Slashdot Mirror

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NYTimes reports that Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, has studied Apple's financial statements and come to the conclusion that AT&T is paying Apple $18 a month, on average, for each iPhone sold by Apple and activated on AT&T's network — up to $432 over a two-year contract. This shows how much incentive Apple has to maintain its exclusive deal with AT&T rather than to sell unlocked phones or cut deals with multiple carriers. Last week Apple disclosed that 250,000 iPhones had been purchased but not registered with ATT that Apple thinks are being unlocked so Apple has now taken action to curb unauthorized resellers by limiting sales of the iPhone to two per customer and requiring that purchases must now be made with a credit or debit card — cash will not be accepted." The latter article links to a US Treasury page explaining the incorrectness of the widely-held belief that cash cannot be refused for any transaction.

securitas writes: "The Electronic Privacy Information Center is suing the US government over its contracts with companies that are data-mining and profiling citizens' personal information for law enforcement agencies like the FBI, DEA, INS, IRS and ATF. ChoicePoint and Experian '...sell information on [individual] U.S. citizens, including credit information, property records, state motor vehicle records, marriage and divorce data' and international assets. The question that springs to mind is who else has access to these detailed profiles besides the government, now that massively expanded investigative powers are being used following 9/11?"

Connecticut's politicians, like those in the rest of the country, range from the reasonably rational to the ignorant and manipulative. Last week saw performances by both varieties. Gov. John G. Rowland last week vetoed an anti-video game bill barring children under 18 from playing "point-and-shoot" video games in public places. The legislation, passed by a wide margin in the Connecticut legislature, was even by gaming-phobia standards so brazenly stupid and blatantly unconstitutional that it calls into serious question its sponsors fitness to hold public office. It shreds any notion of First Amendment freedom. It removes parental responsibility for children's moral and recreational lives, mis-guidedly assigning that role to government and the operators of small businesses. (Read more.)

Notice, too, the ignorance of how video games are used, by whom, and to what effect. Only a small fraction of gamers use point-and-shoot games any more. Meanwhile, violence among the young has been dropping for several years, not rising. And there is no significant or credible evidence linking point-and-shoot games with youth violence, anyway.

No less an authority than the U.S. Secret Service cautions in a special study of school shootings that it's dangerous to generalize about the causes of violence among kids. "The use of profiles is not effective either for identifying students who may pose a risk for targeted violence at school or -- once a student has been identified -- for assessing the risk that a particular student may pose for school-based targeted violence." The Secret Service study cited bullying and harassment as a primary cause of the recent spate of school attacks, and made no mention of video games in general (or point-and-shoot games in particular) as a cause of school violence. You can read the report for yourself. Too bad State Sen. Toni Harp hasn't.

Harp, a New Haven Democrat and the bill's main sponsor, predictably ripped Governor Rowland for pledging to veto her inane legislation. She told the Hartford Courant newspaper that she hopes Connecticut doesn't experience a "tragedy like Columbine, because then he can take some responsibility." Sen. Harp, the mother of three apparently unfortunate children, argues that "these are games that train people to kill." Nowhere in her proposed bill or public statements did she offer any factual support of that foolish and demonstrably false statement. But many of her fellow legislators didn't appear to notice or care, sending this message to kids: lawmakers know nothing about the contemporary world, and rarely follow even minimal standards of research, accuracy or integrity.

Harp first introduced her bill -- which passed by an 82 to 63 vote --in l999, just weeks after the Columbine killings. It would require business owners to control video gaming the same way they restrict sales of cigarettes (at least there's substantial medical research supporting the idea that tobacco is unhealthy) and liquor, by prohibiting anyone under 18 from playing games that involve firing simulated guns at simulated human beings. Operators of public video-game outlets would have faced fines up to $1,000 for letting minors grab the joysticks for games Sen. Harp considers violent and distatesful.

Under her bill -- you can't make this up -- minors could kill simulated aliens and animals at will, however. As for other "weapons," the bill doesn't address violent games that don't involve guns. There must be something in the state's drinking water. U.S. Senator and former vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman has introduced legislation in the U.S. Congress that would make it a federal crime to show R-rated movie trailers in any place where children might possibly see them.

