This is yet another example of appliances-as-services. The item that used to be yours when you brought it home from the store is now only contingently yours, subject to ongoing regulation. In some ways this is good—particularly if you believe in vigorous patent enforcement—but it seems hard on several million consumers here, and this is a remedy simply not realistically available before the Internet: the patent police don’t knock on your door to seize an infringing mousetrap inside.  Rather, the bad mouse trap company pays damages, as EchoStar is to do here — tens of millions of dollars.

TiVo has its remedy; not clear what the consumers’ is when their DVRs are fried through the vector of a “feature update,” other than suing a probably-broke company. And, as discussed before, it’s worrisome that exactly this kind of control can be exercised so casually, and in a spectrum of ways beyond total destruction—spying, bricking as a punishment for certain consumer behavior, and so on.

The latest development in the story, from last week, is that the Federal Circuit has again affirmed that EchoStar needs to destroy the DVRs. The court didn’t directly review the merits of the order, but rejected EchoStar’s narrower claim that the order should be construed to allow other remedies other than remotely disabling the DVRs.  EchoStar’s delay in implementing the bricking has resulted in a finding of contempt of court.

What’s really striking about all the different court orders was how totally unconcerned they were with the novelty and arguable unfairness of the remote-disablement solution. The district court’s order just asserted, without discussion, that the disablement order was appropriate. (“The hardship of disabling DVR capabilities to Defendants’ DVR customers is a consequence of Defendants’ infringement and does not weight against an injunction…The public has an interest in maintaining a strong patent system.”) The Federal Circuit didn’t say much more, asserting that “We find the manner in which the disablement could be accomplished irrelevant to the issue at hand.” Moreover, the Federal Circuit actually rejected EchoStar’s argument that it could just remotely change the parts of the technology that infringed, leaving the DVR players intact generally—the court simply said that wasn’t the point of the disablement provision. One might understand why the Federal Circuit didn’t want to (or couldn’t) jump in with a broad equitable rewrite of the disablement order at this point, but the blasé treatment of a seemingly more reasonable solution was startling. The public may have an interest in a strong patent system, but we haven’t really had a chance yet to weigh whether that means innocent customers have their products disabled: that technology is still new.

It’s worth noting, though, that EchoStar has thus far defied the disablement order, and has been hit with $90 million of contempt fines instead. Complex procedural rules make it difficult to predict how this will all turn out, but EchoStar could just hold out on this, paying contempt fines into bankruptcy. Or TiVo and EchoStar could negotiate a settlement. So we’ll have to watch to see whether any DVR units actually are fried. In the meantime, what I take away from this case is that we can expect more cases like this in the future, and for parties and courts to fully accept and exploit these characteristics of tethered appliances.

—By EO + JZ

Canadian Android Carrier Forcing Firmware Update. A Canadian carrier wanted users to download a firmware upgrade that fixed a glitch prohibiting users from dialing 911, so it made the upgrade mandatory. Seems reasonable. But it bundled in an update that “prevent[ed] users from ever gaining root access to their phones.” Sneaky—one more way that contingent generativity really is contingent, even for savvy users.

Biggest Mobile Operators Join Forces On App Store Project. A few dozen mobile operators have come together to try to create a mobile developer’s dream: a set of standards for applications that would work across phones and mobile OSes, and a single app store (with a single approval process) in which to sell those apps. This could be a good thing if it worked—developers might have more say in big-picture application development, and single carriers or hardware manufacturers would have less ability to be a development chokepoint. (It would also be nice for consumers, generally making the smartphone world look more like the PC world.) I’d be more excited if efforts to create uniform mobile standards weren’t so difficult and historically so unsuccessful.

Demand for Android Phones Makes “Monstrous” 250% Jump. Another developer’s dream (perhaps), Android, is seeing significant growth. “Android has finally caught consumer interest,” according to a research firm. Also, Android users are almost as happy as iPhone users with their phone (72% to 77%).

Big Brother Is Here, Families Say. This story is so bizarre, I don’t know what to make of it. A school in Philadelphia gave out laptops without telling the students or their families that the cameras could be remotely activated. The idea was to use the cameras if the laptops were stolen, but one family claims a camera was used to spy on a student. If true (details are cloudy), that would (a) be mind-bogglingly dumb on the school’s part, and (b) reminiscent of this (ubiquitous cameras) and this (remote activation) in the book. Check out the Onion’s take here.

