The Little Hacker's Room

Stoobalou writes "The people behind VLC, quite probably the most useful media player available right now, have submitted an iPod version to the Apple software police. VLC mdash; which is rightfully famous for having a go at playing just about any kind of audio or video file you care to throw at it mdash; should appear some time next week, if it makes it through the often unfathomable approval process implemented by Apple. The Open Source Video Lan Client has been tweaked to run on the iPod by software developer Applidium."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F1839215%2FOpen-Source-VLC-Media-Player-Coming-To-iPad" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Open+Source+VLC+Media+Player+Coming+To+iPad%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FbNNrNr" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/1839215/Open-Source-VLC-Media-Player-Coming-To-iPad?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782368amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d98f202/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/SWjKrdfor3o" height="1" width="1"/

After our podcast last week, Tim Lee wrote a blog post expanding on our conversation about spectrum policy. I thought I’d take a little space here to respond.

Although we will probably continue to disagree on empirical questions, I think philosophically there is no light between Tim and me. He succinctly expresses our shared view when he writes,

The question advocates of free markets (“extreme” or otherwise) need to ask is not: which property rights should we create? Rather, we need to ask: which set of regulations prevents congestion at the lowest cost in liberty? You want the set of rules that maximizes individual freedom; rules that are clear and predictable and give government officials as little opportunity as possible to make mischief.

Tim and I simply come to different conclusions in our cost-benefit calculation when we look at the competing sets of rules for spectrum.

As Tim points out, radio spectrum is not like sunlight. We can’t use as much of it as we want without congestion. This precludes an open access regime. The question then is, do we create a regime were private actors own the spectrum and make decisions about how to best utilize it? (Government’s only function in this scenario would be to enforce contracts and property rights.) Or do we allow the government to in essence own the spectrum and determine which specific uses will be permitted? (Government in this scenario decides the rules that govern a commons, which is not a trivial matter since it will allow some uses and preclude others.)

So, which regime presents “a lower cost in liberty?” Which one is more “clear and predictable?” Which one presents “government officials as little opportunity as possible to make mischief?” I tend to think the former fits the bill much better than the latter. Tim thinks we can have a little bit of both; that both can be equally efficient. He seems to see little difference between government-as-court and government-as-regulator. I’m less sanguine about government’s ability to set rules for spectrum that get you to the same or better outcome than a property rights regime.

In case there’s any confusion about it, I agree with Tim that free-market principles do not demand that everything be propertized. But in the particular case of spectrum, I believe property and markets are more efficient than either command-and-control allocation or a government commons. And yes, I’m talking about the whole spectrum. Tim identifies the relevant questions to ask in making this determination:

[W]hich set of regulations maximizes the freedom of individuals to use the spectrum as they choose? And which set of regulations will lead to the most efficient utilization of spectrum?

I think the second question informs the first. Without some form of resource allocation, a tragedy of the commons ensues and no one gets to use the spectrum. So, what we need to find is the set of rules that get us the most efficient and most valued uses.

Tim says that my “preferred scheme of exclusive licenses for the entire spectrum doesn’t fit the bill because it puts a thumb on the scale in favor of large, capital-intensive firms that can win multi-billion dollar auctions.” First, I don’t see why this should be the case. The reason why spectrum auctions today fetch billions of dollars in revenue is that the vast majority of the radio spectrum is either in civilian government or military hands, or in private hands but not tradable and limited by law to specific uses. Only a small sliver of it has been auctioned as flexible-use licensed spectrum. In a world of privatized radio frequencies, the auction price of spectrum would fall relative to what we see today.

But putting that aside, how are capital-intensive uses necessarily inconsistent with the most efficient utilization of spectrum? Tim seems to be suggesting that even if people highly value “small-scale, short-range applications like WiFi,” there is no way that a market could provision these. I don’t see why that should be the case. Tim pooh-poohs the notion that a firm (maybe a consortium like the Wi-Fi Alliance?) or a non-profit spectrum conservancy as I have been suggesting could adequately provide the use. He says that such a scheme would be relegated to second-class citizen status, but he doesn’t explain why.

