Those Disagreeable Inventors

Inventors don't play much of a role on the public stage these days compared to the glory days of Marconi and Edison.  But they are nonetheless vital to modern civilization, as technical progress is the main economic engine that drives advanced industrial societies.  Martin L. Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute think tank, says in a recent issue of National Review that we ought to be careful how we treat present and future inventors, even if they prove to be rather disagreeable.  And he makes a good case that many of the best ones are just that, and their disagreeability is intrinsic to what makes them good inventors.

Citing several books about psychology, innovation, and DNA, Tupy says successful inventors tend not to care what other people think, and may even take delight in discomfiting their more powerful peers.  It's ancient history now, but the legendary 1984 Apple commercial shown during the Superbowl portrayed a young—woman—wearing bright colors—running freely—as she charges through a gray crowd of drones hypnotized by Big Brother's face on a telescreen, throws a sledgehammer into the screen, and literally busts up everything.  It has Steve Jobs' fingerprints all over it.  Numerous sources show that Jobs, who is probably the leading candidate for the most famous inventor of the latter 20th century, was not an agreeable person.

So why can't inventors just get along with people like the rest of us do?  Tupy contends that those who successfully seek innovative technical solutions to problems also tend to be loners, somewhat socially awkward, and not terribly concerned about fitting in and getting other people to help them with problems.  Rather, they prefer to work with things and ideas on their own to solve problems.  The umbrella phrase for this type of personality is autism-spectrum disorder, which of course can be crippling in its severer forms, although inventors such as Temple Grandin prove that even clinical-grade autism can be overcome.

Over my career, I have met several, and gotten to know a few, inventors who actually profited from their patents, or at least saw the companies or organizations they were associated with profit from them.  Few of them meet the classic description of an autistic personality:  intense aversion to social interaction, preference for solitude, etc.  I would say that while the autism-spectrum observation is true as far as it goes, and it may be close to necessary to some degree, it is by no means sufficient.  And for this I will turn to some history I'm very familiar with:  my own.

 When I got to college, I was surprised to see that someone had made a poster that showed me as a classic nerd.  It wasn't really mea, but it might as well have been:  plastic-framed glasses, button-down sweater, shirt pocket bulging with pens, slide-rule case hung on belt, etc.  I had spent most of my spare time growing up playing with electronics rather than football or socializing.  I never dated in high school.  And I went to college at what was then probably the West Coast's capital of nerd-dom:  Caltech.  If being on the autism spectrum was all it took to be a successful inventor, I should have done fine.

But I think most successful inventors have a drive that I mostly lacked:  a desire to show up the established order and make it look foolish, not by words, but by actions, hardware, and (nowadays) software.  That part of the successful inventor's personality is missing from my makeup.  On the contrary, I tend to revere established institutions and procedures, not delight in their ruination, even if such ruination works to my benefit.  This attitude of reverence toward existing structues is exactly what you don't want if your job is to convince others that your idea is better than theirs.  It's that simple.

My name is on a couple of patents, one of which (obtained with my Ph. D. supervisor at U. T. Austin in the 1980s) could conceivably have become quite valuable, as it anticipated the future growth of what is known as RFID technology—the little tags that set off alarms if you try to shoplift a pair of sneakers from Walmart.  But as it happened, the university that paid for the patent didn't do anything with it, and neither my supervisor nor I had the time or inclination to do the hard work of convincing people that this was the coming thing.  It would have involved starting a company, and that was not on my scope screen at the time, nor has it ever been since.

The reason Tupy wrote what he did was to make the point that societies which discourage disagreeableness of the type in question may be shortchanging themselves when it comes to innovation.  Nobody knows how to create inventive people.  It's like farming:  the farmer doesn't really grow anything.  He or she just creates conditions under which growth of desirable plants can occur.

So cultures that allow people to do things differently, to play around with ideas without having to worry about getting in trouble with their peers or the government, tend to be cultures in which innovation and invention thrive.  A good contrast here is between the U. S. in the 1950s and the old USSR (Soviet Union), where everyone had to be constantly on guard lest they be heard to say something even slightly negative about the government, at which point their neighbors might rat on them and they'd end up in the Gulag for twenty years.  The USSR was not a hotbed of technical innovation then, although it supported scientists who aided its nuclear-weapons program.  But as far as economically profitable inventions go, it was no contest, as the U. S. was far and away the best place to be for that kind of thing, even in the allegedly conformist and repressive 1950s.

By all means, let's preserve what freedoms we have, to allow those cranky inventors among us to be by their lonely selves, cooking up ideas and gizmos that will make them and others millionaires and benefit the rest of us in the bargain.  But being a nerd isn't all it takes—you have to want to make fools of the complacent powers that be, and succeed at it, too.

Sources:  Martin L. Tupy's article "Disagreeability, Mother of Invention," appeared on pp. 18-20 of the Nov. 16, 2020 print edition of National Review.  The 1984 Apple commercial, which everyone ought to see at least once, can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I.

Is There A Contact-Tracing App In Your Future?

Excuse the similarity to last week's headline about immunity passports in your future, but with so little going on right now either in the economy or elsewhere, thinking about the future seems to be a good thing to do.  And it's likely that you will hear more in the coming weeks about contact-tracing apps for your mobile phone.

A contact-tracing app is designed to follow you around like a 24-hour detective, noticing everybody you've been within Bluetooth range of.  Bluetooth is a short-range communications system that virtually all mobile phones have, and its typical range is about six feet (two meters), which is conveniently just the same as the social-distancing space we are supposed to be keeping to avoid COVID-19 nowadays.  If anyone you've been near subsequently tests positive for COVID-19, this fact is communicated via the app to everyone who has come within proximity to that infected person in the last week or two, and they know to quarantine themselves and get tested too. 

