A Software Problem

The Librarian is a fan of British TV. Not all of it, of course, but series such as Sherlock (with Martin Freeman as the definitive Dr. Watson and that nerd-throb Benedict Cumberbatch) and Downton Abbey. A source of frustration for her is that these programs are released by the BBC months before they show up on this side of the Atlantic. The BBC actually blocks people with U.S. IP (Internet Provider) addresses from streaming the programs. American viewers don't get to see them until PBS broadcasts them stateside, months later.

Enter IP spoofing. There is software available that fools the BBC servers (or any servers, for that matter) with a false UK address. Now we can watch television with actual plot and character development at the same time as Londoners.

There’s a similar problem with UK musical artists. The UK release of these performers generally predates the U.S. release by a month. The answer for a faithful U.S. fan is paradoxical: Download the music from a pirate site for free when the music is released, and then buy it a month or so later when it is legally available here.

The recording companies don’t seem to get the fact that once a piece of music or video is in digital format it is inevitably going to be released into the electronic wild. It’s not a plastic disc in a box anymore.

Some artists have realized this. Radiohead was first in line among major bands, self-releasing their 2007 album In Rainbows online, allowing people to pay whatever price they wanted. After a few months they released an actual boxed set CD, which sold well enough to hit #1 on the U.S. and UK charts. Estimates for their take from the online offer vary between $2.4 million and $10 million, none of which went towards the salaries of recording company executives.

Other artists have followed suit. Amanda Palmer used the online project funding site Kickstarter to raise money for her new album Theatre Is Evil. She broke Kickstarter’s fundraising record with a $1.2 million take. Donors get various perks, including special preview releases. Palmer gets to do the album she really wants, and delivers her art to her fans without the recording company producers as intermediaries.

In the U.S., mobile phones are connected to particular carriers. If Verizon coverage is the best in your area you might buy a Verizon-compatible iPhone or one of the Verizon-compatible Android-based phones, or a simple feature phone, again, compatible with Verizon. Same goes for AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile. Some of these carriers use a system called CDMA and some use a system called GSM, but even within those systems you can’t switch a phone to a different carrier.

This is not the case in Europe. A mobile phone is just a mobile phone. If you want to sign up with a carrier you buy their SIM card (a little plastic chip that sticks into your phone) and start paying them. If you want to switch to a different carrier you buy a different SIM card and sign up with some other company. This lack of a phone lock in results in more competition and, therefore, lower prices.

An example from the Verizon website: 900 minutes, 2 GB of data and unlimited text messaging costs $110 per month. Checking in on the Vodafone UK website, the exact same plan costs 46 Pounds, or $73 per month. A similar plan on T-Mobile UK (900 min., 5000 texts, 1.5 GB) is 35 Pounds or $56 per month. The best price I could find was with a carrier called O2: Unlimited calling, unlimited texts, 1 GB of data, and a free 16GB iPhone for 30 Pounds or $48 per month. A customer can fold in the price of a new phone into the plan or buy a cheaper SIM-only plan for an existing phone.

(I just did the math. 5000 texts per month is one every six minutes for 16 hours per day. Does anyone actually do that? What else could they possibly accomplish?)

Mobile phone companies in the UK also have a wider variety of plans with more combinations of features than their U.S. counterparts. Such are the benefits of unlocked phones. You’d think that a Federal Communications Commission or a Congress concerned with the financial well-being of the citizenry would outlaw the locking of mobile phones. Oh, right, “concerned with the financial well-being of the citizenry.” Never mind.

Those of you who are technically savvy have been waving your hands and bouncing up and down in your chairs like that smart kid in math class. Of course, the million code monkeys out there pounding away on a million keyboards have come up with an answer. There are software packages out there that you can use to unlock your phone. There are businesses where you can send your phone to be professionally unlocked. Even the CDMA/GSM divide is being bridged by new quad-band phones that can run on all the U.S. and European systems. It’s cheaper for the phone manufacturers to make, distribute, and support one model with all the capabilities built into the chip instead of a different model for each system.

Right now the process is kind of an edgy thing and the buyer must beware. A phone can end up “bricked” instead of unlocked, and the warranty is voided by such shenanigans. Things keep developing, however. With the advent of the quad band phone it became a software problem, and software only requires brains and time. My prediction is that unlocking will become more mainstream and reliable. Just as the record companies got caught flat footed by online digital music distribution, I foresee the mobile phone monopsony being flummoxed by the unlocking issue. I can imagine them throwing huge resources into security software in a hopeless attempt to stop the million code monkeys.

The common thread between music and mobile phones is that once information is reduced to electronic bits the ability of authorities to control that information becomes compromised.

This brings me to electronic voting machines. Most of those machines are manufactured by one of three companies: Sequoia, ES&S, and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold). There are two basic types. Card readers do exactly that – the voter fills out a specially formatted ballot and feeds it into a machine that reads it and records the vote. DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machines have a touch screen with a virtual ballot on it. Votes are recorded electronically and sometimes a paper record of the vote is produced. About 25% of voters in this election will be using DRE machines with no paper record of their vote. Without a paper trail the integrity of those votes relies entirely on the security of the voting system computers. The software that runs these systems is considered proprietary by the manufacturers, so the voting machines essentially become impenetrable black boxes. Except, of course, to hackers.

Electronic voting systems have been plagued by failures. Voters have watched as their vote selection flipped form one party to another. In some districts thousands of electronic ballots have disappeared. In other districts vote counts have exceeded the actual population. In New Mexico the number of spoiled ballots in majority Hispanic (read: Democratic) districts rose dramatically when touch screen machines were introduced and then dropped again when paper ballots returned. In both 2004 and 2008 there were statistically significant discrepancies between exit polling and the official results. And those are just the problems we know about.

 I guess that is the real problem with electronic voting – it is almost impossible to know if we’ve been cheated. Two-thirds of Americans are now voting with paper ballots, or at least paper records. However, in the tight races we have been witnessing even a couple of percentage points in a swing state can make the difference. One doesn’t have to steal the entire vote, just the important bits.

The problem with hand counted paper ballots is that they are time consuming and bulky. The beauty of hand counted paper ballots is the same as their faults. Yes, they are time consuming and bulky. If some group wants to steal an election they literally have to steal physical objects. Stuffing the ballot boxes requires that physical copies of ballots have to be produced, filled out, transported, and placed into many breached physical boxes. Faking a vote count requires suborning a number of people, all of whom have to keep their mouths shut. It has been done many times in American history, but it takes real effort and is generally detected.

A number of European countries have experimented with electronic voting. Both Ireland and the Netherlands tried it and went back to paper. Other countries, such as Germany, simply banned electronic voting.

There are many reforms needed in U.S. politics. One vital reform is keeping our ballots physical and our ballot counters human.

Then, perhaps, we could get a consumer friendly FCC and cheap mobile phone service.