inamerrata

Martin points to an Economist review of a anti-corporate film that tries to make the case that corporations are “pyschopathic” by their very nature. It’s presented as “asking the question”, but I can’t see how you’d get a different film if you’d started off with the answer.

I think this is a further trend of an irrational fear of the profit motive — something I’ve commented on previously. Take the following line from the Economist:

Like all psychopaths, the firm is singularly self-interested: its purpose is to create wealth for its shareholders.

There’s two problems with that. One is the if the firm’s focussing on its shareholders then it’s not focussing on itself. Some firms do focus on themselves instead of their shareholders — they reinvest their profits in themselves, rather than making distributions; although that’s usually considered to benefit the shareholders by keeping the share price high, or by allowing for higher distributions in the future. And shareholders are independent of the firm: they have their own lives and interests, they can opt out of the ownership of the firm if they choose, and they have their own lives outside the firm. So by that view, corporations aren’t solely self-serving, they’re in fact absolutely beholden to others. Of course, if you do consider the shareholders to be a form of hive-mind making up the corporation, then you have to count their actions as well; and they’re not “singularly self interested” — they raise children, they make friends, and if they’re like Bill Gates they give billions of dollars to charities.

The other problem is that if the desire is really to create wealth, rather than just to provide or redistribute it, then the company’s focus is actually on improving society — by definition you don’t create wealth by robbing from the rich and giving to the poor (or vice-versa) but only by creating useful new things that didn’t exist beforehand — whether that be new tools for doing things better, discovering new things you can do that make life more pleasant, or just better ways of doing old things. But again: that’s not selfishness in any way.

People are fundamentally selfish — not to the exclusion of all else, and maybe not even first or foremost; but selfishness isn’t an optional trait — complete altruism, or complete disinterest in your own interests, is a good way to get walked all over, or, even if that doesn’t happen, to feel like you’re getting walked all over, and the bitterness, jealousy or hate that entails. That’s not a win.

“The profit motive” is a way of codifying that — you set yourself up to do things for others, creating things, building things, on-selling things, whatever but with a view to getting some consistent benefit for yourself. Choosing to ignore the “do things for others part” so you end up with just “getting some benefit for yourself” might manage to leave you with a psychopathic sort of arrangement, but it’s not an accurate, or even a particularly honest assessment.

I don’t really think that leaves the overall argument of the documentary with a basis, but its ancillary points are flawed too. Let’s look at them.

And, like all psychopaths, the firm is irresponsible, because it puts others at risk to satisfy its profit-maximising goal, harming employees and customers, and damaging the environment. The corporation manipulates everything. It is grandiose, always insisting that it is the best, or number one. It has no empathy, refuses to accept responsibility for its actions and feels no remorse. It relates to others only superficially, via make-believe versions of itself manufactured by public-relations consultants and marketing men.

The reasons corporations are “irresponsible” are because it puts others at risk — like a guide taking folks up Mount Everest: sure there’s a risk, but people know about it up front and are willing to take that risk for the benefits they get; because it harm[s] employees and customers — any company that harms its employees and customers won’t keep them, they’ll either go somewhere else, or they won’t use the service at all, and if you’d rather be employed at FooCorp than unemployed, then FooCorp is making you better off than you’d otherwise be, not “harming” you; and because it damag[es] the environment — well, sure, if you count every use of the environment as “damaging” it, but if it’s okay to cut down some trees to build houses and roads, then most corporations aren’t causing particularly much damage, either.

Manipulating everything is a bit of an ask — individual corporations aren’t all powerful; and if you think being grandiose or always trying to be the best is evidence of being a psychopath, then we’d better start watching out for our elite atheletes going on murderous rampages. Lacking empathy with your customers is a good way of going out of business, and writing a complaint about some canned food will usually net you an apology and either a refund or a replacement for your purchase; a quick google search will even find companies trying to help other companies apologise. It seems odd to claim that companies that spend huge amounts of money trying to understand their customers, and then more trying to communicate with them have only a superficial relationship with them — especially when having in many cases all that expense is designed to build a stronger relationship.

Psychopaths are folks with antisocial disorders. Corporations are voluntary associations of folks that work towards their own interests. Which is more antisocial: working with folks to further common goals, or creating agit-prop to try to disband such groups by likening it to criminal behaviour and mental disease?

I’ve been using the SeeMore plugin mostly for moving my travelblog pictures to separate pages, because even on broadband they’re a nuisance to download and scroll through all the time. But now that my blog’s “syndicated” I feel kind-of obliged not to fill up the planet with long essays, which means splitting longish techy essays after the first paragraph; but that isn’t really what I want my blog to look like.

