Honolulu Completes Internet/Telephone-Only Election

from the how-open-was-it? dept

A few folks have submitted various versions of the news that Honolulu has concluded a city election of council members using only internet or telephone voting. Similar systems have been tried elsewhere, but for the most part, there's been fear to use them more widely in the US, over worries about hacking. Of course, at a time when we still can't even get basic stand-alone e-voting machines to work properly, I think there's still plenty to be worried about before jumping ahead to internet voting. There is a note at the end of the article, saying that the company that provided the technology, called Everyone Counts, says that the code for the systems used in the election are available for auditing. However, a quick glance of the company's website doesn't seem to reveal any code. So unless I'm missing something (in which case, please let us know in the comments!), it sounds like the code isn't open, but only available for auditing by a limited group of folks... just like traditional (buggy, problematic) e-voting systems. Update: And already there are questions about the election. Despite part of the reason for internet voting being that it would get more people involved a tiny 6.3% of the electorate participated raising numerous questions about why... and if the technology miscounted. If people don't trust the technology, they're not going to trust the results either...

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Follow The Bouncing Apple Rumors

from the which-way-did-they-go dept

Tiernan Ray, over at Tech Trade Daily, has an amusing post up explaining the rather circuitous route of a particular Apple rumor found on various Apple rumor sites. Basically, one Apple rumors site claimed a new research report was coming out detailing potential upgrades to various Apple products. But, the problem was that there was no such new report. The research firm in question had actually released a report over a week earlier. And then things got even more mixed up:

Macrumors, in mentioning the phantom report from *today*, cites a PC World article from yesterday, that erroneously references the August 6 note as being analyst comment *today*, meaning, Monday, the date of the PC World article. Even more hilarious, in the Macrumors post, the author says that the phantom report from today about updates to the Mac laptops and iPods is “consistent with whispers we’ve heard.” And he cites … ta da! A post from AppleInsider last week commenting on the original August six note. Oy vey.

So, basically a report from last week is used to confirm a non-existent report from this week, which is actually... the original report from the week before.

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Bell Telephone Patent Was No Poster Child For The Patent System

from the learning-from-history dept

As part of a research project on the history of government regulation, I'm reading a 1975 book about the history of the telephone industry. One of the most interesting things I've been learning about is the central role of the patent system in the telephone's early development. In 1877, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent that effectively gave him a 17-year monopoly over the entire telephone industry. I found the story particularly interesting because it's strikingly at odds with the standard policy argument for the patent system. It's generally claimed that without patents, inventors wouldn't be able to recoup the costs of their inventions. The story of the Bell patents undermines this argument in two ways. First, it's pretty clear that someone else would have invented the telephone within a few years if Bell hadn't done so. Indeed, inventor Elisha Gray famously submitted a preliminary application for his own telephone design a few hours after Bell. But I think an even more serious difficulty for the pro-patent argument is what happened after the Bell patents expired in 1894. Patent supporters assume that competition will rapidly drive the price of a new invention down to the point where an inventor is unable to recoup his investment. But in fact, despite an explosion of new competitors in the 1890s, the American Bell Company maintained its high rates, and its revenues continued to grow every year from 1894 to 1899. It seems that even in competitive markets, there's plenty of room for innovators to turn a profit.

I suspect that part of what was going on was simply that the United States was a big country, even in the 19th century, and there was plenty of room in the market for a number of companies to grow simultaneously. Also, American Bell was demonstrating that innovation is a process, not a burst of innovation. American Bell stayed ahead of its competitors largely by continuing to improve their technology, including adding new long-distance routes and switching from noisy one-wire circuits to much higher-quality two-wire ones. Once it could no longer rely on its patent monopoly, they were forced to stay ahead of competitors by continuously improving their technology. Obviously, consumers are much better off when companies have to compete for their business, rather than simply resting on the strength of a patent monopoly. I've got more discussion of the Bell patent story, and some quotes from the book, at the Technology Liberation Front.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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