I’m co-moderating a retreat with John Palfrey about the future of privacy, and one of the morning provocateurs was Hal Abelson.  He mused back on the days of SAFE — a campaign against a U.S. government proposal for a “Clipper Chip” that would permit, with a warrant, the government to gain access to encrypted data without the permission of the keyholder(s).  Hal supported SAFE, but today said that the best ways to implement the values of privacy aren’t so much in worrying about who has access to what data, but how the data is used.  If that’s the case, I asked, have you rethought your support of SAFE?  To my surprise, Hal said yes: at least in a place under the rule of law, the ways to protect privacy are through process rather than through technology that cannot be broken, even if the process is followed.  That’s a very interesting shift from the days when Hal and I were among five people teaching a course on the legal and technical architectures of cyberspace.

In that 1998 class half the students were from Harvard Law and the other half undergraduates from MIT.  The proto-lawyers all supported technologies to facilitate government access to otherwise-encrypted secrets; the engineers all wanted the tech to rule.  I wonder how the polling would go today.

…JZ

After praising the iPhone as wholesome as warm bread, Colbert takes to task the iPhone for its “kill switch” (”It actually kills you!”).  In the meantime, Gizmodo reports that there’s a “BossPrefs” app to disable it, joining the more labor intensive method of tricking the iPhone into thinking that the Apple update server is found on the phone itself.  (Hat tip: Patrick Meier.)  Both require that the phones be “jailbroken” — untethered from Apple’s control — currently a somewhat unstable and scary process that many have nonetheless tried.  A jailbroken phone can run apps from sources other than the iPhone apps store; hence the ability to install BossPrefs despite its absence there.

Of course, to completey untether the iPhone from Apple can greatly reduce its functionality — and it gives Apple the practical option to reassert control over jailbroken phones by forcing owners to decide between complete isolation or a return to the sandbox.

I’ve got an iPhone myself now and love it — and don’t find myself yet prepared to try to jailbreak it …

…JZ

It’s been clear from the start that information appliances like the iPhone, tethered to their vendors, would have a kill switch — that’s just a subset of the vendor’s (in the case, Apple’s) ability to reprogram any aspect of the phone from a distance at any time.  In a world of third party apps, that means that Apple could kill any app, too.  After some breathless reporting caused by the discovery of a Web page meant for consultion by iPhones that lists bad apps, and debate about whether the switch was more modest — say, only to say which apps wouldn’t be allowed to use the iPhone’s GPS functionality, as a way to protect user privacy — Steve Jobs confirmed that any app can be killed.

This isn’t exclusive to Apple, of course.  Microsoft offers a monthly “malicious software removal tool,” which unobtrusively goes through a PC to remove malware.  Presumably it would become much less popular if Microsoft, or someone regulating Microsoft, tried to use the tool to remove software that people liked; no one seems to have tried to get Microsoft to kill anything yet, though, and such attempts are limited since any new app can immediately be installed on a PC — including one that shuts down a Microsoft app-removal tool.

On the other side of the spectrum, when Facebook kills an app the app is naturally not only unavailable to new users, but disabled for current ones, too.  So Superwall or Secret Crush can go from millions of users to zero in a heartbeat.

So far Apple hasn’t seemed to try to kill any apps already residing on users’ phones.  Instead, it has “merely” yanked apps from the Apps Store, which is the only place to acquire them. Recently Apple got rid of the “I Am Rich” app, which cost the maximum $999.99, and simply featured a glowing red gem on buyers’ screens.

iPhone I Am Rich app

Eight people apparently bought it, with several receiving refunds.  (”Category: Lifestyle.”  Heh.)  The app’s author doesn’t yet know whether he’ll get the money from the rest, minus Apple’s 30% vig.

So should we care?  Apple likely wouldn’t kill apps people like — they make money along with the authors.  And people think of an iPhone as a more unified device, expecting all of it to work at high quality, so gatekeeping might help keep malicious or poor quality apps away.

On the other hand, people don’t know what they’re missing — and firms can be very bad, despite their own economic interests, in recognizing the value of truly novel contributions from outsiders that might take awhile to catch on.  Who would have invested in Wikipedia at the beginning?  And if Wikipedia required an incumbent gatekeeper’s approval or permission to get started, it might have failed to receive it — or languished at the bottom of a list of to-dos amongst hundreds of other apps and services awaiting review.

The iPhone apps model is powerful, and it’s serving some useful purpose in shielding people, prospectively and retroactively, against bad code.  It’s so powerful we may see it extended to PC-like platforms, too, with the thirty-year run of open season for new software drawing to a close.  Without ways of managing that open season without a central gatekeeper, chances seem strong that most will accept — even demand — one.

–JZ

Followers of Herdict’s progress may have noticed by now that our chosen icon is the sheep.  “What’s up with the sheep?” they might ask.