I could make RSS feeds always be short, but that doesn’t really seem like the right solution either; in fact for the non-aggregated case it might be better for RSS feeds to always be long, even for the travelblog case. Which gives me four scenarios: RSS feeds which should show everything; normal web viewing which should show essays, but not photoessays; seemore web viewing which should show everything; and aggregator feeds which should only show the first paragraph or two.

I think MovableType automatically only includes the first paragraph (or few sentences even) in RSS feeds. I wonder if there’s a good way of doing something similar in blosxom.

Heh. The Gnu Hunter scoffed at my attempt to draw a distinction between the price and cost of email delivery; so I’m pleased to find I’m in good company on that issue: here’s Thomas Sowell doing a similar job on the costs of medical care. Also of interest is Brookes News, which has some interesting economics articles (among other things).

Lots of security experts like talking about the risks of software monocultures which basically says that if there are a whole lot of similar machines on the Internet — all running Windows XP Home, say — then it’s generally fairly easy (well, as these things go) to find a security hole that lets you gain control of all of them, and worse because it’s so common lots of people are trying to do it. So less-popular systems often end have a security advantage — Apple’s OS X isn’t that secure, yet it receives far, far less than its fair share of worms, viruses and other attacks compared to Windows systems.

Okay. That’s point one.

Point two is derived from this article by Steven Den Beste which attempts to link fossils, colonisation, globalisation and the war on terror. The linking factor is that competing fossils, races, and ideologies can grow for a while without having to destroy each other, but eventually they’ll saturate their environment, and the weaker competitors will die off. Basically, the theory is that competitive systems tends to kill off variety, and tend towards a monoculture (although obviously they don’t necessarily ever reach it, nor necessarily do it particularly quickly).

Operating systems and applications fit this theory pretty well: they compete on their merits, and monocultures tend to pay off in every area except security (and sometimes even then — if you’ve got a bunch of computers runnign the most secure OS on the planet, it’s probably not a good idea to add in another couple of less secure computers just for variety; even though the security-by-diversity arguments remain just as true). And historically, competition does tend to crush diversity — there are fewer realistically competing desktop OSes now than there were in the early 90s — we used to have DOS, Desqview, Windows, AmigaOS, OS/2, MacOS — while we now only really have a couple — Windows, MacOS and Linux — and MacOS and Linux are now both Unix derivatives with fairly similar underlying architectures. Much of the difference can probably be explained by “convergence” — Windows, AmigaOS and MacOS had pretty different markets back in the 80s, and you couldn’t really do the same things on any of them; as that changed, the number of viable OSes declined. The same thing’s true of Linux distributions, programming toolkits for Windows, word processors, and more.

So that’s the setup, the dialectic if you will: variety’s good; but it’s also self-defeating — in the end, there will be only one.

But variety is possible in some circumstances, in ways that don’t appear to be merely transitory. The current situation with mail servers seems to match that, eg — an April 2003 scan of some 20,000 hosts came up with the following proportions:

Count   Share   Software
8244    38.78%  Sendmail
3707    17.44%  Microsoft IIS/Other
1981    9.32%   qmail
1789    8.42%   IMail
1244    5.85%   Exim
1243    5.85%   smap
825     3.88%   CPMTA
537     2.53%   Postfix
500     2.35%   Microsoft Exchange
340     1.60%   CheckPoint FireWall-1
848     3.99%   Other
21258   TOTAL

Sendmail still has a pretty good lead in those numbers — you have to include the other four of the top five before you equal its marketshare — but it’s at a level of diversity where attacking sendmail isn’t going to be your one stop shop to world domination.

What’s the analysis then? One is that there’s not a great deal of need for competition: sending emails around is mostly a solved problem, and switching mail servers isn’t usually going to give you any big wins. Another is that there’s not really much commercial incentive in any of the above — you don’t choose Microsoft IIS for the mail server, you choose it for the webserver, or because none of the others run on your OS. Exim, postfix and qmail don’t have a lot between them. Sendmail has a fairly ugly configuration system, isn’t terribly efficient, and has irregular security problems discovered, but usually works pretty fine. Though that is still enough to steadily whittle away sendmail’s dominance (from 100% of the market in the 1980s to what it is today).

But the original thesis was that you’d head towards a monoculture if there was competition; it didn’t say anything about what’d happen if there wasn’t. Which means that particular examples tends to support the thesis, and maybe even supports it being extended to say that competition and monocultures go together, when you’ve got the former, you’ll get the latter; when you’ve got the latter, you’ve had the former.