In the computer geek's ideal world, not only would everybody have such an app, but the app would also take note of the physical location where the encounter with the infected person occurred.  That way you could let people even without mobile phones know that if they were in such-and-such place at such-and-such time, there was somebody there who could have infected them.

Countries such as South Korea which have implemented extensive contact tracing by non-automated means have found that it greatly reduced the need for blanket restrictions on movement, such as the U. S. and many other countries are enduring right now.  So worldwide, a number of countries are developing contact-tracing apps.  The BBC reports that Australia and Denmark hope to roll theirs out within two weeks, and Germany won't be far behind. 

In the U. S., the states of North and South Dakota as well as Utah have announced that they are working on similar projects.  However, the tech giants Google and Apple are reluctant to implement the GPS-coupled geographic data feature, because they fear that for example, if the Walmart in your neighborhood gets cited as a place where somebody could have picked up COVID-19, that could hurt the store's business. 

At an Oxford University ethics website, Bryce Goodman discusses the ethical implications of these proposed apps.  He sees it as a privacy-versus-health tradeoff, and would push the lever way toward health and away from privacy.  He points out that the same kind of privacy-intrusive data tracking is already being used to sell us things like skin cream, so why not use it to save lives? 

Until a vaccine against COVID-19 is available, we are either going to have to keep doing what we're doing now—hunkering down and wrecking the economy—or get a lot better at tracing contacts and quarantining only those people who need to be quarantined.  I agree with Goodman when he points out that the extremely blunt instrument of a general lockdown is much harder on some people than others—mainly those who can't work from home and are suffering from the lack of a paycheck, or any distinct prospect of one in the future.  So anything we can do safely to lift the economically costly restrictions should be considered seriously.

On the other hand, whatever humankind can conceive, an unkind human can hack, and it's very easy to picture how a widely-used, let alone compulsory, contact-tracing app could be twisted to cause embarrassment, loss of business, or worse.  Ideally, what would emerge from the system would be a big-data picture of the entire process of how the disease is spreading, geography and names included.  That information would have to exist somewhere, regardless of how often the proposers of the idea say it would be anonymized, because the whole point of the system is identifying people, and perhaps places as well.

There will be mistakes made, and perhaps intentionally false data provided to the system.  How would you feel if you had been doing everything right and suddenly your phone tells you you have COVID-19 and have to stay in total isolation for two weeks?  Or what if some hacker maliciously publishes the names of everybody who has contacted someone with COVID-19 in a whole city?  Welcome to Pariahville.

Those are some downsides I can think of without even trying hard, and I'm sure there are others.  On the upside, I have to admit it would be nice to go back to something approximating normal and get a haircut, pump gas, and (horrors!) even go to a movie without feeling either fearful, guilty, or both.  But I would have confidence to do such things only if I knew that my chances of catching the disease of the hour would be so small that it would fall down into the risk noise of being run over by a bus or hit by lightning.  Right now, that's not the case.

And here's where this topic folds into last week's topic:  the immunity-passport idea.  It might develop that the contact-tracing app becomes a de facto disease-free passport.  If you've been using it faithfully for however long, and if the great majority of people around you are also using it, and if it really works, the fact that it shows you are clean can be trusted.  But if I was running a movie theater, I'd want to see that green spot or whatever it would be on your app before I'd let you in.  And that would get us right back to where many citizens of China are today, who have to show a green color on their compulsory smartphone COVID-19 app before they're permitted to move around most places.  In that regard, China is not a place I would like to emulate right now.

I'm no prophet, and I can't tell whether contact-tracing apps will get very far (Singapore has had less than 25% participation in their voluntary rollout, which makes it almost useless), or will become the de-facto passport to ordinary life again.  Probably what will happen is somewhere in between.  But it will be interesting to see if we can use this high-tech solution to fight what is presently devastating many lives, both in terms of sickness and death, and in terms of economic loss and social isolation.

Sources:  I thank Michael Cook, editor of mercatornet.com, for calling my attention to contact-tracing apps and providing me with these sources I referred to:  the BBC at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52325352 and the Oxford Practical Ethics site at http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2020/04/guest-post-pandemic-ethics-social-justice-demands-mass-surveillance-social-distancing-contact-tracing-and-covid-19/ .  I also referred to an article from the Reuters website at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-apps/showdown-looms-between-silicon-valley-u-s-states-over-contact-tracing-apps-idUSKCN22702F. 

Welcome to the All-Digital Economy

. . . and how's that working out for you?

The United States, along with many other industrialized nations, is currently engaged in a large-scale experiment that is in some ways the realization of the fondest dreams of a small but influential segment of the population.  For some time now, many investors, as well as leaders of the dominant high-tech companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc.—have strived to move us toward an ideal future in which all human interaction and economic activity would take place by means of digital platforms—owned and operated by them, of course.  This ideal world would consist of two classes:  the small symbolic-manipulator elites of owners, designers, and engineers who create and operate these platforms and profit mightily therefrom; and the masses of consumers whose only useful function is to use what the platforms provide. 

Well, the shelter-in-place orders that affect about half the U. S. population and have shuttered all non-essential businesses have violently catapulted us into this ideal future in a matter of a couple of weeks.  And so far, the results are not good.

Yes, a few lines of business have benefited:  food-delivery services, the online videoconferencing system Zoom, and those who provide binge-watched TV series.  But we have also seen the largest number of applications for unemployment benefits in history (over 3 million last week), a stock market slide resembling an avalanche, and a level of economic uncertainty that has no parallel in living memory. 