“Herdict” is a portmanteau of “herd” and “verdict” – used to mean “the verdict of the herd.”  Since the goal of Herdict Network Health is to gain insight into what the world – that is, the herd – is experiencing in terms of web accessibility, we’ve chosen to go with a sheep to represent you, the herd.

Now, you might be thinking, “Wait a minute…who are you calling a sheep?”  To many, the sheep is considered to be an unintelligent species content to simply run with the flock.  On the contrary, sheep tend not to follow the herd when no natural predator is present.

While considering web inaccessibility and online censorship  as a predator might be a bit farfetched, when faced with it, it makes sense to join the herd.  And the more folks who do so, the better the picture we are able to paint of the network.

For example, if you, User A, is in Morocco and finds YouTube blocked, you will probably want to know if others are having the same problem.  With Herdict, you can see – in real time - if others are reporting the same phenomenon, giving you a better sense of possible reasons of why the site is inaccessible.
In other words, Herdict presents your verdict, allowing you, the user, to take control of the process and try to determine what’s going on.

-Jillian C. York

This fall the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (and JZ’s new home) will unveil Herdict, a suite of programs that gathers data from users around the world about their PCs’ performance and ability to access websites. Herdict aggregates this information and aims to provide a real time picture of users’ PC health and web accessibility. If you read The Future of the Internet or saw some of the interviews, or came to Berkman@10, Herdict is the “take away.” For the Internet we know and love is under attack. The openness that allowed users to write any software they wanted, run that software on any machine, and share that software with anyone who wanted it created a lot of great code: Google, Facebook, etc. But that same openness also encouraged a lot of bad code: malware, badware, bots, and so forth. In an effort to protect themselves from this bad code, users are moving from open, “generative” technologies (PC’s) to closed, “tethered” ones (TiVo’s). These tethered appliances give users security but at the price of innovation.

Our current focus is on Herdict for Network Health. Netizens will be able to report any web sites they cannot access through the Herdict website or Firefox/IE plug-in.

By aggregating individuals’ reports across the Internet, Network Health strives to create a real-time picture of network accessibility. Users will be able to read reports of inaccessibility by region or by country, or track specific web sites over time:

Using this information Network Health users will then be able to start diagnosing why sites are inaccessible – network failure, government censorship, or something else – through the OpenNet Initiative.
But Network Health is just one application in the Herdict suite. PC Health, which is still in development, will allow users to track information about their computers’ performance and compare it to the performance of other computers on the network. For example, if PC Health tells a user that her computer is running poorly in comparison to other computers on the network, it might be an indication that she has badwares in her computer. Or if PC Health finds that all the computers with a certain piece of software are running poorly, it might be an indication that the specific software is bad.

Herdict is a collaborative effort: its success relies on the participation of internet crowds. So become a publicist. Link to Herdict on your blog. Share the program with friends. Help make contacts with traditional and online media outlets. And visit our web site for updates.

The Internet will not save itself. Herdict will help us use open technologies responsibly, and help us protect what makes the Internet so great.

(disclaimer: pictures are for illustration purposes. Design and content might change)

I don’t mean to only talk about the iPhone apps system — Facebook apps, Google mash-ups, and plenty of other emerging platforms share the fascinating if troubling characteristics of iPhone apps — but it’s an example that’s continuing to expand.

On the one hand is the NYT’s reporting that the iPhone Apps Store has pressured non-iPhone-carrying competitors (i.e., in the U.S., everyone but AT&T) to start thinking about opening up environements on their own phones for third party apps.

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are already salivating over the enthusiasm for cellphone applications. Their investments in this category rose 90 percent in the first half of 2008, to $383 million, from the second half of 2007, according to Rutberg & Company, a technology research firm based in San Francisco.

That would be a real shift from the landscape that Tim Wu mapped in his Wireless Carterfone paper, chronicling the difficulties that most outside developers faced trying to get apps onto phones.  Of course, as investment and mindshare goes into developing mobile apps, the legacy PC app architecture rusts just a little bit more.  And the mobile architecture, at least in the iPhone’s case, remains tethered: Apple must approve all apps before they can run on its phones, and it can pull the plug without notice.

Today’s case is the Box Office app, as reported by the Unofficial Apple Weblog:

Amazing to see a developer have no idea why its app has been pulled — and simply left emailing Apple with pleas for an explanation.  (It’s the same configuration, in a way, as a Web site that finds itself filtered in China and can only guess what triggered the block.) For what it’s worth, so far the pulling of the App from the Store has not also included a disabling of the App on those iPhones where it is already installed.

