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NASA is admitting that laptop brought to the international space station in July apparently contained a virus designed to swipe user passwords, though they’re not sure how it happened. The computers don’t control anything mission critical, but are used by astronauts to send email and to track their nutritional programs. The computers were never connected to the internet, so NASA is guessing that an astronaut had an infected USB key or something that resulted in the virus getting onto the computer.

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For the last few years, various connectivity providers sold “unlimited” data plans when the reality was the plans weren’t unlimited at all. Many providers are now changing the plans and instituting more clear caps, but it still seems a bit ridiculous to have marketed unlimited data plans and then pulled the rug out from under those who bought exactly what you sold them. Up in Canada, it seems that TELUS is taking it a step further. Not only did it sell people “unlimited” plans that it now regrets, it’s exercising some vague language in its contract that allows them to simply cancel the plans of those who had bought into the “unlimited” plan even just a short while ago. The company is forcing users to switch from a $75 unlimited plan to a $65 plan that is limited to just one GB per month, and dumping anyone who won’t switch. That would seem to be a pretty strong bait-and-switch claim. Sure, perhaps the telcos oversold these unlimited plans, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be required to live up to what they sold.

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The 463 blog points us to an interview with Mitch Kapor of Lotus and EFF fame, in which he makes the case for a national Chief Technology Officer. The idea seems to be that technology policy in the United States is currently fragmented among a bunch of different positions, and having a designated top technologist in the government would help to bring coherence to the nation’s technology policy. It sounds like a reasonable idea at first blush, but on closer examination it might create more problems than it solves.

To start with, it’s important to distinguish between two jobs that are really quite different. One job is to coordinate the government’s own IT infrastructure. Currently, IT decisions are made by the various federal agencies and departments within the federal government. A national CTO could conceivably set guidelines or policies related to IT infrastructure that would apply across the executive branch. The other job is to advise the president on substantive tech policy issues like network neutrality, patents, copyrights, etc. The two jobs are very different, and it’s not at all clear it would make sense to have the same guy doing both. But let’s consider each position in turn.

It’s not clear how significant the potential savings or efficiency gains would be from having a single guy in charge of all government IT deployments. Up to a certain point, there are efficiency gains to be had from greater IT integration, but the federal government is probably so large that those economies of scale have already been exhausted. That’s especially true when we consider that the different parts of the government have widely different requirements. Some parts, such as the FBI and NASA, have offices all over the country, while others are located almost entirely in Washington. Federal agencies do different kinds of work and need a wide variety of software packages. The current arrangement, in which each agency manages its own IT infrastructure, seems likely to give each agency more flexibility to choose technologies that meet its specific needs.

The idea of a designated tech policy advisor is more promising, but that also has potential downsides. A good choice could help bring coherence and vigor to a president’s tech agenda, but, given enough power, a bad choice could cause just as much mischief. Therefore, if the next president does create a CTO position, he ought to limit its function to advising the president, rather than pursuing an independent policy agenda. A good model for this is the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, which advises the president on economic policy and produces an annual report on the state of the economy but doesn’t wield any significant authority in its own right.

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

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The Associated Press has been having a hard time keeping up with the times. While there was the highly publicized situation where it threatened some bloggers with its own, highly questionable definition of fair use, a much bigger deal is that it’s increasingly competing with its own member newspapers by doing things like cutting deals with Google that take traffic away from those member papers’ own sites. Apparently, some of those newspapers are paying attention. Romenesko points us to the news that the Star Tribune in Minnesota has alerted the AP that its canceling its membership. It will be worth watching to see if other newspapers start joining in as well. The AP has had many years to learn how to adapt and change in the internet era, and so far it’s failed repeatedly. Seeing its member newspapers leaving is just the inevitable result of its botched strategy.

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Want to know when someone is preparing to take away your First Amendment rights? It’s when they claim that they have a proposal that involves “balancing” those rights with other events (sent to us by Eric Goldman). In this case, the proposal comes from a professor from Brigham Young University, Cheryl B. Preston, who’s proposing the idea for an Internet Community Ports Act (ICPA), which would create special “zones” online where it would be okay for “adult” material to reside, and other zones that would be kid friendly. Apparently, this is needed to:

Find a reasonable balance among the values of the First Amendment, the appeal of an unfettered technological frontier, the right to be free of unwanted speech, and the right of parents to have the aid of the government in protecting children from age-inappropriate sexually explicit content online.