Tim says that what’s needed is a policy that accommodates both long-distance high-powered uses like broadband or wireless backhaul, and short-range low-power commons-type uses like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The sort of property- and market-based policy I have in mind is exactly that.

Tim also says that a “decision that all spectrum will be exclusively licensed is a government choice whose consequences can’t be fully corrected by subsequent market transactions.” First, what are these problematic consequences that will need correction? Second, if correcting them means that government needs to have control over some of the spectrum, it always has the power of eminent domain. In a spectrum market setting, we would have a much better sense of the true opportunity cost of placing spectrum under government management. Because it would have to pay just compensation for what it takes, the government would have to internalize the true costs of its decisions. And of course government can avoid using a takings. I can imagine a big-bang spectrum auction where the government is one of the bidders for some of the spectrum—again, fully internalizing the true cost of the spectrum.

Finally, I hope it’s clear why I’m so skeptical of government’s ability to manage a spectrum efficiently. It’s for all the reasons Tim masterfully lays out when he talks about bottom-up solutions generally being superior to top-down ones. Government planners do not have the information or incentives to set the most efficient rules. Worse, it’s likely that the rule-setting process is corruptible so that one possible set of rules is favored over another for political reasons. And talk about correcting unintended consequences. I’m pretty sure Tim will agree markets tend to be more speedy than bureaucracies.

An explosive EastEnders storyline which will lead to the departure of Peggy Mitchell, played by Barbara Windsor, has begun.

La prise de médicaments contre l'insomnie et l'anxiété augmente de 36% le risque de mortalité, montrent des travaux menés à l'École de psychologie de l'Université Laval.

A court says federal funding for US stem cell research can continue until a final legal decision on the matter.

Belgium's court rules that recent raids by police probing alleged child sex abuse by Catholic priests were illegal, throwing the investigation into doubt.

MPs back calls for a fresh parliamentary investigation into phone hacking claims after criticism of News of the World journalists.

Dans une entrevue accordée à un journaliste du magazine américain The Atlantic, Fidel Castro affirme que le modèle économique cubain n'est plus viable et que le temps est venu d'y apporter des réformes.

Police are offering a £10,000 reward in their search for a man wanted in connection with the murder of a teenager in Cardiff.

cgriffin21 writes "T-Mobile Thursday finally confirmed what it's been hinting at for a while: The HTC G2, T-Mobile's HSPA+ successor to the HTC G1, is on the way. It'll be an Android 2.2 phone and run on T-Mobile's HSPA+ data network, which while not a 4G network offers what T-Mobile is calling 4G-like speeds up to 21 Mbps. T-Mobile hasn't confirmed pricing or exact availability but said it would open the G2 to presales for existing customers at the end of September."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmobile.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F189228%2FT-Mobile-To-Begin-HTC-G2-Preorders" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=T-Mobile+To+Begin+HTC+G2+Preorders%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FavfB6l" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/189228/T-Mobile-To-Begin-HTC-G2-Preorders?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782338amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d98b746/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Mf1XXwjbAnqyb4nf4w8Weg-fIDo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Mf1XXwjbAnqyb4nf4w8Weg-fIDo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Mf1XXwjbAnqyb4nf4w8Weg-fIDo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Mf1XXwjbAnqyb4nf4w8Weg-fIDo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/cJ26of1RH6U" height="1" width="1"/

President Obama calls a small church's plan to burn the Koran a "recruitment bonanza" for al-Qaeda, while Interpol warns a violent response is likely.