Microsoft takes the StopBadware Approach Further. Last week, MS obtained a restraining order to deactivate 277 domain names it had linked to the Waledec botnet. Severing the connection between drones and the mothership goes beyond tactics employed by the Google/StopBadware Project.  It effectively makes the targeted websites invisible, instead of slapping a prominent warning label on them. Although MS attempted to cut off only addresses used exclusively for spam, it appears that the single U.S.-based target may be a legitimate site, if a hapless drone.  While owners have the opportunity to reclaim their addresses, MS’s actions raise questions of proportionality and whether cooperation and information-sharing between prominent Internet denizens, such as MS and Google, if possible, would result in more efficient and just solutions. Their approach also highlights the tension between the need for secrecy to effectively attack the spam network and the notice usually required prior to legal action.

One step behind. Thesixtyone.com, a site that allows the public to listen to, rate, and buy largely indie music, is looking for a hacker that can break up the bot-powered voting rings seeking to game their democratic rating system.  A laudable goal, but one spammers have already begun to circumvent by using real people instead of bots.

Passing through the cloud. Katherine Boehret recently reviewed Pogoplug, a device that makes files web-accessible without actually storing them in the cloud.  While this type of solution doesn’t address data-portability concerns surrounding extraction of personal data in usable form – to allow seamless transition between social networking sites, for example – it does let the user to maintain more control over data instead of entrusting it entirely to the cloud.  This control prevents third parties from holding data hostage and from losing, allowing government access to, selling, or mining personal information; but users can still access their files from almost anywhere.

Please think twice. A website launched last week illustrates the risk of publicly sharing information online.  Pleaserobme.com aggregates Twitter posts that contain location-sharing information from Foursquare in a chronological list to show the potential for exploitation by Internet users with malicious intentions.  While it’s probable that only a small set of burglars will take advantage of this information, the site is an example of a grassroots campaign to raise awareness of potential problems for users who don’t recognize how the information they freely give can be mined.  Whether this awareness leads them to alter their behavior or simply “get over it” is up to the individual.

Facebook messaging glitch. A subset of Facebook users experienced firsthand the risk of entrusting control of personal messages to third parties.  Last Wednesday, FB accidentally sent the private messages of a “small number” of users to strangers instead of the intended recipients.  Unlike well-publicized security breaches of credit card companies and banks, the misdirected messages were largely personal in nature and contained little identifying information, so the risk of actual injury is low.  But that may not be very comforting to those who had intimate details divulged to strangers.  Some of the accounts indeed provoke a gut-level enquiry as to how privacy violation should be measured.  On the flip-side, the occasional misrouting of a letter by the Post Office doesn’t give rise to much concern – and in that case the sender is usually clearly identifiable – so why should electronic mail be afforded greater scrutiny?

—By Jennifer Halbleib and Elisabeth Oppenheimer

First, he begins with a quick history of the subtle but massive shift between the Apple II and the iPhone:

In 1977, a 21-year-old Steve Jobs unveiled something the world had never seen before: a ready-to-program personal computer. After powering the machine up, proud Apple II owners were confronted with a cryptic blinking cursor, awaiting instructions.

The Apple II was a clean slate, a device built – boldly – with no specific tasks in mind. Yet, despite the cursor, you did not have to know how to write programs. Instead, with a few keystrokes you could run software acquired from anyone, anywhere. The Apple II was generative. After the launch, Apple had no clue what would happen next, which meant that what happened was not limited by Mr Jobs’ hunches. Within two years, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had released VisiCalc , the first digital spreadsheet, which ran on the Apple II. Suddenly businesses around the world craved machines previously marketed only to hobbyists. Apple IIs flew off the shelves. The company had to conduct research to figure out why.

Thirty years later Apple gave us the iPhone. It was easy to use, elegant and cool – and had lots of applications right out of the box. But the company quietly dropped a fundamental feature, one signalled by the dropping of “Computer” from Apple Computer’s name: the iPhone could not be programmed by outsiders. “We define everything that is on the phone,” said Mr Jobs. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work any more.”

The openness on which Apple had built its original empire had been completely reversed – but the spirit was still there among users. Hackers vied to “jailbreak” the iPhone, running new apps on it despite Apple’s desire to keep it closed. Apple threatened to disable any phone that had been jailbroken, but then appeared to relent: a year after the iPhone’s introduction, it launched the App Store. … But the App Store has a catch: app developers and their software must be approved by Apple. If Apple does not like the app, for any reason, it is gone.”