Apple could do this right: it could start to think about how to relate to app developers in ways that give them calculable rules, notice and opportunity to be heard, and other elements of what lawyers would call due process before pulling the plug.  It doesn’t necessarily have to — in the absence of monopoly power it doesn’t owe its developers what outsiders might call a fair shake; instead the shake is whatever Apple says it is and developers are free to write apps for other platforms if they don’t like it.  But as with the Google death penalty, it can be difficult for the market overall to exercise discipline should the platform really take off — and “only” apps on the margin get targeted.

The iPhone has come some way since the days when Steve Jobs pledged that Apple would “define everything that is on the phone.”  Yet even with a software development kit allowing for outside coding, Apple reserves the right to … define everything that is on the phone.  Application makers submit their apps for Apple’s approval, which can be withheld — or revoked — for any reason.

Reasons might not just have to do with quality; they may have to do with policing the uses of the phone so they don’t conflict or compete with Apple’s (or AT&T’s) own business models. A developer called Nullriver makes several PC and iPhone utilities, and for awhile offered one called Netshare: apparently, during its brief existence, it allowed iPhone users to link (”tether,” used very differently than I do in the FOI book) their phones to their PCs, so that their PCs can benefit from the iPhone’s unmetered wide-area Internet connection.

Venturebeat is reporting that Netshare is no longer available in the iPhone Apps Store, and the link to its product page at Nullriver has only a message about a site update.

What made Netshare disappear?  If it was because it allowed users to use the phone in a way not approved by Apple, should we care?  Does it matter if it turns out that people who initially bought the app at $9.99 from the iPhone Apps store find that it no longer works?

Update: Kevin P. and Engadget report that the app is back — at least at its direct link, if not among the store’s searchable apps.

Update 2 (Aug. 3 ‘08): It’s down again. Nullriver says:

NetShare, where did it go?

Update 2: Apple has taken it down again, with no explanation yet again.

Update: NetShare is now back up and available from the AppStore!

We’re not quite sure why Apple took down the NetShare application yet, we’ve received no communication from Apple thus far. NetShare did not violate any of the Developer or AppStore agreements. We’re hoping we’ll get some feedback from Apple today. Sorry to all the folks that couldn’t get it in time. We’ll do our best to try to get the application back onto the AppStore if at all possible. At the very least, we hope Apple will allow it to be used in countries where the provider does permit tethering.

The makers of Scrabulous have apparently relaunched it as “Wordscraper,” a word game that can support a variety of rules, and whose tiles no longer look so much like Scrabble’s. Players can themselves set the rules to simulate a Scrabble game — but that would make the infringement that of the users rather than Scrabulous.  If Hasbro decides to go after the new incarnation — they may be just as put out by this version, since users can still end up playing what acts like Scrabble with it — to pressure Facebook they’ll have to sketch out a claim for tertiary infringement: the users are infringing (with no fair use defense?); Scrabulous is helping them do it (secondary infringement); Facebook is helping Scrabulous help the users do it (tertiary!).

The trademark claim always seemed the strongest to me — and the most easily cured.  We’ll see what shoe drops next as Hasbro mulls its options and decides whether it can still effectively pressure Facebook, which may not want to deal with a lawsuit, no matter how much they think they could prevail.

The NYT is blogging that Facebook has removed Scrabulous.  Trying to get there through Facebook shows:

Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.

The app is apparently doing IP geolocation to see whom to turn away; when I visit Facebook from a British IP address I can get to Scrabulous perfectly well.  In this sense Facebook hasn’t done anything, except perhaps tell Scrabulous that it had better shut out the North Americans or risk having Facebook kill the app entirely. Instead, Scrabulous itself appears to be taking the action.  The “click here” link in the message to North Americans curiously links to an IP address rather than a domain name — http://74.54.87.73/facebook/updateme.php — which contains a form for people to put in their email addresses for updates from the Scrabulous founders.

It’d be great to learn more about the dynamics among Scrabulous, Facebook, and Hasbro.  I’ll see what I can glean.

–JZ

One of the more contestable claims of the FOI book is that tethered information appliances like the iPhone, that either block outside apps or subject them to much more gatekeeping by the platform vendor, will not only complement the more open PC, but overtake it — that PCs themselves will become appliancized.

Already there’s talk of expanding the App Store to PCs themselves. From Venturebeat:

While it may not make sense for huge applications such as Photoshop or Microsoft Office, does it not make sense to eventually get items such as Dashboard widgets through the App Store?

Perhaps a stretch, but worth thinking about would be Apple using the App Store as a competitor to something like Adobe Air. The apps run so beautifully on the iPhone and iPod Touch, just imagine would they could run on a more powerful desktop or notebook computer.

The App Store model is very powerful — and has some real benefits with it, not least of which is keeping the user experience a “quality” one, to include screening (or later killing) apps that appear malicious.  But it is a wholesale shift of our IT ecosystem when a vendor or vendors are in position to screen the apps coming from the “dark energy” of nerds at large.

–JZ