I have the privilege of knowing one of the few people in the U. S. whose weekly routine has been almost completely untouched by these events.  He is not a resident of a desert island, nor a fantastically wealthy hermit living in an isolated compound with years worth of supplies.  It's just that for years now, he has been following the shelter-in-place rules by choice.  This relative of mine acquired enough funds to retire about twenty years ago, and chooses to live by himself and spend most of his waking hours online in chatrooms, watching YouTube programs, and viewing the occasional sports show on TV.  He ventures outside once a week or so for grocery shopping, but other than the occasional medical problem, he has no other human contact, and likes it that way.  The only inconvenience he has experienced so far from the coronavirus restrictions is that he had to go to four grocery stores last week to find bread—the first three were sold out.  But other than that, his lifestyle is largely undisturbed.

A nation can afford only so many people like my relative.  It's a free country, so far, and so if a person chooses to cut himself off from society like that, he is allowed to do so.  But we are currently experiencing what happens when he is joined by dozens of millions more forced to live that way.  Yes, we're glad there are such things as Zoom, Netflix, YouTube, and for that matter, cellphones, electric utilities, and water supplies.  But we are also finding out by direct experience that a vast part of our economy consists of embodied people going places and being together to do useful and entertaining things.  And when you cut that part out, everybody suffers in one way or another—the subsistence-wage person who loses the low-wage service job at a restaurant or movie theater, to the wealthiest investor who has seen his net worth decline by a third recently. 

Underlying the prejudice in favor of digital everything, and the corresponding disdain for people and industries that make things rather than bitstreams, is a kind of Gnostic dualism.  The Gnostics were sects popular in the early years of the Christian era.  One prominent branch of Gnosticism believed that the universe was divided into a good spiritual part and a bad material part.  Because the physical human body was material, they disdained it and believed that the real person was a good spirit who just happened to be imprisoned in a decaying material body.  The goal of life was to free yourself from the body and all its trappings, and rejoin the other good spirits after death.  Or something like that.

Well, we are finding out what happens when we all become temporary Gnostics, and eschew as much human contact with each other and with our physical workplaces as we can.  The distant goal of having everybody exist mainly online as an anticipation of the day hoped for by transhumanists (a popular movement in Silicon Valley) when we can all free ourselves from our mortal biological "meat cages" and live forever as software, has just jumped into our laps without being invited. 

The fact is that human beings are creatures that don't just inhabit bodies:  we are bodies, but we are also more than our bodies.  We are also immaterial minds, but a mind without a body is incomplete, as is a body without a mind.  Any rational political economy will acknowledge this fact, and will plan for a future that includes bodies as well as minds—full human beings interacting in accordance with human nature, which—despite the last few hundred years of innovations in philosophy, science, and culture—has not changed. 

We as a nation will get through the coronavirus pandemic somehow, though not without serious losses that could have been mitigated with more foresight.  But the experiment we are now undergoing of trying to live all-digital lives holds lessons for us that we can all profit from, and I don't mean just dollars and cents. 

Here's an idea:  if your life has been disrupted by the pandemic, start writing a list of things you miss from back before the pandemic began.  Ask yourself why these things were important.  And when things get back to whatever the new normal will be, don't lose the list.  Ask yourself, and ask your leaders, what things we have chased after too hard, and what things we have neglected.  And then let's try to apply the lessons that this experiment is teaching us, before we forget about the whole thing and go back to the mistakes we were making before.

Sources:  The 3 million unemployment compensation applications recorded for the week of Mar. 22-28, 2020 were reported in numerous sources such as The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemployment-rate-coronavirus-business.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Gnosticism. 

Engineers and Corporate Leaks

A recent Bloomberg News item describes how Apple is going to great lengths to keep its engineers from leaking secrets to the media.  Historically, Apple has kept the public in the dark about its plans unless and until the company wants to reveal them, usually at a trade show where CEO Tim Cook or another leader gets to present the new product or feature amid ballyhoo and drama.  Leaks spoil the surprise, and so it's understandable that the corporation wants to suppress them.  But it hasn't been able to do that completely, and a recently published memo (also leaked, presumably) gives us some insight into the thinking that goes on at one of the world's largest tech companies about secrecy and leaks.

The memo, which was posted on the company's internal blog, says that in March a leaker who told outsiders about plans for Apple's software roadmap was caught and fired.  He didn't think he'd be caught, but the memo claims that in 2017, Apple caught 29 leakers who were either Apple employees, contractors, or suppliers, and 12 were arrested.  The memo points out that while a person may not start out intending to be a leaker, media people befriending you on Facebook probably have only one thing in mind—to find out what secrets you know.  If you're caught, you will not only lose your job at Apple and possibly face arrest, but you'll find it hard to get work in the industry anywhere else. 

The overall tone of the memo reminds me of those World War II propaganda posters that showed Hitler and Mussolini with huge ears leaning next to a sauced-looking GI at a bar who is obviously spilling military secrets to a good-looking gal who's writing them down under the table on a notebook strapped to her leg.  Maybe I'm combining a couple of posters there, but the point is that large organizations with secrets to keep have to convince their workers that it's a serious moral failing to tell confidential information to outsiders. 

The negative consequence of talking to spies in wartime is pretty obvious:  the enemy is out there to kill you and your fellow soldiers, and so why would you do anything that would make the enemy's job easier?  In the case of corporate secrets, the worst negative consequences of blabbing are not so clear.  I'm not aware that anyone outside of Apple has succeeded in marketing a look-alike knockoff iPad or iPhone, because such an achievement would require more than just a few random leaks to do. 