Which means if we want to retain a good amount of variety in operating systems, or web browsers, or whatever, we’ve got to avoid competition — perhaps not in the small (particular features, our prices), but at least in the large (so that a random person wanting mail is about equally likely to be satisfied with any of the top few mail packages).

In the end, that basically means that when you go to a Microsoft shop you shouldn’t fall over in shock at hearing “Well, we recommend Windows of course, but that Linux stuff’s pretty good too if that’s what floats your boat.”

(By contrast, the same theory when applied to the question of whether open source will ever dominate the world brings up the following answer: it’ll do so precisely when it doesn’t have any flaws compared to other modes of creating software, and when its clear that all the other modes do have comparatively fatal flaws.)

John Ray, who writes Dissecting Leftism, an interesting blog decrying various inane comments from left-wing types, recently noted:

Statistical expert John Lott Jr. sets out why California’s virtual ban on electonic voting is just ignorant technophobia. Australia has paper voting only so I have no personal knowledge of alternatives but his claim that electronic voting is in fact more secure than paper voting seems reasonable to me. Voting security in Australia is a joke — leading to Al Capone’s famous saying “Vote early and vote often” being regarded as good election-day advice in some Australian Leftist circles. Rather like Pakistan.

Obviously, I’m going to bridle at being called a technophobe, as I’m not persuaded by the linked article that electronic voting is secure. The main problem with the article is it conflates two security issues. One is identification and ensuring that people only vote once. Australia doesn’t do a terribly good job of that — no ID is required, so you can just pick a name from the phonebook, walk up, claim you’re that person, and vote. They might find out later that “John Smith” voted twice, but that’s not going to help them catch you, so what do you care? Similar problems for people who die, but aren’t off the electoral role, or who are away, or whatever else. That’s an issue where electronic measures can help: taking digital photos of people who vote and associating that with the name they claim to vote under would give you a mechanism of better catching fraudsters, and requiring photo ID with a barcode that gets scanned and passed around the various polling places would be a pretty effective countermeasure too. But none of that is really about electronic voting — it all happens before you get into the booth.

The real problem for fraud in electronic voting is in incorrectly counting the results. It’s trivial to write a program that displays a vote for Bob on the screen or on a printer, and records a vote for Alice on a read-only CD ROM. It’s trivial to write a program that does this only one in a hundred times, or only after a thousand votes have been recorded. And it’s impossible to test for this situation. Worse: you don’t have to be acting deliberately to cause these sorts of problems; they can be caused by bugs, or out-of-spec usage. With paper it’s not an issue: you know exactly what you’ve written down, there’s no physical way for that to change between you’re writing it down and it being counted, and when it’s counted we have security measures in place to make sure it’s counted correctly.

There are ways to avoid this sort of problem — making the source code available for public inspection is one, and another is having controlled interfaces (eg, between making the vote (press a screen, get a certificate), recording it (put the certificate on a scanner) and counting it (remove the storage device from the recorder and put it in another machine) — but none of them are perfect, and none of them are really even that well understood. And that’s by experts — voting needs to be something that everyone can trust, not something that you need a PhD in computer science to be able to understand.

Based on the Australian experience — where we have fairly effective preferential voting, very simple procedures for voting (no butterfly ballots), and a whole bunch of folks who’re good at getting election results calculated very quickly — it seems to me that electronic voting is trying to solve the wrong problem (“We need computers in the voting booths! Because that’s cool!!!”), instead of the right ones (“We need some non-intrusive ways of stopping people from multi-voting”).

Hrm, the Planet aggregators don’t seem to like smartquotes in titles. So I’ve disabled them. Lame.

(For those playing along at home, this is about the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States, which includes an IP chapter that requires Australia to change its copyright and patent law to line up more with the DMCA and the US Patent Office. I’ve commented on this previously.)

Anyway, today’s post is to note that Linux Australia’s submission (#183) has finally been accepted, as has Rusty Russell’s (#184). It’s a bit weird that it took so long to accept them — they were submitted on time (ie, weeks ago), yet seem to have been accepted only after the ABC’s submission which was very late (it’s dated 30th April), and concurrent with the ASX submission which appears to have only been sent in yesterday. Weird. On the other hand, they might’ve been not quite compliant with the rules for submissions (which require addresses and such for individuals at least), so maybe that was the problem.