This blog has covered many of the apps that Apple has axed: the countdown to Bush’s departure, the app with information about health care, BabyShaker, religious spoofs, and programs to redirect calls, Google Voice, and I am Rich, among many others.

But the lingering question is, so what? Is the world really worse off because we can’t pay $999 for an app that does nothing (I Am Rich), especially given that Apple’s screening system does get rid of many apps with security problems? Is this like First Amendment absolutism — a preference for open systems that doesn’t take into account actual costs and benefits?

In response, JZ tries to imagine what we would have lost had the PC been as appliancized as the iPhone:

To be sure, many rejected apps will not be missed. (Only eight spendthrifts bought I Am Rich before it disappeared.) And users can be protected from harmful software from suspect sources. But consider: the world wide web started as, and remains, an app. Its first versions were written by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who was unaffiliated with any software or hardware vendor. How worthy of approval would Wikipedia have seemed when it boasted only seven articles — dubiously hoping that the public would magically provide the rest? How threatened might today’s content publishers feel by peer-to-peer apps that let iPhone users trade data from one phone to another? We know the answer to that: enough that they have persuaded Apple to exclude all such apps from the App Store.

The web, Wikipedia, p2p — that’s a lot to lose. And at the same time we lose those benefits of generativity, as JZ points out, we give companies (and through them, governments) unprecedented censorship power. But the iPod, Pad, and Phone aren’t going anywhere. JZ concludes:

Hope lies in more balanced combinations of open and closed systems, such as that embodied by the traditional Apple Mac – or phones based on the Android operating system from the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of hardware, software and telecoms companies. Android Market is the approved counterpart to Apple’s App Store but, in this case, users are also free to go off-roading, installing any code they like. Android is a canary in the digital coal mine: will its more open model survive should people load suspect apps and find they cannot make calls any more?

Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out. We should focus on preserving our freedoms, even as the devices we acquire become more attractive and easier to use.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Amazon Cracks Open the Kindle. Amazon is opening the Kindle to outside developers who can market their products in what sounds exactly like an App Store, down to the 70-30 revenue split and and light policing of apps. (One difference is that developers have to pay for wireless delivery.) It’s seeming like this is *the* model for the next few years. Speaking of which…

Computers Should Be More Like Toasters. The sale of the Apple Tablet could mark an important moment for generativity. Computers have been shrinking and phones have been growing—but the critical difference has been that anyone could still code for a computer, until now. The Tablet looks more like a computer than a phone, but will Apple will prescreen apps they way it does for the iPhone? Farhad Manjoo thinks that would be a good thing, but there are clear generativity costs.

The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age. Josh Bernoff points out that, as we switch to appliancized computers and smart devices instead of PCs, the web becomes a “splinternet.” Websites show up and operate differently on each device. He thinks about how to handle this from a business and marketing perspective, advising: “Here’s what not to do: panic and try to unify things again. The shattering cannot be undone.”

Technology Changes “Outstrip” Netbooks. Meanwhile, the BBC considers the convergence among netbooks, smartphones, and tablet notebooks, and who the short- and long-term winners are likely to be.

Apple censors Dalai Lama iPhone Apps in China. An interesting look at how censorship works on iPhones in China. (The story was written pre-Google announcement, so some portions are out of date.) Apple, complying with local law, appears to be removing apps related to the Dalai Lama in the Chinese App Store, and a search for Falun Gong apps freezes the search page. On the other hand, it’s possible to access YouTube through an iPhone app, which isn’t always possible on a PC.

And in the crystal ball dep’t — from JZ’s book:

Imagine entering a café in Paris with one’s personal digital assistant or mobile phone, and being able to query: “Is there anyone on my buddy list within 100 yards? Are any of the ten closest friends of my ten closest friends within 100 yards?” Although this may sound fanciful, it could quickly become mainstream. With reputation systems already advising us on what to buy, why not have them also help us make the first cut on whom to meet, to date, to befriend? These are not difficult services to offer, and there are precursors today.

As usual, there’s an app for that… the “datecheck” app allows you to enter a name, phone number, or email address, and get information on your date. The categories are “sleaze detector” (check of criminal convictions & sex offenses), “$$$” (home ownership, etc), “interests” (gleaned from social networks), “living situation” (who they live with), and “compatibility”—although unfortunately, the “compatibility” check is still just a check of astrological signs. Now all they need is friends’ feedback rankings.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday.