But the real issue is control:  control of information that Apple wants to release only when it suits its plans to do so.  As the article points out, the huge public investment in Apple stock creates a powerful incentive for reporters to find out what the company is up to in advance of Apple's planned announcements, because anything that affects the firm's stock price is of interest to its investors.  Hence the steady flow of leaks about product releases, features, and the timing of new products, despite Apple's stern memos about the despicability of leaking on the part of its engineers.

If Apple is like most tech corporations, every engineer (and maybe every employee down to the janitors who clean the floors at 1 Infinite Loop, for all I know) is made to sign a hiring agreement which, among other things, binds them to keep secret information secret.  So at a minimum, if an engineer leaks information to a reporter, the engineer is violating that agreement. 

There are situations in which such an action can be justified, but they are rare.  It's called whistleblowing.  If an engineer knows of a really bad situation that threatens public safety, for example, and supervisors refuse to do anything about it, sometimes the engineer is justified in going outside the company altogether to a reporter or government official in order to remedy the situation.  But none of the leaks that Apple is ticked off about seem to fit in that category. 

Software-intensive businesses like Apple can't rely only on patents to keep themselves ahead of the competition.  That is why trade secrecy plays such an important role in highly competitive businesses like consumer technology, and why Apple gets so upset when one of its engineers leaks confidential information.  Especially in the phone market, Apple is not the only player in town, and its concerns that important innovations it has expended a lot of effort on will be stolen by Samsung or another firm are real ones.

This is another example of a general rule about professional ethics:  with specialized knowledge comes specialized responsibilities.  Engineers whose work involves secret information that would harm the company's interests if conveyed to outsiders have an obligation to keep that information confidential.  Leakers have all sorts of motivations, ranging from the temptation to yield to the flattery of a reporter, to a desire for revenge for alleged mistreatment at work.  But working for a company, as the memo points out, is a relationship of trust.  And trust violated is no longer trust.

I'm not saying that Apple's secrecy policies are always justified.  In previous blogs, I have discussed some things that Apple does that do not appear to be in the best interest of its consumers.  And depending on the circumstances, it might be serving a higher morality for an engineer to let the public know that Apple is dealing unfairly with them. 

But whatever the reason for a leak, any engineer who deliberately leaks information should be prepared for the consequences.  Even whistleblowers whose actions appear to be completely justified in retrospect usually end up getting fired and becoming a pariah, not only in the company they blow the whistle on, but often in their entire industry.  It's not fair when that happens, but it happens. 

Secrecy is a strain on those who keep secrets, and now and then secrecy is used to cover up wrongdoing.  But most of the time, tech companies have good reasons for their secrets, and any engineer who presumes to ignore those reasons and talk to outsiders is taking a career-threatening risk.

Sources:  The article "Apple warns employees to stop leaking information, talks of arrests" by Mark Gurman of the Bloomberg News service appeared on Apr. 13, 2018 on the San Jose Mercury-News website at

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/13/apple-warns-employees-to-stop-leaking-information-talks-of-arrests/. 

For Consumer Electronics, The Fix is Out—Or Is It?

Did you know that Apple can tell if you break your iPhone screen and take it to get fixed by somebody who isn't in Apple's authorized repair network and uses a non-Apple screen to fix it?  Not only can they tell, they can intentionally disable your phone when they find out. 

That's exactly what happened to Antonio Olmos, a news photographer covering the refugee crisis in the Balkans, when he broke his iPhone screen and couldn't find an Apple-authorized repair facility in Macedonia.  But he did find somebody who fixed it with an aftermarket screen, and the phone worked fine until a routine sofware update a few months later.  Then, wham—Apple turned his phone off.  When Olmos inquired, he was told that Apple did this as a "security measure" in case some of the unauthorized parts were defective.  But that wasn't the problem—the phone worked fine until Apple broke it in an act that looks suspiciously like punishment. 

Olmos had enough connections with the media to raise a public stink about the issue, and eventually Apple caved and quit turning off phones that have been repaired by non-Apple facilities with non-Apple parts.  But with his inquiry, Olmos turned over a rock to reveal just one of the many ways that manufacturers are increasingly trying to discourage repairs of their products by anyone other than their own limited number of authorized repair facilities—and sometimes not even then.

In an article on the website of the professional engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, two leaders of the "right-to-repair" movement, Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne, describe how this is happening, not only with consumer electronics but with items as big as tractors.  For example, John Deere, the agricultural-equipment maker, took the position that in selling a tractor to a farmer, the company didn't really let go of the tractor—they only granted an "implied license" to operate it.  John Deere reserved the right to repair it or say who was going to repair it—certainly not the farmer.

This didn't sit well with farmers, who complained, and the U. S. Copyright Office ruled that John Deere was wrong—when a farmer buys a tractor, he can do anything he wants with it, from fixing it himself to driving it into a lake. 

These are only two of the most egregious examples of manufacturers who try to discourage consumers from fixing their own stuff, or using independent repair shops who use aftermarket parts.  As anyone who has been to a non-dealer-owned auto repair shop or an Autozone knows, independent repair facilities are often cheaper than dealerships and can do work of just as good a quality as the dealerships.  And many aftermarket parts are comparable in quality to OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts.  So why do the makers seem to hate it if you fix something of theirs that breaks?

Well, the obvious reason is that as soon as a company sells you one of their products, they are competing with themselves.  If the product breaks, you have two choices, in principle:  fixing it or buying a new one.  The maker wants to sell you a new one, of course, and anything that can be done to make fixing difficult or impossible will tend to tilt your decision in the direction of a new purchase.