In other news, Matthew Rimmer from the ANU (submission 27) appeared as a witness before the committee today, and the Australian Digital Alliance (submission 71) did likewise yesterday. It’ll be interesting to see what the committee thinks of their opinions when the transcripts of those sessions come out.

Since the Professor’s decided to skip his Friday afternoon catblogging, here’s some Monday evening dogblogging for you. From left to right, meet Chips (m, silky terrier), Cheeky (m, chihuahua), and Skye (f, Siberian husky). If you’re not an RSS weenie, you can probably see Skye over on the right too, giving a practical demonstration of this blog’s theme.

(Okay, I admit it, I’m cheating by posting old photos. So sue me.)

UPDATE 2004/05/04:

Clinton pointed out that “you can probably see Skye over on the right too” wasn’t very clear — obviously I meant my right, which is your left.

UPDATE 2004/06/25:

Err, wtf? Cheeky’s a chihuahua not a dachshund. Well, at least I got the “I can’t spell it” part of the breed right. Fixed.

I’ve been a bit lax about noting updates to my blogroll. Introducing Clinton’s blog: Whining, not dining, Brad’s blog, currently titled The Bored and The Geeky, and Pat’s blog: Got Meat?.

(Hrm, I guess non-Aussies don’t have to grimace at the low hamming distance between “blogroll” and “bogroll”)

So, back in the mists of time (ie, slightly over a month ago), David Welton asked Do you think it’s possible for Debian to have a leader anymore?. I made a few comments in response, which in part might be summarised as Debian having an unreasonable culture of blame on its leadership, leading to people not being particularly interested in taking up the job which in turn results in the job not being done, and Debian essentially stagnating. One of the comments I made was:

[…] Let’s delve into this some more: I spent a fair bit of time advocating what I thought was the appropriate course of action on [the removal of] non-free. I prepared a resolution, and it even won the day. For my involvement in this debate, I’ve been called a hypocrite [0], told I’ve personally broken the fundamental compromises behind the social contract [1], and told that I deserve to have the absolute worst assumed of my motives [2].

Thomas Bushnell’s response (and followup) was:

[[0]] does not say you are a hypocrite.

[…It] is not, in fact, targeted at you specifically, and it has nothing to do with removing non-free, as Nathanael indicated.

Huh? Nathanael actually said that you *had* misunderepresented what he said, and now you are misrepresenting his correction. *Wonderful!*

Reading debian-devel I now get to see this:

The RM was being hypocritical, using a bogus interpretation of the Social Contract to convince himself that he wasn’t. After the amendment passed, he was unable to delude himself further. I don’t think the proponents of the amendment could have predicted his psychology.

Nathanael Nerode’s the guy with the hypocrisy fetish, and isn’t a developer, although we seem to be fortunate enough that he’s seriously considering applying now. Thomas Bushnell’s been a developer for a while now.

I find the above remarks highly offensive. They’re not something I’ve got any interest in putting up with, least of all from supposed colleagues. Should I have to? Are they a necessary part of developing a free software distribution? If causing offense in that manner is something that can and should be avoided, is the way Thomas dealt with the issue when I raised it a month ago appropriate or optimal? Is the complete lack of criticism Thomas received, and the complete lack of support I received indicative of the correct path to take on this topic?

The Planet Debian aggregator has confused me a bit — it’s meant to be a “community” thing, and be about things that aren’t directly Debian related, but on the other hand, I ramble on about boring Australian political stuff that can be pretty boring. Up until now Planet Debian has just snarfed my Debian section, but that means it misses out on the not-Debian-specific but still relevant/interesting posts I put up. So I got fed up tonight, and made up a new fake categories plugin so I can say exactly what categories should be included. It’s pretty cool, I think. It works by having a planetdebian.cat file in your blosxom datadir that looks like:

copyright
debian
links
meta
travelblog

that just specifies the relevant categories. You access it by asking for the planetdebian category, a la http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/planetdebian. Flavours and such Just Work. Sweet.

Here’s the story:

Australia’s inflation rate lowest in 4 years

CANBERRA, April 28 (Xinhuanet) — Australia’s annual inflation rate slowed to 2 percent, the lowest since December 1999, official figures released on Wednesday show.

The news.com story‘s headline is Living costs rise slowest in 4 years, the Herald Sun says Inflation at four-year low, Yahoo News’ take is Australia’s Costello Says Inflation Remains Low.

What’s the ABC’s headline?

Costello welcomes inflation rise

UPDATE 2004/04/29:

Heh. Advantage: Gnu Hunter.

