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In the same FCC meeting yesterday in which opening the “white spaces” was approved, there was supposed to be a discussion of changing the rate structure that the telephone companies use for passing calls to each other. This is an amazingly complex and highly regulated business, and what makes it even more complicated is the fact that some of the terminology on which the regulatory structure rests is meaningless in the context of new technology. In the end the FCC just decided to do nothing for the time being.

Saul Hansell of the New York Times does as good a job explaining some of the issues as is humanly possible, I think.

The tale of Joe the Plumber is developing a thousand derivative lives. One, at least, is a bits story.

After Joe Wurzelbacher became a celebrity, someone in the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services ran a check on the state databases to see if he owed any child support. The McCain campaign has cried foul, and accused the Obama campaign of doing it. The Department has a non-political explanation, reported here:

Given our understanding that Mr. Wurzelbacher had publicly indicated that he had the means to purchase a substantial business enterprise, ODJFS, consistent with past departmental practice, checked confidential databases to make sure that if Mr. Wurzelbacher did owe child support, or unemployment compensation taxes, or was receiving public assistance, appropriate action was being taken.

Believe that or not as you wish. There doesn’t seem to be a written policy that spells this out, or a list of the other people who have been subject to this practice. It’s not helpful that the head of the office is a $2500 donor to the Obama campaign. On the other hand, what she describes (.pdf here) as the standard practice seems reasonable enough: that they follow up on phone tips about big spenders who may have skipped their child support payments, and they compare the list of big lottery winners to their lists of deadbeat dads. No such office wants to be embarrassed by reading in the newspaper what they could have figured out on their own just by being awake and alert.

This case resembles one we reported earlier, when Oklahoma tax officials went to town after reading students’ boasting about the success of their keg party business. Bits don’t come tagged with fine-grained access and usage restrictions. You may be able to stipulate who sees them and who doesn’t, but new situations arise every day and it’s impossible to lay down the rules with mathematical or legal precision limiting who can use them or for what. Human judgment is always going to be involved, and human judgment must be shaped by training and broad principles as well as being limited by formal access restrictions. What’s changed is that there is so much more information and so many more people who have the potential to access it. When it was hard to get at the data, the likelihood of its being misused was much lower.

For those in the New York City area, Harry will be involved an Intelligence Squared Debate of that question on November 18 at Rockefeller University. Joining him in arguing the affirmative are Siva Vaidhyanathan (author of “Copyrights and Copywrongs,” and the forthcoming “The Googlization of Everything”) and law professor Randal Picker. They will be opposed by Esther Dyson, John Battelle (author of “The Search,” a good book about Google), and author Jeff Jarvis. Should be a great event.

Wikipedia articles now turn up at the top of many Internet searches. They have assumed an astonishing degree of authority in only a few years. And deservedly: They are, in general, remarkably accurate. In an article appearing in Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel argues that the standards and protocols Wikipedia uses are redefining the very notion of truth. As Garfinkel explains,

On Wikipedia, objective truth isn’t all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication–ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth,” states Wikipedia’s official policy on the subject.

“Verifiability” means that the information appeared in some other publication. Other principles are “Neutral Point of View” — editing an entry about yourself is a no-no, for example — and “no original research.”

These principles work beautifully given the fact that anyone can edit entries. Vandalism and errors generally get corrected extremely quickly.

But the three principles don’t work perfectly, and Garfinkel gives a couple of thought-provoking examples where they fail dramatically, because information has gained currency through repetition and only the principals are in a position to explain why it is false.

A fascinating piece, and, like everything Garfinkel writes, very well-argued.

Here is a nice radio interview with the three authors on the HearSayCulture radio show out of California.

In Blown to Bits we talk about the Electronic Data Recorders in new cars, which document critical data about speed and braking. In case of an accident, the police and the insurance company will know far better what happened just before the accident than they used to, when they had to rely on witness testimony and accident reconstruction from skid marks and the like.