This helps a maker's bottom line, but it also contributes to the millions of tons of electronic scrap that goes into landfills worldwide every year.  As economist John C. Médaille put it, "Only by constantly buying what we don't need or already have can the system sustain itself; the size of the garbage dump becomes the true measure of our 'wealth'."  So what should be done?

The answer that Wiens and Gordon-Byrne favor is legislation at the state level to prohibit manufacturers from monopolizing product repair or preventing it altogether.  While this has some chance of working, it is only part of the problem. 

The things a culture values can tell you a lot about the culture.  Multinational corporations have encouraged the development of a worldwide consumer culture that values things that the corporations can sell at a profit.  And in the absence of strong counterforces from custom, religion, or politics, the consumer culture increasingly dominates the lives of not just millions, but closer to billions of people.  In 2016, almost two-thirds of the world's population owned a mobile phone.  That's about the same percentage of the globe's population who, as of 2013, do not have indoor plumbing (flush toilets, in other words).  Now don't get me wrong—having a smart phone, or any kind of a phone, is a huge leap forward toward all sorts of civilizational goods:  the ability to call for emergency services, to participate in a market economy, and so on.  Mobile phones can on occasion be lifesavers.  But so can flush toilets.  There are good reasons, however, that Apple is in the smart-phone business and not the flush-toilet business. 

State laws protecting our right to fix things can redress some of the grievous wrongs that companies are trying to put across with regard to product repairs.  But even if all service manuals were posted for free on the Internet and you could find a competent independent repair shop in every city and town, many of us would still be just waiting for our phone to break down to give us an excuse to buy a new one. 

This is a moral issue, really, and to explore its depths would take us far beyond the limits of this blog space.  But the heart of the matter is whether we believe what the manufacturers want us to believe, namely (as Médaille again puts it), "that our happiness lies not in persons, but in things, and not merely in things, but in constantly new things." 

That notion is, to put it indelicately, a lie.  But it's behind much of the advertising and marketing that we are subjected to all the time.  Until we recognize that lie for what it is, and change our ways of living and using our resources to reflect our realization that it's a lie, all the repair-protection laws in the world won't make much difference in the flood of electronics that goes from store to user to garbage dump faster every year. 

Sources:  The article "Why We Must Fight For the Right to Repair Our Electronics" by Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne was posted on the IEEE Spectrum website on Oct. 24, 2017 at https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics.  The statistic on worldwide mobile phone use is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/, and the one on flush toilets is from http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/22/_60_percent_of_the_world_population_still_without_toilets.html.  John C. Médaille's book Toward a Truly Free Market (ISI Books, 2010), pp. 194-195, is the source of the quotations attributed to him.

Apple Versus the Feds: How a Smartphone Stymied the FBI

When Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik died in a hail of gunfire last December 2 after killing 14 people at a San Bernardino office party, the FBI recovered Farook's iPhone within a few hours.  One of the critical unanswered questions about the San Bernardino shootings is whether the couple had outside help, and the data on the iPhone may hold the answer.  Problem is, the FBI can't get at the data, and Apple, the iPhone's maker, won't help them.

Why not?  Let's let Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, answer that one:  "[T]he U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone."  A little historical perspective is in order to put this situation into context.

With the advent of powerful digital computers, advanced encryption algorithms were designed and adopted by both sides of the Cold War (both the U. S. and the Soviet Union) for secret communications in the 1970s and onward.  The U. S. National Security Agency, long used to spying on analog communications in which good radios were the most elaborate equipment needed, found itself behind the technology curve and spent millions on advanced computing technology to maintain its ability to crack enemy codes.  The computing power of those early NSA computers now resides on your smartphone, and after a run-in with NSA a few years ago involving spying on Apple, the tech company and its president resolved to do a better job than ever in protecting its customers' privacy.  The latest iPhone operating system has a feature that not only encrypts the user's private data, but destroys the internal encryption key if it detects more than 10 attempts to unlock the phone using the 4-digit password.  After that happens, nobody but God can retrieve the data. 

At first the FBI was hoping that the phone was backed up to the iCloud, where the data might be recovered.  But it turns out that the automatic backup feature was turned off last October, possibly by Farook to avoid just such snooping.  After trying everything they could think of, including things Apple suggested, the FBI has asked Apple to do something that the firm claims is unprecedented. 

The FBI wants Apple to write a new operating system for Farook's phone that will allow unlimited password tries electronically, which will allow the FBI to access the phone's data.  They say it will only be used on Farook's phone, and so there is no risk to anybody else's phone.  The FBI has put this request in the form of a court order, and Tim Cook has vowed to fight it.

Why?  Apple claims the risks of that system getting loose, either accidentally or by command, are simply too great, and they have dug in their heels.  For example, it has been suggested that once it becomes generally known that Apple has developed such a backdoor, repressive regimes will order the firm to give it to them, or else kick Apple out of the country.

This is not the first time that Apple and the federal government have been at loggerheads over encrypted data.  In a 2014 case, Apple was ordered to extract data from an iPhone, but it is not immediately clear from the record whether they complied.  In both that case and the San Bernardino situation, the FBI cited as its authority the All Writs Act of 1789, which basically lets courts issue writs (orders) "necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law."   To the ears of this non-lawyer, it sounds like the law basically says you can do whatever you want, but the Act is typically hauled out as a kind of last resort, as subsequent case law has erected a set of four conditions that must be fulfilled before a court can issue an order under the Act.  Of course, the FBI thinks the conditions are fulfilled, and Apple doesn't.