Tootech writes "In a case of 'physician, heal thyself,' the agency mdash; which forms the operational arm of DHS's National Cyber Security Division, or NCSD mdash; failed to keep its own systems up to date with the latest software patches. Auditors working for the DHS inspector general ran a sweep of US-CERT using the vulnerability scanner Nessus and turned up 1,085 instances of 202 high-risk security holes. 'The majority of the high-risk vulnerabilities involved application and operating system and security software patches that had not been deployed on computer systems located in Virginia,' reads the report from assistant inspector general Frank Deffer."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fyro.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F136204%2FDHS-CyberSecurity-Misses-1085-Holes-On-Own-Network" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=DHS+CyberSecurity+Misses+1085+Holes+On+Own+Network%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F8Y37R1" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/136204/DHS-CyberSecurity-Misses-1085-Holes-On-Own-Network?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1781978amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d985108/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TOSziP3jXbrc_oqXMsx-kbbzDXc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TOSziP3jXbrc_oqXMsx-kbbzDXc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TOSziP3jXbrc_oqXMsx-kbbzDXc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TOSziP3jXbrc_oqXMsx-kbbzDXc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/NzI5SvCBGxE" height="1" width="1"/

Rahmmp writes "Adobe has sounded an alarm for a new zero-day flaw in its PDF Reader/Acrobat software, warning that hackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability in-the-wild. An Adobe spokeswoman described the attacks as 'limited' but warned that that could change with the availability of public samples and exploit code."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fit.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F157246%2FNew-Adobe-PDF-Zero-Day-Under-Attack" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=New+Adobe+PDF+Zero-Day+Under+Attack%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F8Z7loO" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/157246/New-Adobe-PDF-Zero-Day-Under-Attack?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782110amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d97e164/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Fzbd67JOdy3n43OQi6GAsMFxf5o/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Fzbd67JOdy3n43OQi6GAsMFxf5o/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Fzbd67JOdy3n43OQi6GAsMFxf5o/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Fzbd67JOdy3n43OQi6GAsMFxf5o/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/9t4vzal4TKM" height="1" width="1"/

I'm happy that Amy Crehore alerted me to the macabre animation of artist Joe Seigenthaler.

See more of Seigenthaler's work after the jump.

MSPs claimed a record amount of expenses last year, with payments totalling almost £11.7m.

Le président américain qualifie de «destructeur» et de «contraire aux valeurs de l'Amérique» le projet du pasteur Terry Jones de brûler des corans samedi, en mémoire des victimes du 11 septembre 2001.

A man who texted two lovers with messages of affection on the day he killed his wife of nearly 26 years is jailed for life.

Mary, a pregnant Consumerist reader, says that TSA screeners at O'Hare forced her to use a full-body scanner, refusing her repeated requests for a full-body pat-down.

Last year, I reviewed Peter and Max, the excellent novel based on Bill Willingham's Fables graphic novels. I've just got through listening to the Brilliance Audio unabridged audiobook, read by nerd icon and kick-ass voice-actor Wil Wheaton. Highly, highly recommended: Wil's interpretation makes this feel more like a radio drama than an audiobook.

wiedzmin writes "This month, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops, will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number for 'anytime, anywhere' biometric authentication. While enrolling with the UIDAI may be voluntary, other agencies and service providers might require a UID number in order to transact business. Usha Ramanathan, a prominent legal expert who is attached to the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in the national capital, said that, 'taken to its logical limit, the UID project will make it impossible, in a couple of years, for an ordinary citizen to undertake a simple task such as traveling within the country without a UID number.' Next step, tying that UID number and biometric information to to their RIM BlackBerry PIN number."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fyro.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F0024239%2FBiometric-IDs-For-Every-Indian-Citizen" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Biometric+IDs+For+Every+Indian+Citizen%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Fd1bEnV" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/0024239/Biometric-IDs-For-Every-Indian-Citizen?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1781384amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d985bf5/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/S5n65N_gnyBGc1NvTnJ0CBskoBw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/S5n65N_gnyBGc1NvTnJ0CBskoBw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/S5n65N_gnyBGc1NvTnJ0CBskoBw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/S5n65N_gnyBGc1NvTnJ0CBskoBw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/R8XYh_bGQRs" height="1" width="1"/