So that makes sense on one level.  But here’s what I don’t get: the light only took that long to get here if the starting point for it was in fact 13.2 billion light years away.  Since the universe is expanding, if one rewinds time, it shrinks.  Indeed, I thought the Big Bang to mean that at one point the Universe was a singularity, both meaning in a condition for which our laws of physics can’t say anything, and that it was essentially compressed into a single point.

But if it was compressed into a single point — apparently about 5-600 million years further back from the 13.2 billion we’re now seeing — that means that 14 billion years ago everything was, well, extremely close to everything else.  So unless the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, how could anything be 13.2 billion light years away from us, 13.2 billion years ago?  Maybe something is that far now, but if so its light would only just be starting its journey to us.  The whole light year calculation presumes that something was that far away from us then – a time when the whole universe was much, much smaller in diameter.  Maybe it has something to do with the universe’s expansion as a matter of dark energy, e.g., the fabric of the universe itself expanding, vs. the expansion found as all the galaxies speed away from one another (countered by the actions of gravity)?  Something to do with the “inflationary period” catapulting everything really far away from everything else in one swoop?

I’m sure I’m missing something here.  What is it?

Companies rarely share information about the cyberattacks they experience — conventional wisdom has it that it makes the company appear vulnerable, and drives customers away.  Here Google is open about the attacks, while of course assuring readers that it had tightened security as a result.  Google then links these attacks to a lessening of enthusiasm for doing business in China.  Eliminating censorship in google.cn is only mentioned after that.

Suppose the Chinese government acts as expected and tells Google that it may no longer operate in China.  Google.cn might vanish as a domain name, since it’s hosted under the Chinese country-code TLD of .cn, ultimately controllable by the Chinese government.  But the search engine found there could of course keep operating from a different location, like cn.google.com.  Suppose then that China attempts to filter out traffic to and from that new location — and to and from google.com for good measure, as it has done from time to time, especially before the advent of google.cn and its agreement to censor.  (We’ll be watching for such moves at herdict.org, a site where users can report Web blockages.)

What next?  My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user.  There are lots of unexplored options here.  They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters.  So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages.  Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches.  Circumvention of filtering (or other blockages, for that matter) tends to happen on the user side of things, seeking out proxies like the Tor network, or anonymizer.com.

To be sure, many of the larger benefits of operating in China originally cited by Google four years ago — exposing the citizenry to services beyond those locally grown and monitored; engaging them beyond the “China Wide Web” to which some government officials aspire to limit them; and gaining market share that can create momentum and support for later loosening of restrictions — may attenuate.  Google.cn is less known and used than, say, the local Baidu search engine, which boasts about 60% market share.  That share is about to get even bigger.

But drawing a line is both the right move and a brilliant one.  It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos, and masterfully recasts the firm in a place it will feel more comfortable: supporting the free and open dissemination of information rather than metering it out according to undesirable (and capricious) government standards.

Offhand, I can’t think of an app with comparable problems that has gotten into iPhone’s app store. What will be really interesting about this incident, and the similar ones that are sure to follow, is how users and vendors react. I can imagine this creating hysterical urging for Google to pre-screen all Android apps the way Apple does, but I think that would be premature. Yes, an open Market(s) is going to have more questionable apps, but there are many solutions other than lockdown—a strong user ranking for apps (which already exists), a way to alert people who have already downloaded the app, sandboxing (which admittedly wouldn’t have mattered here), or a quick way to freeze the app while complaints are investigating. They’re only partial solutions, but lockdown is only partial, too.

Now that the Android OS is really starting to take off, this story is going to be repeated, and we’ll get to see how strongly committed Google is to the principles it built the OS on — and whether there are models out there for vetting third party code that do better than those of the generative PC, but aren’t as restrictive as that of the iPhone.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Update: eWeek reports that Google has removed a number of suspicious apps from its marketplace.  Of course, the more generative structure of the Android market means that “banned” apps can be obtained elsewhere — unlike the iPhone app monopoly enjoyed by Apple, where the iPhone App store is the only point of distribution.  –JZ

Android Market Badly Needs A Web Presence to Compete with the App Store. Jason Kincaid argues that, while there are fewer Android apps than iPhone apps, a better web system for browsing and choosing apps could really help Android. I think he’s right that Google could think creatively about how to push the Market past (or at least toward) the App Store, but he admits that the big caveat is that 90% of apps are bought over-the-air, not via the web.