Apple's stand is based on the idea, not that common among high-tech companies, that even Apple doesn't have any business with your personal data, which is why they designed the iPhone operating system to be so hard to crack.  This differs from practices of other firms, who happily mine their customers' private data for commercially valuable things like brand names and so on.  Privacy advocates from across the political spectrum have joined Cook in his opposition to the order, and the outcome of this case could have wide implications not only for the FBI and smartphones, but for digital privacy generally.

National Review commentator Kevin Williamson (from whose column I first learned about this matter) takes the view that the FBI is taking the easy way out by simply ordering Apple to do its job.  There is evidence to support this claim.  For example, in its instructions to Apple, the FBI asked them to rig a bluetooth link to the phone so they could try the 9999 different number combinations electronically, instead of having to make somebody sit there and do it by hand.  This apparently minor detail has the aroma of a royal order to underlings—"and while you're at it, fix it so I don't mess up my manicure wearing my fingers out on that touchscreen of yours."  Back in the days of telephone hacking in the 1960s, teenagers with time on their hands would amuse themselves by dialing all 9999 numbers in a given 3-digit telephone exchange (e. g. 292-0000 to 292-9999) just for the thrill of discovering the test and supervisory numbers the phone company used for long-distance routing and maintenance.  Apparently, the FBI can't be bothered with such tedium.

The matter is in the hands of lawyers now, and if the issue does indeed go all the way to the Supreme Court, its fate may well depend on whether President Obama gets to appoint a new member after Justice Scalia's recent demise, or whether the next president does, or whether a split Court ends up doing nothing (split decisions leave the lower court's decision standing).  Whatever happens, I admire Tim Cook for taking a principled and consistent stand for a cause that he could so easily abandon:  the notion that privacy still means something in a digital age.

Sources:  Kevin Williamson's column "Hurray for Tim Cook" can be found at National Review Online at http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431491/apples-tim-cook-right-resist-governments-demand.  I referred to articles by ABC News reporter Jack Date carried on Feb. 19, 2016 at http://abcnews.go.com/US/san-bernardino-shooters-apple-id-passcode-changed-government/story?id=37066070 and Feb. 17 at http://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-iphone-apples-security-features-locked-investigators/story?id=36995221.  I also referred to an article in The Guardian online at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/19/apple-fbi-privacy-encryption-fight-san-bernardino-shooting-syed-farook-iphone, and Wikipedia articles on encryption software and the All Writs Act of 1789.

Under the Cloud

The business world is almost as fad-ridden as the education world, and one of the hot words in the last few years is "cloud" as in "I'll get it from the cloud," or "We put all our data on the cloud."  In this sense, the word means a set of Internet servers where your important data is archived so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an Internet connection.  The concept is increasingly vital to commercial and institutional users worldwide, and makes sense in that context.  But as Scientific American columnist David Pogue warns in the February issue, Apple and Microsoft are taking not-so-subtle steps to force many individual users of their products onto the cloud.  And I doubt that anyone reading this column can avoid using Apple and Microsoft products without a lot of inconvenience. 

The situation, as I understand it, is basically this:  suppose you have data that needs continual updating on your portable gizmo (which can be an iPad, an iPhone, a BlackBerry, one of those Android things, or you name it), and you'd also like the same version of the same data on your laptop.  In the old days, whenever you made changes on your calendar, for example, you would then physically plug your portable device through a USB cable or whatnot into your laptop and tell it to sync.  That way, your laptop calendar would agree with your handheld thingy's calendar and vice versa, and you wouldn't find yourself at Aunt Mimi's when you were supposed to be having your teeth cleaned.  So far, so good.

Then the number of handheld devices proliferated, and so did their operating systems, and so did the ways you can have laptops and towers talk with portable systems (wireless, IR, Bluetooth, etc.), and at least according to the manufacturers and their unofficial representatives, it just got to be too hard to come up with proprietary software to sync absolutely every portable thingamajig with each operating system for all the popular computers.  So they just said forget it:  the real data will sit on the cloud, where we can keep track of it, and then all we have to do is make sure that every piece of hardware (portable or not) can keep in touch with the cloud.  And that solved the problem. . . .

But if you were used to firing up your old laptop and plugging it into your BlackBerry that you've had since 2003, and you are dead-set against keeping your data in a place that you know not where and you know not when it might go down, you are now out in the cold and under the cloud, so to speak.  According to Mr. Pogue, the latest operating systems from both Apple and Microsoft either don't allow you to do hard-wired transfers without involving the cloud, or make it so hard to do that you almost have to get a networking certificate from Microsoft to know how to do it. A discussion thread on an Apple forum on exactly this topic has been going on since last October, and has accumulated 150 pages of comments.  So there are more than a few people upset about this.

Call me Amish, but it doesn't affect me because my form of a BlackBerry is a three-by-five card.  Or rather, many three-by-five cards.  I suppose if you took all the three-by-five cards I've used in the last decade and piled them up, they would make a stack high enough to fall over and form the kind of mess my desk looks like some days.  In fact, that may be why. . . anyway, somehow I have survived thirty years of an occasionally intense professional life with nothing more advanced than a laptop or two and a mobile phone that you still have to use the numeric keypad for to send a text.  It's so annoying to do it that way that I hardly ever send texts, which is all right by me. 

But seriously, this specific issue is an example of a more general trend that organizations are following: a move toward exerting increasing control of any computer that is connected to one of their networks.  For example, I spend some time at the University of Texas at Austin.  If I was using a University-provided laptop (which I'm not, as it turns out), I would now have to make sure that all the data on it was encrypted in accordance with a University-provided type of encryption software so that if it happens to get stolen, the thieves can't run off with University data.  That makes sense from a liability and security point of view—I have blogged on numerous scandals and crimes that happened when someone took home a laptop full of supposedly secure data—but it represents another intrusion, if you will, into a space that was formerly rather private. 

