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This fall, Ken and I will be teaching a course in the Harvard Extension School based on our book with Hal Abelson. The course is called Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (click on the title to go to the course web site). We’re teaching it in one two-hour class every Monday 5:30-7:30. It is also going to be available as a “distance course,” so anyone anywhere could take it.

We’ve already posted the syllabus on the course web site. The course will be a ton of fun to teach. We will cover the waterfront of social and legal issues that everyone should know about. No math, either — it’s not the same as the “Quantitative Reasoning” course called Bits we teach in the spring both in the College and by distance through the Extension School.

Comments and queries welcome, either on this site or directly by email to us.

Definitely Slydial. It’s a free service that enables you to leave a message on the other party’s voicemail directly, with no possibility you’ll get an actual human being instead. The site shows a bunch of uses for this, for example

You go to a week long convention for work in Las Vegas and blow $5,000 the first night at the roulette table. You need to call your wife and tell her why she should hold off on making the monthly mortgage payment. Her voicemail will be much more understanding then she will.

You are working on a dozen different projects and have as many calls to return. Instead of being stuck on the phone with just one, leave each a voicemail with an update and you may just have enough time to enjoy Happy Hour.

Is this a great country, or what?

We’ve added an Events link above, listing all author appearances related to the book. For our friends in England, note that Hal will be at Blackwell’s in Oxford next week.

Well, probably not the worst ever, but for 2008, terrible.

My crime? I forgot that my username was case sensitive. I typed it in lowercase rather than mixed upper and lower, along with the correct password.

No wonder people hate computers. This is a major financial services business. When the Web was young, and people were having their web sites coded by their 16 year old children, customers might have put up with that sort of indifference and hostility. No more. I am closing my account — or will, once I get the paper form I need to fill out.

Khalil Gibran’s wonderful poem begins, “Your children are not your children.” They are of your lineage, that is, but you can’t control them like possessions.

I thought of this reading the woes iPhone buyers. From the beginning, Apple intended the iPhone to be usable only with AT&T cellular service. Steve Jobs was not amused when people figured out how to hack the phone so it could be used with other cellular service providers. So when he released the new iPhone, he made it harder to change the device’s intended functioning. You have to activate it while he (or his appointed representative at your friendly Apple store) is watching. Turns out the activation software was problematic and it’s been a very frustrating experience for many buyers, such as this one. Long lines in the store, people sent home and told to try from there, and discovering that they still can’t get the thing working. (There are many similar stories.)

Much can be said about Apple having — temporarily, no doubt — turned an engineering marvel into a public relations disaster. But if you look beyond the surface, there is an important philosophical point here. iPhone buyers thought they were buying a phone, and most people think that when you buy something, you should be able to do what you want with it. What Apple actually wants is to tether the phone to the company, making sure it gets used only in the ways Apple wants. You aren’t really buying a phone at the Apple store, because when you walk out of the store you are dragging the tether behind you, and Apple can jerk the tether any time it wants.

As long as things work perfectly and as the customer expects, tethering may be a sound business strategy. But in this fiasco Apple has bluntly reminded iPhone buyers that the thing they think they have bought isn’t really theirs. This larger point may ultimately cost Apple.

There is a good short article on the NYT Business page today about the ways in which Microsoft and Google have made network effects work to their advantage. A network effect is simply a situation in which having more people use your product makes it more valuable for other people to use it too, causing its popularity to snowball. Bill Gates is credited as the master of network effects, having built the Microsoft empire on the foundation of Microsoft’s operating system. Google has no such single control point, goes the argument, because of the Internet’s open standards, but has nonetheless been quite successful at exploiting “softer” network effects.

As I was cleaning up some old files I ran across a compelling example of the way network effects have changed the personal computer industry. In early 1984, as personal computers were becoming common at Harvard, I did a campuswide survey to find out what machines students had. 54 students said they owned personal computers and 32 of those said they had them at Harvard. These numbers are surely underestimates; the survey was unscientific and there was no reward for participating. But the distribution is fascinating:

8 Apple; 10 IBM; 4 Tandy; 4 Commodore; 5 Atari; 1 Zenith; 4 TI; 3 DEC; 2 Osborne; 4 Kaypro; one each HP, Sinclair, Brothers, Actrix, Corona, Ohio Scientific, Sol20, Timex, and NEC. I remember preparing the report itself on a Heathkit Z80 machine I built at home.

Now that was a Cambrian period in the evolution of the industry. This was 9 years after Microsoft had been founded, and there was still plenty of competition. But the incompatibilities made fertile ground for de facto standards to emerge, and Gates’ company tilled that earth with amazing skill.

The data about YouTube viewing that Google must turn over to Viacom, described in yesterday’s post, includes data from all over the world. So the viewing habits of individual Frenchmen and Italians will be there for the analyzing. A nice piece of reporting by Bloomberg’s Stephanie Bodoni points out an interesting side-effect of the judge’s order: it may breach some important and delicate international trade agreements.

As discussed in Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits, privacy standards in the EU are higher than privacy standards in the US, where free expression rights (happy Independence Day, everyone) tend to trump privacy rights. This creates a problem for the transfer of personal information out of the EU to the US. While the US government never signed on to EU privacy rules, a “safe harbor” was created for individual American businesses that could certify their compliance with European standards. US businesses with multinational operations have to demonstrate their compliance with seven principles for handling personal information, including security, access controls, and the like, in order to be able to import personal information about Europeans.

The judge’s order that Google must turn over that personal information to another US company, whatever deal Google may have struck with the EU, is a breach in these international privacy agreements. And the Europeans are gearing up to complain.

One has to wonder whether the judge was aware of the international dimensions of his order, or didn’t care about them.

Now that’s a dog-bites-man headline, but the votes in question are the votes that validated the unconstitutional government wiretapping under FISA discussed in earlier posts (here, here, and here). Now it turns out, thanks to excellent research by Maplight.org, that House members who favored immunity for the telcos received on average more than twice as much in telco contributions than those who voted no. Democrats who switched their votes in order to relieve the telcos of responsibility for the wiretaps received 68% more than those who voted against immunity twice.

One of the themes of Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits is the importance of the political contributions by entrenched interests, major communications corporations in particular, on freedom of information as the technology makes an open society more feasible. These numbers dramatically show the extent to which Congresspeople will act against the public interest broadly and the civil rights of individuals in order to raise the money needed for their re-election campaigns. It must be pretty demoralizing for the honorable ones among our elected representatives.

1) Comcast and Time Warner are experimenting with metering Internet usage, on the principle that the Internet is like the water supply system. Problem with this idea is that there is no bits shortage as there is a water shortage. They should be building more pipes rather than maintaining the pipe scarcity and jacking up their prices for the water.

2) The FCC wants to auction off a piece of the spectrum to someone willing to use part of it to build a nation-wide, free, wireless Internet. The catch? This parallel universe will be censored. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Details about how to define what content would be unacceptable for viewing over the free network is still under discussion.”

Neither the FCC nor any other government agency has any business in Internet censorship, as the courts have repeatedly held. (In fact, the FCC has no business in broadcast censorship any more either, but see Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits for that story.) There are so many problems with this idea, it’s hard to know where to begin, but Scott Bradner’s column would be a good start for those wanting to know more and to get some of the background. Fundamentally, the flaw with this proposal rests on another metaphorical failure. See also David Weinberger on this.

We’ve created an list of edits and errata for the book. For future reference, it is the last link on the “Excerpts” page shown in the menu bar. These changes will all be incorporated into the second printing. Please email us any other problems that need fixing, large or small. Our aim is to get this book perfect and to keep our readers fully informed when it isn’t.