We’ve seen similar proposals in the past that haven’t gone very far. And, this proposal seems quite similar to that older proposal — except presented by a law professor in a law review, rather than a local business man. Like that last proposal, this one focuses on having all adult content be accessed over a specific port. As we noted when that earlier proposal came out, the problem isn’t with the idea of a “red light” district, but with determining what is and is not considered reasonable or “harmful.” Given how badly many online filtering services “over filter” content, this could be a real problem.

Yet Preston brushes this very big issue aside:

Much of the debate about regulating pornography has stymied
on the esoteric impossibility of drawing the line between acceptable
and unacceptable content. However, “definitions” is a diversionary
argument. Not only do we know it when we see it, we now have
codified the scope of it and relied for federal court purposes on the
ready identification of it by a range of observers.

Not quite. While it is, perhaps, possible to have courts judge these things for professional publications, when you’re talking about a communications medium where everyone is a publisher and decisions need to be made in real time, that “definition” problem is very, very real. Much of the rest of the argument in favor of this law, again, seems to miss out on this important factor, acting as if the rules that have been set up for traditional publishing systems can equally be applied to real-time communications. That’s simply not true.

But, of course, with the latest smack down against the COPA law, you can bet that politicians will eventually be looking for the next big “protect the children on the internet” law — so don’t be surprised if you see a version of this proposed law bubble up at some point.

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iPhone developer Nicolas Sloan has released Earth3D, a new application for the iPhone and iPod touch that presents the user with 3D views of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. The application allows users to drag one finger to rotate the Earth; multiple fingers stop and start the rotation of the camera. Earth3D is available now as a free download from the App Store.
…

Origins takes place from a 2-D overhead perspective in water, beginning with a fairly clear and open pool, progressing through icy and murky waters, and concluding on the edge of a beach with nearby sand. We’ve heard the formula described best as “Pac-Man without walls,” and think this is fairly accurate: you continue to pilot your creature around through 18 open-edged stages, collecting enough dot-shaped DNA balls to let you progress…

D2C offers the choice of six faux teams, two difficulty levels, and either single game or best-of-three Playoff modes, each played with limited rules that focus almost entirely on Click Wheel based pitching and batting, rather than fielding. You start out with several standard pitches, and can unlock three additional ones through Playoff play. Neither the batting or the pitching action is in any way compelling, however, as you have only simple button-…

Apparently Judy Estrin, a well-known Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and exec, is coming out with a new book warning that the infrastructure needed for innovation in Silicon Valley is going away. The complaint basically appears to be that there’s too much emphasis on the short-term, with companies focusing on the quick flip rather than the long haul trends that need to be satisfied to drive real innovation.

I can absolutely understand where this is coming from — but I think it’s wrong. There absolutely are a bunch of folks in Silicon Valley who are focused on the quick flip and the easy cash out. Those folks have been around for a while. They get a lot more attention in the boom years, and during the down cycles you see them fleeing for somewhere else. But that doesn’t mean that the overall culture of innovation is in trouble.

In some sense, the argument sounds similar to the complaints we hear from long-time journalists bemoaning bloggers, or professional television producers whining about YouTube. The tools of innovation have changed the marketplace, allowing many more entrants — and not all of those entrants are all that serious about it, or even that good at it. So, there’s a ton of crappy blog content, and millions upon millions of videos that would never, ever show up on a television. Yet, there are also plenty of gems exposed by these systems that would never have come out otherwise.

And the same is true for innovation culture in Silicon Valley.

The “tools” for creating a startup make it easier and cheaper than ever before to simply throw something up and see if it sticks. And, yes, much of it is terrible — just like plenty of online content is terrible — but out of that some great stuff evolves. The fact that there are plenty of short term thinkers just throwing stuff quickly at the wall isn’t necessarily bad for innovation — it just means that innovation is taking a slightly different path. There are plenty of folks in Silicon Valley still thinking about the long haul, and looking at the trends and understanding them. But the ability to throw something up and see if it sticks is valuable as well, as it allows a lot more testing of ideas in the real world, without having to make huge initial investments. That isn’t to say that short-term thinking is a good thing. It’s not. But some folks doing short-term thinking doesn’t preclude others from using those lessons to build real long-term innovation.

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Developed by a previously unknown company named RF3, the iFit series of Earhook-style earphones are billed as healthy cellular phone earphones, designed with six-way adjustable earpieces and a shielding technology to reduce emitted cell phone radiation to low levels. One of the versions, the RF3-212s ($40), is a single earphone with an integrated microphone, the pieces connected by an odd bit of surgical-style wireless blue tubing, while the other…