Of course, if the University owns the laptop, they get to say what you can and can't do with it.  Privately owned computers connected to privately rented networks are another matter, but then you still have to deal with Apple or Microsoft, and their pressure to keep your stuff on the cloud will prove irresistible.  The Star Trek Borg, a race of cybernetic beings, liked to say "resistance is futile," but that was only a TV show.   

Personally, I don't see any real harm in letting Microsoft know the details of my next dental appointment.  And yes, those massive servers go down from time to time, but then so does your laptop.  I admit that I would feel a certain kind of existential queasiness in entrusting the only record of my professional schedule to some ethereal system that is everywhere and nowhere, rather than having it in a tangible, solid form on pieces of paper in my appointment calendar in my briefcase.  (Yes, I do that the old-fashioned way too.)  Maybe people living in the 1850s felt the same way about the newfangled electromagnetic telegrams, and didn't really trust them on an instinctive level as much as they would trust a letter written by the hand of a friend they knew.  But they got used to trusting telegrams, and I suppose we will get used to trusting the cloud, as long as our trust is not abused. 

Sources:  The online version of David Pogue's article "The Curse of the Cloud" can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/were-forced-to-use-cloud-services-but-at-what-cost/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on BlackBerry and Borg (Star Trek). 

Apple, Google, and the Mystery of Music

Back in the dark ages of music reproduction, when state-of-the-art was a plastic box called a cassette tape, yours truly worked for a few summers between college semesters at an audiovisual repair shop.  Most of my time there, I spent in the back room trying to fix recalcitrant tape recorders and players, but once in a while we were short-handed and I actually had to deal with a customer.  One guy I remember in particular.  He had brought in a strange-looking cassette player shaped and colored more or less like a volleyball, and its guts were not cooperating with my attempts to fix it.  One day he stopped in and demanded to see the guy who was actually working on his unit.  I came out to the front counter and tried to explain the problem to him.  He listened patiently, and then all he said was, “Man, I gotta have my music.”

Multiply him by the seven billion or so people on this planet, and you can realize some of the consequences of the fact that music is a universal feature of human culture, and the scale of money to be made by whoever provides music to these masses.  Before mechanical sound reproduction was possible, this was by necessity a retail operation.  Either you made music yourself, which is still the main way to hear music in many parts of the Global South, or you supported a few specialists called musicians, who could entertain as many people at once as could hear the sounds they made—a few thousand at a time at most.  Then came the phonograph, radio, magnetic recording, digital audio, the iPod, and most recently, according to Wired.com, Google and Apple’s attempts to dominate the global supply of streaming music to smartphones. 

Wired reporter Matt Honan admits that music is now a commodity, like gasoline or pork bellies.  The important thing about a commodity is the bulk price that  the distributors pay to the suppliers, which Apple reportedly offered to set at six cents per 100 songs streamed.  If Apple prevailed, that would mean for every song streamed to an individual listener, the entity formerly known as the record label would receive six ten-thousandths of a dollar.  Just a few years ago, when 45-RPM discs were still being sold, royalties might have amounted to as much as a tenth of the cost of a record, say maybe sixty cents.  Of course, you could listen to a record over and over again, but the same is often true of streaming audio.  The point here is that the cash return to the label for each listen has diminished almost to the vanishing point. 

It is not clear that Apple’s low bid will win out, but something close to it probably will.  And in the nature of digital distribution, we will probably end up with one major worldwide supplier of music to the masses, just as Google is the major supplier of search-engine technology.  Is this a bad thing?

It depends on what you think music is for.  Many people I know, especially younger ones, but even including my wife (who turns 57 next Tuesday), view music as a sort of background accessory to their lives, like certain styles of clothing.  The music they listen (or listened) to in their 20s and 30s becomes a part of them, and they select it to accompany or even induce certain moods of relaxation, pleasure, and so on.  For many people, like the gentleman I waited on at the repair shop, life without music is unimaginable, and it forms a continuous undertone to their lives at work and home.  If this is all that music means to you, then it doesn’t matter that much who supplies it, just as the name of your electric utility company probably doesn’t matter to you as long as the price is reasonable and the delivery is reliable.  That’s what dealers in commodities do:  deliver the goods reliably at a reasonable price.

But if you believe music is the most direct path to one’s emotions, in a manner of speaking a direct line to the soul, and can represent the abstraction called beauty, which is one of the “three roads to God” (the other two being truth and goodness)—well, then, the matter becomes a little more serious.  While it is unlikely that Google, Apple, or whoever ends up in charge will discriminate against particular styles of music if such discrimination reduces the bottom line, we can expect censorship to become an issue, especially in countries or regions where restrictive regimes hold power.  In the past, revolutionaries and freedom fighters have used music to great advantage.  In the classic World War II film Casablanca, no one can forget the stirring cafe scene in which a group of German soldiers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” are drowned out by the French patriots singing “La Marseillaise.”  Say Google becomes the music supplier of choice in China, and the government decides that anything with religious or political overtones is not allowed?  Google and Yahoo and other high-tech firms have already kowtowed to the demands of governments for censorship with regard to search-engine results, and why should songs be any different?

Fortunately, anyone with a pair of lungs and vocal cords can make some kind of music or other.  And even now, in secret house churches, in African villages, and anywhere two or more people decide to sing together, the mysterious thing called music is doing its work in putting human beings in touch with the transcendent.  And we don’t need Apple's or Google’s help with that.