The Attorney-General’s department says this about the Digital Agenda report:

Current Status of the Government’s Review

Phillips Fox conducted their research and analysis independently of the Government. During the term of the consultancy the Government negotiated with the United States a Free Trade Agreement. The Government is now moving towards signing its Free Trade Agreement with the US and implementing its obligations. In some areas, the copyright provisions of the Free Trade Agreement supersede the recommendations made in the Phillips Fox report. Where relevant the Phillips Fox report is being used to inform the Government’s implementation of the Free Trade Agreement obligations.

Following the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement obligations, the Government will conclude its broader review of the Digital Agenda reforms. The broader review will include analysis of the Phillips Fox report in relation to issues that were not considered in the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement as well as other Digital Agenda reform issues that were raised during the review.

They’re also still accepting submissions:

If you have concerns in relation to the Digital Agenda or the Computer Programs amendments to the Copyright Act that were not covered in the issues papers, or on which you have not already made a submission to Phillips Fox, make a submission on that matter directly to the Attorney-General’s Department (attention of Copyright Law Branch, Robert Garran Offices, National Circuit Barton ACT 2600). Such concerns will be considered by the Government as part of its broader review of the reforms.

It’s out!

Recommendation seventeen is choice:

That the definition of TPM in section 10 of the Act be amended so as to accord with the interpretation favoured by Sackville J in Stevens, at first instance.

That the permitted purposes in section 116A (3) be amended so as to clearly allow any supply or use of a circumvention device or service for any use or exception allowed under the Act, including fair dealing and access to a legitimately acquired non-pirated product.

That section 116A(1) be amended so as to prohibit the use, including commercial and personal use, of a circumvention device or service to circumvent a TPM, other than for a permitted purpose.

That section 135ANA be amended so as to prohibit the personal use of a broadcast decoding device other than for a permitted purpose, being the same permitted purposes listed in section 116A(3).

What the hell does that mean, I hear you ask. AIUI, the first paragraph says PlayStation 2 region coding isn’t a valid TPM, and thus that mod chipping isn’t circumventing a protection measure. ie, if you want to protect from copyright infringement, don’t make a tool that prevents parallel imports instead. The second paragraph means that supplying circumvention devices even ones that circumvent real protection measures is okay as long as you’re doing it to let people do sensible things — like watch DVDs they’ve bought. The third and fourth paragraphs increase the penalties if you’re pirating stuff.

Here’s another one: recommendation nineteen.

That the integrity of the permitted purposes in section 116A(3) be retained by preventing a copyright owner from making it a condition of access to or use of a copyright work or other subject matter that a user will not use a circumvention device or service for the purpose of making a fair dealing of the work or other subject matter.

That this amendment is made irrespective of whether the recommendation to include fair dealing as a permitted purpose is accepted. However, in those circumstances, a new subsection may need to be introduced in order to give effect to the recommendation.

It’s, like, the way laws should be made: consultation, and carefully balancing various interests.

Also of interest is recommendation fifteen, which suggests getting rid of the “communication” requirement in making transient copies of stuff — so that if you make a transient copy of a webpage while you’re trying to get it between your modem and screen that’s okay, even though you’re not communicating to anyone else. Recommendations thirteen and fourteen discuss a “limited subpoena process” for takedown notices that actually involves independent judicial bodies, rather than just hoping copyright onwers and ISPs do the right thing dealing with takedown notices. Other recommendations are interesting and sensible too, as are many of the things which are covered by “no change seems necessary or justified here”, such as the decompilation provisions.

Sweet.

Now let’s hope we can apply as many of these recommendations in the context of the FTA as we can.

Watch Kim Weatherall for further analysis.

UPDATE 2004/04/28:

Little sooner said than done: more analysis for your enjoyment. The conclusion bears repeating:

One more thing I’m thinking. My friend Peter Eckersley pointed out to me last night that getting depressed about aspects of the copyright law is not the only thing we can do. I think he’s right. Perhaps the reality (if it ends up being a reality) of a move to more protectionist, US-style laws means 2 key things for us into the future.

First, it means that we need to make a genuine, concerted effort to ensure that exceptions to copyright are broadened in Australia. To the extent that exceptions like US-style fair use are broader – or potentially broader – than Australian-style fair dealing, we need a shift. Soon. And we need to think about things like private copying. Because the possibility of lots and lots of Australians infringing copying all the time just makes no sense.

Second, it makes things like Creative Commons more important. Build alternative systems. That work.

…news at 11.

UPDATE 2004/04/27:

Welcome to the 11 O’clock news. Our lead story tonight: Debian Release Manager doesn’t know how to spell “effect”.