Standards Organizations Not A Panacea

Joi Ito quotes Irving Wladawsky-Berger the Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation of IBM:

If a crunch comes between the interests of the shareholders and interests of the community, a business has to choose the interests of the shareholders. A business creating a standard that it controls and says is "open" and that people should "trust them" is not robust from that perspective. Business should prevent itself from getting into these situation. Working with neutral professional organizations makes it impossible for such conflicts to corrupt the process and is key to good open standards.

— Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s definition of Open Standards 17 Jan 2006, Joi Ito’s blog

The IBM VP makes a good point about potential conflict between open standards and shareholder value. And Joi rightly applauds him for making it.

However, standards bodies are not a panacea for all ills of openness.

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The Total Influence

Forty five years ago this month, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech that seems to have accurately predicted the future:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

— Farewell Address to the Nation, by Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 1961

Eisenhower had been the commander of all Allied forces in Europe during World War II. He later went into politics as a Republican, and when he gave this speech he was the president of the United States. He knew of what he warned, and it would appear by the ongoing lobbying scandals in DC that he warned correctly.

He did propose a solution.

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Symantec Rootkit: Example or Warning?

Doubtless everyone has heard about the Symantec rootkit. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the Sony rootkit. As F-Secure explained:
“Symantec’s rootkit is part of a documented, useful feature; it could be turned on or off and it could easily be uninstalled by the user.”

Symnantec rootkit fuss p2p news / p2pnet

That’s all well and good, but it still created an invisible directory that miscreants could have used to hide malware.

That there’s been a big flap about this without either Symantec doing anything inappropriate with it or a miscreant taking advantage of it (so far as we know); I think it’s a good thing that public reaction has forced recall of the feature before it has done any known harm.

Risk management includes not knowingly including attractive nuisances in software.

-jsq

MLK and Insurance

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the U.S. So far as I know he never used the Internet, considering that even the ARPANET hadn’t been implemented yet. But he did occasionally talk about insurance:
But not only that, we’ve got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank-we want a “bank-in” movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I’m not asking you something we don’t do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We’re telling you to follow what we’re doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an “insurance-in.”

—“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” Martin Luther King Jr., Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968.

So it would appear that those particular S&Ls and insurance companies had additional priorities beyond making money for the shareholders. And that larger companies failing to address issues of interest to part of their potential customer base led to those customers addressing those issues otherwise. Or, paying too much attention to the bottom line to the exclusion of social issues can eventually adversely affect the bottom line. That seems like a risk to me.

What does this have to do with the Internet? Handing the Internet in the U.S. over to the control of a few large telcos, as could happen in the near future, seems like a pretty big risk.

-jsq

Hedged Cats

It seems catastrophe bonds aren’t the only way to hedge a cat. According to BusinessWeek, hedge funds are directly insuring catastrophes:
Collectively, though, hedge funds have huge sums available for catastrophe protection. That means much more hedge money is likely to flood in if rates remain high. Among the funds that have already entered the sector are Kenneth C. Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group in Chicago, George Soros’ Soros Fund Management, HBK Investments in Dallas, and Louis M. Bacon’s Moore Capital Management.

How Hedge Funds Are Taking On Mother Nature, by Peter Coy, BusinessWeek, 16 January 2006

This is partly a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The article says it is different than what happened after Hurricane Andrew, the previous most costly hurricane, in 1992.

Why do hedge funds do this? Continue reading →

United States of Microsoft

Richard Forno, a principal consultant for KRvW Associates and a former senior security analyst for the House of Representatives, believes that Microsoft is a threat to national security. The White House, Congress, and Department of Defense all run Windows and send and receive e-mail on MS Exchange Server—exploitable Microsoft products that offer a “target-rich environment for malicious code.”

—Microsoft vs. Computer Security Why the software giant still can’t get it right. By Adam L. Penenberg Slate Posted Monday, Jan. 9, 2006, at 1:10 PM ET

Golly, I wish somebody had thought of that sooner, like maybe Dan Geer about two years ago. Continue reading →

Liberty Is Security

In this age where every terrorist action seems to be met by politicians and the public rushing to clamp down on the liberty of people who had nothing to do with it, my mantra is Benjamin Franklin’s comment:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Well, recent research demonstrates old Ben was more right than that statement would indicate:

One method to attenuate [suicide bombers], then, is to target dangerous groups that influence individuals, such as Al ­Qaeda. Another method, says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered that “countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn suicide terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.” Let freedom ring!

— Murdercide Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers By Michael Shermer, Scientific American January 2006.

Not only does curtailing civil liberties not assist much in the short term with catching terrorists, in the long term it actually breeds terrorists. After all, terrorism isn’t about religion, or poverty, or even nationalism: it is about politics. The politics of civil liberties.

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Software Patent Reform?

Does it take IBM to organize software patent reform? It’s IBM spearheading a move to assist the US PTO and inventors in looking up prior art, using open source methods.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that IBM is involved in this, given that they file more patents every year than anybody else. See also the book, Rembrandts in the Attic..

I hope this movement succeeds. It would be nice for software patents to be more useful than they are, which would mean less cluttered with junk that never should have been let in the door.

-jsq

Another Voice Within the Islamic World

Often I wonder why what mostly appears in the press from the Muslim world appears to be either business as usual (the hajj is starting now) or the latest threat from some extremist or other, or of course the press’s favorite angle on either of those (hotel collapses during hajj or terrorists kill x people). All those things are legitimate news, and I’m glad that ordinary things do go on as usual. But where are the voices opposing the extremists?

Here’s one, from Iran. Former president Mohammed Khatami says:

Since the aggressive voice within the Islamic world is very loud today, and the poser circles in the west, too, try to further aggrandize it, we need to clarify that there is another voice within the Islamic world," Khatami was quoted as saying.

"In order to clarify which version of Islam we are talking about, there is no need to represent a nation, or a government, but we need to clarify that our voice is clearly heard in the Islamic world and accepted," he said.

— Iran’s Khatami calls for "another voice" in Islamic world (Xinhua) Updated: 2006-01-07 09:22

For that matter, why does this story only seem to be carried on two Chinese news agencies and a couple of middle eastern ones? Does the western press have no interest in a reasonable  voice from the middle east? Maybe it’s too busy carrying the latest not-so-reasonable diatribe from the current president of Iran and ex-president Khatami’s reasonable voice doesn’t fit the current press template for Iran; I don’t know. 

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