Sources:  The Wired.com story “Why There Are So Many Streaming-Music Rumors Right Now” appeared on Mar. 8, 2013 at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/why-there-are-so-many-streaming-music-rumors-right-now/.  My thoughts on music drew inspiration from a talk (downloaded from iTunes!) by Peter Kreeft entitled “Beauty,” which is available at http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm.  And the name of the 19th-century patriotic song that the Germans sing in Casablanca is disclosed at http://www.vincasa.com/indexwacht.html.

A Trip To the Genius Bar

It is a sad fact of life that even the best-engineered system breaks down from time to time.  Hence repairmen (or should I say repair people, these days) are assured of job security, although the types of repairs they make have changed radically over the years.  For a few summers in high school and college, I worked as a repair technician at an audiovisual services shop, fixing tape recorders and dealing mainly with mechanical rather than electrical troubles.  But when my Mac laptop started acting up the other day, I decided to take it to the 2012 version of Mac’s fix-it shop:  the Genius Bar.

That’s an inspired name, by the way, evoking images of a drinking establishment with a bouncer that lets in only MENSA members with IQs above 140.  What it is in fact is a counter at the rear of an Apple retail store in an Austin shopping mall.  I had heard recently that Apple retail stores have the highest sales figures per square foot of store area of any type of mall store, and after visiting one, I believe it.

The display windows showed life-size cutout profiles of two people enjoying some of the latest Mac products.  Just a few minutes after the store opened at 10, it was as crowded as a discount clothing store during tax-free weekend.  And about half the people inside wore identical blue tee-shirts with Mac logos:  the sales staff.  Someone greeted me as soon as I stepped in the door.  I explained that I had gone online and made an appointment for 10:15 at the Genius Bar, and the man referred me to another sales associate, a young woman carrying an iPad (clipboards are so twentieth-century), who looked up my name and said it would be just a few minutes.  I was early, so I didn’t mind waiting.

Customers, or potential customers, were everywhere, trying out the wares displayed on clean, simple white box-like tables or browsing through the accessories for iPads, iPhones, and i don’t know what all else.  I wasn’t in the market for any of those, so I poked around where they had custom-made cases for iPads.  The one I found most amusing was made to look like a codex:  one of those pre-printing-press books with thick hand-painted leather binding.  It gave me the same kind of feeling I had when I first heard a student’s cellphone in my class emit a classic mechanical-bell ringtone.

Pretty soon yet a third salesperson hunted me down.  “Karl?  We’re ready for you, have a seat right here.”  It was just a bare counter with four high stools and barely enough elbow room to separate me from an older woman with a German accent who was explaining what her Macbook Air wasn’t doing right.

My genius (I’ll call him Biff) was a late-twenty-something man who was distinguished from many of the other salespeople by not having any tattoos.  He asked me what the problem was.  I told him my Magic Mouse did all its magic except scrolling, and it wasn’t the mouse because it would scroll fine with my wife’s computer.

He tried some obvious things first.  Logging in as a guest, he discovered that when he did that, the mouse worked.  That was progress, but he explained that all it told him was that some of my custom library and root stuff was corrupted, because when a guest logs in the library is empty.

I will not bore you with what all he tried in the next half hour.  At one point, because no one had mentioned charges or fees, I asked him what this would cost.  “Nothing unless we turn a screw.”  So software fixes were free.  That sounded good.  Every so often he’d spin the computer over to me and ask me to enter my password again.  I must have done that fifteen or twenty times.  It gave me a nice but entirely spurious sense that I was assisting in the repair.

At one point he turned to the fellow genius next to him, an older guy with a short beard, earrings, and many tattoos.  The guy said, “Don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing,” went into some mysterious part of the file system where all the files were labeled with incomprehensible abbreviations like “ertx” and “infpro,” but failed to fix the problem.  My genius reset something on the machine that took a few minutes and excused himself to go in the back and consult with the web, I suppose.

When he came back, I said I supposed they wouldn’t let him work on my machine all day, would they?  Was there a time limit?

“Not a time limit exactly, but a goal.  We can be somewhat flexible, and there’s one more thing I can try.”  Saying thus, he opened some files and started selectively wiping out whole sections.  I got a little nervous and recalled Mark Twain’s saying that “a good horse was a good horse until it had run away once, and a good watch was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it.”  But this wasn’t the first time the machine (a fairly new one) had been in for repairs, so it wasn’t really relevant to the case.

Finally, Biff turned my Mac back to me and said, “Now, one more password entry, and see what it does now.”  Then he tried stroking the mouse’s back, and this time it scrolled.  And we were in my library, not the guest’s empty one.  I congratulated Biff, thanked him for his time, packed up my Mac, and walked through the crowd surging around the thousands of dollars’ worth of retail merchandise I steadfastly refrained from buying, and went about the rest of my day.

Was it ethical for me to take a half hour of a genius’s time and get a repair that probably would have cost me upwards of a hundred dollars at a non-genius shop?  Well, I look at it this way.  If they really sell five thousand dollars a year of stuff from that place for every square foot in it, they seem to think they can afford to give away free software repairs in the back.  And if some customers take advantage of this service without leaving some of their cash behind for other more costly attractions on display, well, it’s just a cost of doing business that way.  I for one thank Apple for being so generous, and only wish there were more Apple retail stores nationwide.  But that would spell trouble for all the other Mac repair shops, so maybe things are just as well the way they are.

 

Sources:  The statistic on retail sales in Mac stores (their figure of $5,647 per square foot, presumably per year, is seventeen times the U. S. mall store average of $341) is from an MSN Money article published on April 19, 2012 at http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=f87ebfd7-fcf1-4bdb-9489-d752d85293b6.  Mark Twain’s comment about horses and watches, which he attributes to his deceased Uncle William, is in his short story, “My Watch.”