Apple Approves “Tits & Boobies” and “Pussy Lovers” Apps. Apple’s app reviewers try to figure out what to do with a “tits & boobies” app that shows pictures of the birds of that name. “One thing is clear to me: Nobody is ever going to be happy with this process, which I’m afraid will remain imperfect forever.”

Inside India’s CAPTCHA-solving economy. One huge aspect of ubiquitous human computing is sending menial computing tasks abroad; the social and economic implications of that, obviously, are potentially enormous. This piece is a good description of the market for CAPTCHA-solving work in India, where the going rate for 1000 captchas is $2.

Google Rests Its Defense of Executives in Italian Privacy Case. Some of you may have been following this case—Google executives in Italy are being prosecuted for allowing a video of students bullying an autistic teenager to remain on Youtube. The video stayed online for two months, but was removed almost immediately when Google employees were alerted to its presence. Google rested its case a few days ago; a verdict is expected in January or February. None of the executives faces jail time, because they don’t have criminal records. But if they’re convicted, it will be interesting to see what Google decides to do with its future Italian operations.

Cellphone Encryption Code Is Divulged. A German engineer claims to have broken the code used to encrypt GSM phone calls, or 80% of the world’s mobile calls. There are steps between breaking the code and actually intercepting and deciphering calls, but this is the big step. He says he’s only “trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls”—measures which exist, but haven’t been implemented.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

The Google Phone, Unlocked. Google is introducing a branded smartphone running the Android OS. Interestingly, it’s an unlocked phone, although because it’s GSM, it can only run on T-Mobile and AT&T in the US. I wonder if it will be subsidized by the carriers; if not, it could be a first step in helping break the carrier-subsidy model—discussed in this slightly out-of-date paper. Of course, even the iPhone couldn’t make it unsubsidized.

This Dumb Decade: The 87 Lamest Moments in Tech, 2000-2009. Not so much the future of the internet, but the recent past. Many of the recent lame moments have been covered in this blog (Danger Sidekick phones lose users’ data for weeks; Apple rejects Google Voice; Amazon removes 1984 from the Kindle). The old stuff is fun. I didn’t know that Facebook donated $9.5 million to a privacy-education foundation after the Beacon fiasco.

Obama to Name Howard Schmidt as Cybersecurity Coordinator, President Obama appoints Howard Schmidt, who also worked for President Bush, as his cybersecurity coordinator. Good to see that the administration is taking cybersecurity seriously, although they’re really looking at a different problem than the book discusses—threats to military and commercial infrastructure, rather than users’ endpoints and experiences.

Taxi Hack. A website allows users to criticize or praise service from specific taxi drivers, identified by medallion or license number. This has echoes of a future imagined in Chapter 9 of the book—you see a taxi, you punch in the number, and you have the driver’s digital reputation before you step into the cab (or choose not to).  (Hat tip: Emily Brill.)

Piqqem. A website crowd-sources stock picks. Of course, crowd-sourcing is all over the internet, but it seems it would be particularly treacherous if this website were subverted—say, by a company ordering its employees to vote its stock up.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer and JZ

The Month of Apple Bugs. For one month, researchers released information every day on different bugs that infect Apple products (OS X, Safari, apps for Macs, etc.). They say they’ve found public release gets quicker results than “responsible disclosure” (i.e., just telling the vendor). That’s one model for cybersecurity…

There’s lots of coverage out there about the Supernova conference, “a forum to examine all of the opportunities and challenges created in the Network Age.” Here’s JZ’s talk (starting around minute 29) and a good text summary, along with some reactions:

Pondering a Rogue Cloud wonders what government and industry pressures cloud computing providers will face.

Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms “But further, Vogels [Amazon CTO] said that users should feel comfortable trusting Amazon because the company’s mission is to be a ‘customer-centric company.’ Which seemed to be exactly Zittrain’s point.”

Cloud Computing an Option for Disaster Recovery Vogels discusses one of the big upsides of cloud computing—your data might be safer. We’ve discussed this topic here.

And bonus JZ links: a talk at Singularity University on Civic Technologies and the Internet, and an interview with Amanda Congdon on cloud computing (with spooky music).

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer