conversation. The standard modus operandi is to make a controversial statement that is sure to polarize the members --- usually something bordering on sexist or racist. Then the troll lights up a cigar, sits back and watches, only joining in with responses that will fan the flames. Your first thought might be, “This guy needs to get a life”, but sadly, it is a way of life to trolls.

When I was a kid (in a time long ago and far away) we used technology to perform mischief also.. Of course, the technology was rather primitive --- it was called a telephone. Me and a buddy would call a local store and ask, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” (the brand name of a pipe tobacco that came in a small can). When the proprietor answered in the affirmative, we’d respond, “Well. let him out --- he doesn’t like it in there!” It was hilarious at the time. You had to be there.


All these examples are just to say that it may not be technology alone that is the root cause of mischief, it’s a human flaw that most of us outgrow. But it sure does enhance the quality and quantity of mischief that can be done.

The Healthcare.gov Controversy

Folks who hope that technology will save us from the problems we have created for ourselves (e.g. Climate Change) should take a closer look at the current Healthcare.gov website controversy. As you must know by now, the rollout of the Affordable Health Care Act (aka ObamaCare) has been rife with technical problems. Users have experienced long wait times, they are getting inaccurate information and even the insurance companies are having difficulty getting information about who has signed up as well as incorrect information. In short, people are annoyed, confused and, consequently, unhappy. Most Republicans and many Democrats are criticizing the operation of the website and the President is taking heat. However, I’m pretty sure that by the time you read this some of the technical problems will have been solved.

But how and why did this mess occur? When Google rolls out a new application, while it is not perfect, there is a general acceptance of its adequate performance and this, coupled to a trust that bugs will be identified and fixed on a timely basis causes very few ripples. Sometimes Google issues a “Beta” version that invites sophisticated users to try it out and report bugs before the actual application is released. This is a useful accepted practice in software development that will generally improve the product. So why did the US government not follow this path? Many pundits have proposed answers to this question.

Some think that anything the government attempts is doomed to be inefficient as well as costly while others quote the old saw, "To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer." But like most complex problems there are no easy answers. Private corporations like Google have fewer accountability regulations restraining them than does the US government. When I worked for the US Navy we had a saying to the effect, “when you award the contract to the lowest bidder, what kind of results do you expect?”. While this is an overgeneralization and is unfair, it is true that choosing the lowest bidder requires less work because you will not have to justify the choice as much as you would the higher bidder. So even though the government outsources the product to a private firm to implement, not only are these restrictions passed down from the government to the subcontractor (and to sub-subcontractor etc), the communication and accountability necessarily becomes diluted and this can only cause problems. To make matters worse, the main contractor, CGI Federal has a past history of bungling at least 20 other government IT contracts: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-care-web-sites-lead-contractor-employs-executives-from-troubled-it-company/2013/11/15/6e107e2e-487a-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html).

To make matters even worse, although CGI was awarded the contract in Dec 2011, the government did not give them the specifications for the project until this spring causing a hurry-up implementation that would almost surely be buggy. The programming process is similar to building a house for a client who keeps changing their mind about everything from how many rooms and their locations to the type of faucets in the bath. In other words, in addition to driving the contractor crazy, he will be unable to estimation the completion date because the specifications keep changing.

For an excellent graphic description of the problems encountered at HealthCare.gov, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-went-wrong-with-healthcaregov/2013/10/24/400e68de-3d07-11e3-b7ba-503fb5822c3e_graphic.html but be forewarned that the reference to the other main contractor, QSSI, is based in Columbia, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC and not in the country of Columbia.

In the meantime, what can be done to mitigate the debacle? Unfortunately not much unless someone slips a large patience pill into the national water supply. And we don’t have a national water supply.

A rule of thumb for software engineers is that once the code (software) reaches a certain size, it is no longer useful to make correction patches to it because they usually cause more new problems than they fix. If this is the case, it’s time to do a full rewrite and if the HealthCare.gov project has reached this tipping point, expect a loud and bumpy ride.

Negative Aspects to Internet Technology

In this column, I play the role of curmudgeon, grousing about certain aspects of the Internet but, like many other irascible critics, offering no solutions.

Across from my September eighth column was an AP story, “Samsung unveils new Smartwatch.  and I’m beginning to notice TV commercials for it.  The  main purpose of the smartwatch seems to be to alert the user to incoming messages on their smartphone.  I had read about this new tech marvel earlier but this particular article got me to thinking about the need for such a device costing 300 dollars. Does the world really need a device to tell them to go to another device to read a message from another human being? Do we need a smartwatch to connect to our smartphone which we can use to program our TV just to we can mitigate our boredom?  How about this as an alternative: Send a check for 300 bucks to Doctors Without Borders and either wait until you see your friend to talk with them or, if you’re not that patient,  wait until you get out of the meeting to consult your missed calls.

Franz Kafka has said that most of our problems stem from laziness and impatience and perhaps Karl Marx got one thing right when he claimed, “The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”

(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/k/karl_marx.html#iX4Up5srgopi0e3D.99 “

We seem to have forgotten that the root of the term “ technology” is from the greek “techne” which translates roughly to “craftsmanship” and because craft is usually the practical application of an art, it is much to be admired. Certainly the Samsung corporation is crafty but that’s a whole ‘nother use of the word.

It’s a reasonable premise to argue that the Internet has had the most powerful effect on global societies than any other single technology. And it’s even more reasonable to claim that it’s been particularly effective  on our youth.  Beeban Kidron, a British filmmaker, was interviewed by Tim Adams  of the Guardian which resulted in the article, “We need to talk about teenagers and the internet”.

(http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/08/beeban-kidron-inreallife-interview-teenagers?CMP=ema_565&et_cid=48249&et_rid=7426967&Linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2ffilm%2f2013%2fsep%2f08%2fbeeban-kidron-inreallife-interview-teenagers)

The article starts off with a bang. "What is the best thing about the internet?" Kidron wondered. One of the boys, a 15-year-old called Ryan, answered her without hesitation. "Porn," he said. She goes on to point out the dehumanizing aspects of this easy access to pornography and the interesting conclusion that most of the boys are aware of this. The porn fix is not only addictive, it leaves the boys unfulfilled, somewhat depressed and most importantly, still ignorant of the human condition and their place in society.  "I've ruined the sense of love," one of the boys tells Kidron.   

Girls are affected as well.   Kidron interviews a young woman who tells her how attached she is to her BlackBerry and when a gang of boys takes it from her how she allowed herself to be sexually assaulted in order to get it back. These children are not special needs or “kids with an issue”, Kidron goes on --- this subculture is pervasive. She is speaking about her native country, England, but it’s not too difficult to extrapolate this depressing trend to any society that has reached a certain technological level.

On the other hand, I  recently read in my Sigma Xi newsletter the headline:

“Technology transforms sewer water into electricity” which describes how engineers have developed a system to generate electricity using the microbes from sewage water. It appears to be about as efficient as solar technology with the added benefit that it also cleans the water. I don’t go so far as to think to myself, “What a Wonderful World!!!”, but I do see that while being a curmudgeon can be fun, it’s not a useful way to view this complex, amazing universe of ours. I believe that you can choose to be happy or you can choose to be unhappy and the world is ready to back you up 100%.

Neuroscience and the new assault on Privacy

Recently, I came across a Reuters article (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/27/net-us-science-brain-idUSBRE97Q0XZ20130827) with the headline: “U.S. scientist operates colleague's brain from across campus” which, as you may suspect, piqued my interest. All sorts of wonderful and horrible fantasies were triggered ranging from professors being able to lecture to their classes without preparation to students taking exams for each other. However, after actually reading the content which began with the claim that they had achieved the first “mind-meld” , I found a much more mundane but still potentially exciting scenario.

Scientist A ,wearing a cap with electrodes, was sending his brain’s electrical signals to a colleague on the the other end of campus. His colleague, scientist B, wearing a similar cap, received the signals directed to the left motor cortex which controls right hand movement. When A  imagined moving his right hand to press a space bar on on his keyboard, B involuntarily moved his right index finger in response. While this hardly qualifies as a bona fide Star Trek mind-meld, the scientists are hopeful that this technology when fully developed could be used productively using the example that  “it might one day be harnessed to allow an airline pilot on the ground help someone land a plane whose own pilot is incapacitated.”

