ASYLUM

* Counterpoint

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An AIDS researcher has an alternative viewpoint on the previous article. Raises some good points; although I'd pick up on one thing:

Too much is missing [...] why the lack of specificity?

Well, the article was the written equivilent of a trailer, for a documentary the BBC showed on TV the other night (which I missed, I'm afraid, so I can't tell you if the required details were there or not), so, well, yes, it would be light on detail.

This doesn't diminish the other good points though.

* Protection

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled geekfest to bring you this disturbing news.

The BBC is reporting that HIV+ children were taken into care by the ACS — New York City's Administration for Children's Services, who's job is to protect children in the city — and forcibly subjected to experimental and highly-dangerous drug trials.

"We were told that if they were vomiting, if they lost their ability to walk, if they were having diarrhoea, if they were dying, then all of this was because of their HIV infection." — paediatric nurse Jacklyn Hoerger

However, according to the Beeb, it was Glaxo-SmithKline's drugs that were making the children ill; Dr David Rasnick describes some of them simply as "lethal" while others have "serious, serious side-effects."

Of course, there are always risks involved in medical trials, but that's why there are safeguards in place and trials are conducted on volunteers who are informed of the risks involved and decide to go ahead anyway.

Here, the children had no choice; their parents, relatives or guardians were not informed. If they discovered what was going on, and tried to take their kids off the drugs, the ACS simply took legal guardianship of the children allowing them to do as they wished:

Jacklyn, a trained paediatric nurse [took] the children off the drugs, which [...] resulted in an immediate boost to their health and happiness. As a result she was branded a child abuser in court. She has not been allowed to see the children since. [...] Over 23,000 of the city's children are either in foster care or independent homes run mostly by religious organisations on behalf of the local authorities and almost 99% are black or hispanic. — BBC report

At one such home, "Incarnation", run by the Catholic Church, children who refused the poisonous drugs had a tube inserted into their stomach to force them.

History Repeating

This isn't the first time medical trials have been carried out people without their knowledge. While the UK is not exactly innocent of conducting unethical tests on people under cover of the Official Secrets Act, they were enlisted men, and adults, and they knew they were taking part in tests even if they didn't know what was going on precisely. None of which excuses the behaviour, it's still appalling, but compared to force-feeding lethal drugs into orphan children and telling them it's making them better... well. Shit. It takes serious fucking dedication and years of practice to get more evil than that.

But the USA has a long history of systematically medically abusing people. There's the MKULTRA drug trials, conducted by the CIA, and dismessed as 'crank conspiracy theories' for about 20 years, until records were finally released — those that hadn't been illegally destroyed — that proved that actually, yes, unsuspecting civillians were doped up with drugs in an attempt to discover a 'truth serum'. Including orphan children. Ladies and Gentleman, We Have A Precedent — although, in light of this recent news, the last couple of paragraphs of that article ring decidedly hollow.

There's also the infamous Tuskegee case, which is the textbook reference for medical ethics classes. It took until Clinton's presidency for the US Government to apologise for that, along with a whole slew of secret radiation experiments — which, again, after several decades, the government finally released data on — only to yank it again after 11 September 2001.

It's a good job all those safeguards were put into place to stop anything like it ever happening again, right?

And breathe...

* Hi-frequency Hi-jinks

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So, this recent spate of Politechesque posts was actually kicked off by a piece of news I dropped into del.icio.us a few days ago, but I'm just now getting round to commenting on it.

If you've read the previous post, or you're just l33t, you'll know about how a chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum — that stuff like light, or heat, or rawwk radio — was auctioned off. Well, as it happens, the part of the UK government that decides these things has just announced a complete rethink of how they regulate the spectrum.

So why do you care about all this anyway? Because — in the long term — it affects things like:

• What music you can listen to on the radio and who gets to choose

• Ditto for satellite & 'terrestrial' television (but not cable)

• How much your mobile phone call charges are

• What kind of services and features you can expect from your mopho

• How fast your laptop can connect to the internet and how much it costs

• How well your devices can talk to each other and who decides what they're allowed to say. (More on this in the next post.)

And that's just the obvious effects on present-day devices. It also effects who can invent new technology and whether they're able to bring their inventions to market.

And my point in writing all this? The short of it is: It's good that spectrum allocation is being shaken up, but I am suspicious of how they're going about it. The long of it is... well, here we go again...

Background Radiation

As I mentioned before — but didn't expain why — there are currently controls on who can use what frequencies. A huge chunk, about 30%, is reserved by the military. The rest is chopped up, parceled and doled out according to ancient assumptions about radio technology, primarily concerned with interference.

You see, when radio was new, the technology clunky, and involved glowing tubes that looked bad-ass but didn't sound so hot, it was difficult to be accurate about what frequency you broadcast or listened on. Signals packed too close together would interfere with each other. So we cut the spectrum up into chunks, each chunk wide enough that an inaccurate signal wouldn't spill over into the next one, and handed out the chunks to people who needed them — or rather, people who paid big wads of cash for 'licences' to use them. The biggest spenders are radio, TV, and as previously discussed, mopho cell networks.

(Some is allocated to special groups such as emergency services. This is probably a good thing, and this portion — about 20% — is not being changed in the shakeup.)

Trouble in Paradigms

The logic behind this was a classic 'market forces' reading of the situation: given a limited resource (spectrum), hand it out to the highest bidders, since they theoretically represent the most efficient use of it. Otherwise they'd have less money to spend on spectrum, right? People spend money on things they find of value to them, so lots of value = lots of people spending money = lots of cash to buy spectrum licences.

Of course, 'market forces' rarely actually work the way they're supposed to. It's a cute theory, but there are always external factors acting on 'the market' that break the system. How severely it's broken depends on the financial, legal and political environment.

A typical sequence of events is to start out with a wide spread of healthy competition, but then have big chunks of the market merge with each other (or just get hoovered up by the most moneyed) until you have just a handful of major players, none of whom have an interest in rocking the boat.

If the environment prevents young whippersnappers from strutting in and causing trouble — usually due to a 'gatekeeper' rule, technology, monopoly or just a huge financial investment required to join the game — then your 'market forces' are dead. They've been killed by a de facto cartel, even if no anti-monopoly rules are actually broken; working wholly independently, the companies will clearly still act in their own self-interest. Don't rock the boat.

Property Values

Examples can be seen in radio, tv, popular music, telephony (mobile and traditional landline), game publishing, and cable TV/internet. Gatekeepers (aka barriers to entry) in these markets vary but include patents, spectrum licences, exclusive content deals, retail shelfspace and marketing muscle. Or "broadcast rights" that allow use of materials to be controlled by those radio-broadcast monopolies. See how all these posts are starting to tie together? Great!

Okay, so what about these changes? Well, if you followed those links at the start, you're way ahead of me on this, but essentially Ofcom is allowing companies to sell chunks of spectrum (that were previously licenced from Ofcom) to other companies.

This is portrayed as a positive step:

"In the past we have had a command and control approach in which we hold the keys and dole them out to people we think deserve it most [...] The new approach is that we are not going to say who should use it or tell them how to use it" — Ofcom spokesman

Except that while Ofcom might not decide precisely who uses it, they're still saying some one company will have exclusive use — and that company will be the one with the deepest pockets for acquiring bandwidth.

This new situation seems worryingly like a property right to me. Instead of having that money given to the government as a payment for permission to broadcast, it appears to have become a purchase, with each chunk of spectrum now belonging to the company to do with as they see fit. Previously, the licences carried with them certain stipulations; this is because as a valuable shared resource that belongs to us all if we lent some spectrum to a company to use, we expected them to use it to our benefit.

Why is a property-right worrying? Historically, whenever people are granted property-rights, in something that isn't actually property in the physical-lump-of-atoms sense, its not-actually-property origins seem to get forgotten. Instead, that property right tends to be seen over time as an absolute moral imperative (heh), and become extended and strengthened, ultimately without limit. (Don't even get me started on how the patent system has been corrupted.)

And what happens when Clear Channel buys it all? Quiet, Friend Citizen!

Radio Activity

The other, non-political problem with this is that its view of technology is hideously out-of-date. Transceivers are no longer made of glowing tubes, thwomming big, fuzzy-glaring beams of radio into the sky like the Bat Signal. Smart radio is here. Software radio is here. Spread spectrum has been gaining ground for fifty years now. There are a myriad ways of making spectrum-use more efficient.

Example: in the UK (and most of the world outside the USA), for the past few years, radio stations have been slowly moving away from traditional bands like FM and starting to broadcast using a standard called DAB.

(The USA, of course, invented it's own special standard, called IBOC, that's special, because it was invented in the USA, and is not standardised with the rest of the world. Ahem.)

Anyway, DAB uses spread-spectrum radio to transmit something they call a 'multiplex' — a single transmission that actually contains around a dozen radio stations — each one digitally encoded and compressed to make efficient use of bandwidth. Your radio just picks out the one you care about. They can even fit a few web pages into the leftovers, although hardly anyone has equipment that can receive that.

We can now weave low-power signals in and out of existing radio signals, too quiet to interfere with them, but loud enough to be picked up by smart receivers that know what and where to look. We can program radios to listen carefully before they start to speak, waiting for silences and modulating their voices to suit the environment around them. Polite radios.

Because the radios are software, if someone discovers a new, more efficient way of getting bits of data from A to B, it doesn't necessarily obsolete millions of existing radios — you just fetch the latest patch.

Some wide-eyed hippies even suggest that radio bandwidth is not scarce at all, may even be a function of processing power — so that if each radio has a certain amount of CPU available to it, more radios equals more bandwidth (due to the power of collaboration — the work of discerning the environment and sculpting suitable signals being shared out amongst many radios) not less (due to overcrowding).

Personally, I don't have the radio engineering nadgers to tell if this is true or not — and from what I can tell, a lot of radio engineers seem to disagree with each other on the subject anyway. But even if it's not the case, it seems like working towards that goal will still give us vastly better bandwith usage than our current model of selling 6-lane highways cut through our natural resources for monopolies to drive narrow sports cars down.

Unlicentious

So if the current situation is inefficient, and the new proposals have a suspiciously monopolistic tint to them, what else is there?

Well, the hippies suggest unlicenced spectrum is the way to go. Don't allocate channels to companies at all. Let everyone share it. Free spectrum, man!

Is this wise? Will it work? It sounds suspiciously like communism. Beards may be involved. Get the Pinkertons on the case, dammit. And obviously those who've paid billions for licences and have an oligopoly to look after think it's a bad idea.

Well. Let's see. The region around 2.4Ghz had been given up as useless for quite some time, because microwave ovens cause a whole bunch of interference there. Noone wanted it. So the regulatory agencies in several countries (and, eventually, most of them) said, "Ah, to hell with — you can do whatever you want in this band, as long as you're quiet about it. No shouting 2.4Ghz all the way from Land's End to John O'Groats."

Turns out, modern techniques can get quite a lot out of 2.4Ghz.

This band is now where WiFi and Bluetooth live. According to reports, 33 million WiFi units shipped last year, with steady growth predicted, and a market worth $3.7bn by 2007.

(It's worth noting that while analysts keep predicting A Great Future For Bluetooth, it only shipped 2 million units in the same period. Why isn't it as successful as WiFi? I'll get back to you on that.)

This is in a junk band, remember, given up for scrap and scavenge, on which anyone can broadcast anything. Despite predictions of doom and generalised fearmongering, this experiment in letting people just get the hell on with it, has actually been wildly successful.

How can it possibly work? Surely it's a recipe for anarchy, for dangerous subversives flooding the airwaves with crazy-talk?

The important thing to bear in mind is that it's not throwing away all rules. It is not anarchy — you would run into all sorts of problems with bad behaviour, people gettings into 'arms races' of trying to broadcast louder and louder to drown out their neighbours, for instance. You still need to regulate the spectrum.

But instead of regulating it by saying "Only this guy can use it," you regulate it by setting ground rules on how you use it — essentially saying "Kids, you can all use it if you play nice. Don't fight. Be most excellent to each other. Dudes."

Still. Different people want to do different things. Some people want to talk to other people, some want to get their email, some want to open their garage door, some want to figure out where they are, some want to synchronize their cellphone to their computer's address book, some want to make sure their baby's OK, some want to send distress signals (and some just do so by accident), and some just want to cook their dinner. Won't these requirements clash?

The thing to recognise here is that, dinner aside (which is just a matter of adequately shielding the oven) all these things are the same, when viewed in the abstract.

No matter what they look or sound like when you use them, every single one is about shuffling some bits of digital data from point A to B. One thing can rule them all, and in the wireless bind them.

And more of that in the next article.

* Mopho: TNG

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Here in the UK, and in most of the world except the US, we've been using a digital mobile phone standard called GSM for quite a while now. This post, when it gets around to it, is about what comes next. Sort-of.

(The USA, of course, invented it's own special standard, called CDMA, that's special, because it was invented in the USA, and is not standardised with the rest of the world.)

Because it's a standard, a modern GSM mopho will work anywhere in Europe, in the world even (outside the USA — although there are some pockets of GSM service there too) and because everything interconnects, no matter which network you or the person you want to communicate with is on, you can send/receive calls, SMS, photos, and more modern features like GPRS always-on mobile internet access, anywhere developed-enough to support it.

(Hell, half the undeveloped world has it too, because it's quicker, cheaper and easier to throw up some cell towers than to dig trenches and drape copper wires across the land like strings of fairy-lights. The lucky funsters can receive offers to Make Money Fast And Enlarge Their Penii even in the People's Democratic Free Nation of Outer Buttfuckistan.)