Here’s another innovation in digital automotive technology. Ford has introduced a digital key that sets the vehicle’s operating parameters. So if you don’t want Johnny driving the car over 80mph, you just make sure that Johnny’s key won’t let him. Your own key fits the same ignition lock, but lets you drive as fast as you want.

Other things the key controls are chimes that sound when the vehicle’s speed passes certain thresholds, — and the stereo volume, which can be maxed out at 44% of the system’s capabilities.

Though the key is programmed at home, it appears that the programmability is limited. You can’t set the top speed at 60, for example, only at 80. That is probably a good idea — there are occasions when you need a burst of speed for collision avoidance. But no reason why the codes couldn’t do something more complicated in the future — such as letting you drive over 60mph only for short periods.

Surprise, surprise: Parents like this feature and kids don’t.

Blown to Bits will be re-launched next Tuesday, October 7, in a conversation hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where I am privileged to be a Fellow. The event will take place in Maxwell Dworkin G125 at 6PM, and will be followed by a reception in the lobby. We’ll finish in plenty of time for people to go off and watch the presidential debate. Further details here. Hal, Ken, and Harry will all be there. Come and join us!

Hal, Ken, and Harry are on Emily Rooney’s Greater Boston tonight at 7pm, on WGBH in Boston (Channel 2, the local PBS affiliate). We’re probably going to be the final segment, airing about 7:20.

Here’s a link to the recording of our segment.

In a piece we published in May, we noted:

[Geolocation] data would be a goldmine for advertisers targeting their ads at cell phones — they would love to know not only who you are, but where you are. And it would be a boon for shoppers, too — imagine being able to ask, when Nordstrom’s doesn’t have your favorite stockings in your size, if any nearby store has them in stock.

But to do that, you’d have to have enough information about what you were looking for to type in the identifying information, or else spend time Web browsing, a clumsy process on a cell phone. Not very realistic as we described it.

A Japanese company has an application for Google’s new phone that does something similar to what we had in mind, but much more practical and more widely useful. You see the stockings in the store, whip out your phone, and point the camera at the bar code on the package. The camera doesn’t actually photograph the bar code; it reads it, and then gives you back a list of nearby stores with the same item, and what they are charging for it.

Brilliant. If I were running a fancy department store with high ceilings and high overhead, I’d be shaking in my shoes at the prospect of people using my nice premises for shopping, and discount stores for buying.

More on retail applications of bar code scanning by cell phone in this article by Erik Hermansen.

After yesterday’s anguished report on surveillance of children, let’s try something today that at least starts off on a lighter note.

A report out of New Zealand says that of all the time people spend online while in the office (and for many people, that is most of their office time), about a quarter of it is spent doing personal business. And more than three-quarters of all emails sent from office computers are personal.

Ah, I hear you cry, but it makes me so much more efficient that I get more done than I used to.

Maybe.

And someone in the story points out that it’s better for the business if we do our banking online from our desk than if we take half an hour to walk to the bank.

Maybe.

In any case, these reports cause the corporate efficiency experts to do the lost-time calculations, the vast cost to business of this wasted time. If only we could get our employees to focus on their work, we’d be more competitive.

And it is exactly these considerations that drive companies to install on office computer tools like the ones we discussed yesterday for children — software that monitors what web sites employees are going to, and perhaps blocks certain external connections. (There are other reasons as well. Not a good thing if you email your friend Mary in Oklahoma the spreadsheet you meant to email Mary in accounting.)

The cultural issues are going to take some time to sort out, but once put in place they tend to be hard to move. So read your corporate privacy policy. As we note on page 57, Harvard’s employee privacy policy is surprisingly Orwellian, though I am confident that it’s never used the way it’s written:

Employees must have no expectation or right of privacy in anything they create, store, send, or receive on Harvard’s computers, networks, or telecommunications systems. …. Electronic files, e-mail, data files, images, software, and voice mail may be accessed at any time by management or by other authorized personnel for any business purpose. Access may be requested and arranged through the system(s) user, however, this is not required.