As I previously mentioned, this aroused my interest and further research led to an interesting destination on the web where one can view a two-part video hosted by Alan Alda (Hawkeye himself).  Actually Alda’s presentation is excellent, combining thoughtful interview and analysis on a well- constructed PBS video: (http://brainsontrial.com/watch-videos/video/episode-1-determining-guilt/) with just a soupçon of mischei

The premise of this video is a mock trial of an attempted robbery and shooting that raises questions about the law, neuroscience and privacy. As the trial progresses, Alda breaks in to examine a new technique in neuroscience that raises privacy issues particularly in the law profession.

. As background, we first learn about the technology that makes all of this possible: the fmri (and no, it’s not the stock symbol for a new form of government-backed mortgages) --- it stands for “functional mri” and and if you’ve had an mri you may already know that it’s “magnetic resonance imaging” and doesn’t hurt at all (unless you’re claustrophobic like me). The “functional” part comes in because the fmri can show the locations in the brain that are working hard and researchers are mapping the brain to match up a unique function with its precise  location. For example, the fusiform face area location of the brain has the job or function of recognizing and categorizing faces. If a person suffers brain damage in that specific area, they will have difficulty recognizing faces. And most importantly for this discussion, if this fusiform area lights up (shows activity as evidenced by more blood flow) during an  fmri, then we can reasonably surmise the subject is in the face recognition mode.This is one school of thought in current neuroscience ---  the other important school is that while functional areas exist, they are not so centralized and actually several locations may collaborate. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_specialization_(brain)). In either case, the scientist’s goal is to correlate active physical parts of the brain with human behavior and great progress is being made.

Using the above as the backstory, the video proceeds to raise the following questions:

The process of eyewitness identification is murky at best; the jury must decide whether prosecutor or defense attorney makes the better case. Suppose frmi technology could examine the relevant brain area to determine what the witness actually saw? What if it could decide whether the witness or the defendant was lying? What if it could detect which members of the jury were showing racial bias?  And even if a person, say the defendant, voluntarily submitted to the frmi procedure, what about the fifth amendment to the Constitution which protects a witness from testifying against themselves?

All interesting and provocative questions, and if neuroscience technology evolves to the point where we literally can read another’s mind, what are the implications for society? Will it destroy it, will we pass more regulations to protect privacy, or will  we learn to live in a fishbowl?

Metadata = Data? You bet. (for Sept 8 PR column)

As I mentioned in last month’s column, the story of NSA’s domestic surveillance made public by Edward snowden has legs. In fact, if the story were an insect, it would be a millipede. Now before you send me a nasty correction, let the record show that I know that, by definition, an insect is limited to six legs but “millipede” sounds so much better than “arachnid. It would seem that in this brave new digital age there should be not only millipedes but mega, giga, tera and even petapedes. No matter. Suffice to say that this story shows no signs of ending well or soon.

As of Aug 21, the latest twist to this thriller revealed that two years ago the FISA court strongly admonished the NSA for sweeping up domestic along with foreign intelligence gathering. The crux of the issue was that, without a warrant, the NSA had no authority to spy on US citizens and in fact, were violating the fourth amendment protecting citizens from unreasonable search.

I have spent some weeks researching the method that NSA must have used to intercept US citizen’s phone calls, emails and other Internet transactions and could only find the political and economic aspects --- how they pressured Internet providers like Verizon and AT&T to “share” their data unbeknownst to US users. There was very little information about the actual techniques applied to the data once the NSA had it in their hands.. So I decided to abandon the experiential approach and apply deduction instead. After all, I had taught the Database Management course in my career as Computer Science professor so why not put to use what I had learned? Here’s the way I think it went.:

Once the NSA had all of this data safely stored on their collection of disks they could make the first pass over the data to create their database. The three main functions of a database system are: Create, Update, and Interrogate. In the Create phase the raw data is usually indexed for rapid retrieval during the Update and Interrogate phases. Indexing is a fairly straightforward operation; if you’re of a certain age, you remember thumb-indexed dictionaries to faciitlate the Interrogate function. For example if you needed the definition of “mendacious” you could start your search immediately in the “M” section of the dictionary thanks to the handy thumb indentations rather than begin on page 1 and search sequentially from there. Techniques similar to this are embodied in computer programs whose job it is to update and interrogate large databases --- similar in kind but not in degree. These programs not only allow for multiple indexes as links to the database but are degrees of magnitude faster than manual methods.