Of course, you'll pay golden beachballs through the arsehole for the service, but that's down to a combination of greed, spectrum-license monopolies and, in the UK at least, the infamous 3G Spectrum Auction.

Spectrum 4.8Ghz

For the uninitiated, spectrum licenses are nothing to do with the old rubbery Sinclair computers. They're all about who can use radio, and on what channels. Not just radio, either, because as you get to higher or lower frequencies than your FM band, you start to fall into other stuff — first of all other radio bands, like AM, or VHF/UHF (television), but also microwaves, for instance, or light, or X-rays, or infra-red. It's all part of the same electromagnetic spectrum.

There'll be more on the subject of spectrum, licenses, monopolies, and the rationale of auctioning it off, later in this continuing series. For now, I'm just going to talk about the 3G Spectrum Auction.

The Auction

A certain frequency-band (set of 'radio channels') was set aside for use by a new kind of mopho technology: 3G, or "Third Generation", which can send more data, faster, than existing phones. Permission to use these was auctioned off. Not eBay, or any old wave-your-hand-in-the-air auction either, but a new kind of auction specially-designed by game theorists and economists to extract the maximum amount of money from potential 3G licensees, by setting the rules up to pit them against each other in cunning ways, and even running simulations of bidding patterns to see what might happen.

A surprisingly smart move by the government in some ways — pulling game theory out of their arse and putting it to practical use, who'da thunk it? — and from a money-raising point-of-view, it was wildly successful.

It raised — and remember, this is just for a tiny, cold, rainy island in the north atlantic, they have to buy seperate licenses for many european countries — £22.5 billion. Let's say that again, this time in italic type: £22.5 billion. You're allowed to hold your pinkie-finger to your mouth like Dr. Evil, if you like.

This was through a combination of:

• cunning auction design

• marketing the hell out of 3G — all the other cool kids will be using it! You don't want to be the only mopho network without it, do you? What kind of loser network would that make you? Huh? Huh?

• this last one was just lucky: at the time, stock in communications companies was sky high, carried aloft by the glistening irridescent blink-tags of the internet bubble.

The Fallout

Of course, the bubble burst. Worse, no-one really cares about 3G. I'll get into why in a day or two. For now, I'll just state that there's no compelling reason to upgrade — it offers nothing consumers care about — and doesn't have as wide coverage as GSM. So they blew all that money for nothing. Their chicks may or may not be for free, we have no figures on that.

I have no sympathy for them — they were greedy control-freaks beforehand and are still greedy control-freaks now, and if they had any sense, they'd have done their market and due-dilligence research and been rational about what they spent.

But as a result, the 3G auction 'windfall' is actually just passed on to us — I think some people like to call that a 'stealth tax'. Mopho companies are trying to dig themselves out of their foolish debt by gouging the hell out of existing users.

Plus, they're desperate to 'protect their investment', so it's no surprise that, for instance, the UK's biggest WiFi hotspot networks are owned by telephone companies, and overpriced to ensure they aren't competetive. Again, this is a topic I'll return to. This multi-part essay is hypertextastic. Or something that rhymes with it.

* Broadcast Anomalies

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Over the next few posts I'm going to be bitching about radio, broadcasting, end-to-end and other such geek whinging. Just so you know.

Currently, the WIPO is trying to ramrod through legislation that invents a completely new intellectual property right: The Broadcast Right. What this "Right" (wrong) will do, is give a broadcaster rights over material they transmit — even if they don't own it. Even if nobody owns it, if it's public-domain. Funnily enough, I consider this a bad idea. The supposed reason is to prevent "signal theft" (people getting cable/satellite tv service without paying for it), but that's clearly a pretext.

It's a little like UPS demanding to own stuff which they couriered to you — even after the delivery's been fully paid-for and the package dropped off — and claiming it's to solve the problem of people not paying their UPS accounts or trying to get parcels delivered for free. Can you smell something?

Well, the EFF and others were there to lobby against this, for the obvious reasons. Blogger, author and EFF outreach coordinator Cory Doctorow amongst them, writing down the whole thing. Their documents were stolen and trashed by their opponents. WIPO rules were suddenly changed, meaning they couldn't photocopy new handouts at WIPO; and then trundled off to form a Diplomatic Conference which apparently excludes non-governmental groups like the EFF from attending.

Neat! Like n00b roleplaying GMs, they're railroading the players, changing the rules, and when all else fails, packing up their toys and going home.

La la la la la we can't hear you...

Anyway, this is all about lockout and barriers to entry, a subject I expect I shall be returning to soon...