"We've got to realize that we can't legislate everyting under the sun," said Gov. Rowland, himself the father and stepfather of five kids under 16. "It's too much big government, it's too much Big Daddy. Let's send a message to parents that, 'Hey there are some games out there that are pretty ugly, and why don't you go see what your kids are doing?" Rowland also noticed that the bill would be a nightmare to enforce, if it were even possible. We are shocked by this kind of logic from public officials, even though the idea that parents ought to yank their kids out of video game parlors for playing point and shoot games is still pretty inane.

If Sen. Harp knew anything at all about the evolution of gaming, she might re-consider her stance. If point-and-shoot games actually turned kids into murderers, there would be few people under 18 left alive in the United States.

Americans now name video games as their favorite form of entertainment, according to one recent survey by the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA). TV came in a distant second, with Web-surfing third. If you include home entertainment systems like PlayStation, then video games are the runaway national pastime. One hundred and forty-five million Americans play computer and video games, the IDSA estimates. The vast majority (80 per cent) aren't kids at all: typical gamers are between 28 and 30, and nearly half are women.

Gaming isn't merely hunt-and-kill challenges for adolescents -- it includes everything from urban-planning, trivia, gambling, bridge and chess puzzles to complex, sophisticated journeys into the imagination. And it's making a ton of money.

Game-related revenue totalled more than $8.9 billion in 1999, topping the $7.3 billion generated that year by movie box office receipts. This isn't a cult; it's mainstream entertainment.

MIT's Henry Jenkins and other scholars have been pointing out in recent years that gaming is revolutionizing the imagination. Yet it's been greeted by the same Puritan ethic that regards play as suspicious, Jenkins has written, and which denounced other new forms of entertainment and culture, from novels to TV.

The biggest category of games are strategy and role-playing games, followed by by action, sports and racing. (Hunt-and-kill games are now down to 15 percent of the market).

In some way, politicians like Sen. Harp ought to be held accountable for their laziness, their disconnection from their own constitituencies, ignorance of the cultural lives of the young, and lack of regard for basic freedom. It's hardly a democratic value to bring government into decisions like what movies kids can see or which video games parents ought to allow them to play.

As for Gov. Rowland, he gets the Penguin award for rational response to the post-Columbine hysteria.

Slashdot covers the continuing efforts of music and other industries to eliminate digital copying of, well, just about anything. But what about paper copies? What if every color photocopy you made included a unique serial number to trace the page back to the copy machine? What if every color printer, down to the lowliest inkjet, printed an invisible watermark on every page it printed? What if every scanner included a watermark in every scan that was traceable back to the scanner?

Slashdot received a lot of submissions of this Privacy Forum article about ID numbers being "watermarked" (just like digital watermarks) into copies made by any color copy machine. Go ahead and read it; the rest of this story assumes that you've read the link.

This not a secret; I remember a case a few years ago where a Columbia University copier was being used to create counterfeit currency, and the imprinted copies were traced straight back to the machine used to create them (amazingly, Altavista turned up an article about this case). Basically, when color copiers first started getting good, the Treasury started leaning on manufacturers to make their products less useful for counterfeiting. AFAIK, there's no law in effect saying that manufacturers MUST include an anti-counterfeiting features in their devices; but on the other hand, there aren't very many equipment manufacturers, so they're easy to lean on.

So today, any copy you make with any color copier will include a unique serial number. Make sure you don't copy anything that someone might want to trace back to you on a color copier. Maybe this isn't that big a deal; color copiers aren't home appliances.

But now home scanners and inkjets make up a nice copying system for as little $200-300. The Treasury Department has a big program devoted to preventing digital copying, and it looks like one of their main concerns is consumer-grade equipment. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving is even soliciting proposals from vendors which have a system suitable for embedding these watermarks in all output produced by color inkjet printers.

Fighting counterfeiting is fine with me. Thus the systems which "recognize" currency and refuse to scan or print it don't seem like too much of an infringement. But embedding serial numbers in all printer output? Maybe I just have a cynical mind, but I can think of about a hundred reasons this is a bad idea.