For example, if I am the program looking at one of your emails, I can record the time and date it was sent, your and the recipient’s email addresses as well as any keywords that have been deemed important like: “bomb”, “Egypt”, “Syria”, “China”....you get the idea. Next, I determine the location in disk memory where this email will be stored but before I store it I make a note, in the form of a list which associates each of the keywords with that disk location. This process is repeated for all of the emails in the database and when it’s finished we have created a table of keywords and the disk locations of the emails that contain that word:

Keyword / Location

aardvark 636542

bomb 124679, 001489, 789325

... ...

zygote 987654, 123321


Now imagine that I’m the Interrogate program and my human NSA agent wants to look at all emails that contain the word “bomb”, all I have to do to make him happy is consult my table of associations between keywords and disk locations, go to each location (124679, 001489, 789325) and display the full email located there.


By this time dear reader, you may have surmised that these keywords that link to and allow rapid access to individual emails are the metadata the NSA originally claimed to be outside the purview of the fourth amendment as they are not the actual data itself. If you believe that, I have a lottery prize for you to claim.

Privacy, Security and Sympathy

I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me today, Friday July 19, as I sit on my deck, temperature 95 in the shade, sweating out yet one more column. You can if you wish but I don’t want you to. I do this not only to let my editor know that I don’t always write the column the night before but to call your attention to the fact that the Privacy vs Security issue that I discussed in last month’s column is a news story with legs (that’s what we in the news biz call “persistence”) and I want to continue it in this column even though you won’t be reading it until August 11 when, if the current trend continues, the temperatures will hover in the 135 degree range. Or not --- they could be in the thirties and I would not be surprised.

To mix a metaphor, lots more words have flowed under the bridge/over the dam since we first learned from Edward Snowden’s leaks to  the Manchester Guardian about how the NSA was, if you’re of the liberal or libertarian persuasion, invading our right to privacy and if you’re not then “enhancing our security” might be the way you would describe it. In either case,  Snowden’s actions may have the unintended side effect of uniting the left and the right, the liberals and the conservatives, the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress under the banner of “Freedom to be Left Alone”.“

By the way, I just want all my readers to know that I’ve decided to move me, my fan and iced coffee from the deck down to the basement where it’s a frosty 80 degrees and I should  be able to concentrate better.  Please, please do not worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’m fine, really. Ok, where was I? Ah, yes,, the story with legs.

The Aug 1 edition of the PR published an AP story that the surveillance had “3 hops” to it. That is, NSA could, if they felt it was necessary, search your phone calls for up to 40 people and, for each of those 40, 40 more, and for each of those 1600 oblivious souls, 40 more --- resulting in up to “12.5 million” searches..By my calculation: 40 + (40x40) + (40x40x40) is only 65,640 searches --- nowhere near the 12.5 million but still enough to get excited about.

If you feel that your privacy is in jeopardy, there are several things you can do:

Sign an online petition against this surveillance  at: https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/stop-government-snooping#petition or at:

https://cms.fightforthefuture.org/july-4th-celebrate-4th-amendment-post-it-everywhere/

If you are web-savvy you can use a proxy or anonymous remailer service.

You can use self-destructing emails similar to the mobile photo apps http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57591562-1/this-e-mail-will-self-destruct-in-five-seconds/?part=rss but this app may still be in the review.

In more recent developments, on July 24, 2013, Representative  Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan presented the House this question: “Do you oppose the suspicionless collection of the phone records of every American? “.

Here's how they answered: 94 Republicans and 111  Democrats agreed (they voted Yes) while  134 Republicans and 83 Democrats disagreed (they voted No). So the vote was 205 For and 217 Against (12 members did not vote).(http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml). It’s easy to conclude that if our Representatives truly represent us there is no consensus on this question.

While I basically oppose dragnets, I have mixed feelings on this issue. When I receive an automated call from my credit card company questioning purchases I have made that do not fit my spending “profile” should I be enraged that my privacy has been violated or thankful that they’re looking out for me?  Frankly, I’m thankful because I know about and have agreed to this policy. In the case of the NSA vs Snowden, to be honest, I was not surprised but I was disturbed that a government agency, even a spy agency, is spying on me under a “law” that I didn’t know existed.. One of the hallmarks of a representative democracy is transparency, is it not?