I always find it interesting when something that has long been taken for granted turns out to have been either false or based on a false premise and, as a result, disproved.

John Quarterman points us to an excellent de-bunking of the Tragedy of the Commons:

Interesting article here making a point that should have been obvious for forty years. When Garrett Hardin published his famous article about the “tragedy of the commons” in Science in December 1968, he cited no evidence whatsoever for his assertion that a commons would always be overgrazed; that community-owned resources would always be mismanaged. Quite a bit of evidence was already available, but he ignored it, because it said quite the opposite: villagers would band together to manage their commons, including setting limits (stints) on how many animals any villager could graze, and they would enforce those limits.

While the Tragedy of the Commons exists, it’s generally through a mechanis which allows over-subscription of licenses by the individual depleting the available resource. Since “someone else” granted them that license, the users will argue they cannot be held to blame for their over-consumption. Water rights are an excellent example which are covered in extreme detail in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.” Commercial fishing probably fits the model as well. The rights are typically allocated based on dated, optimistic and/or historically high estimations of allowable resource consumption, then the rights-holders claim that their consumption level must be reasonable since they’re only using as much as they’re licensed for. The fact that the river no longer flows to the sea or that there are no longer any fish to be found is Somebody Else’s Problem.

I had not considered the “scorched earth” negotiating tactic that the authors of the paper describe, deliberately destroying the common ground to weaken those who actually need it, but it unfortunately makes sense.

I’m not sure of the true source, but I really like this graphical representation of death estimates since I think it calls out how rare many causes of death are. People tend to forget that the rare causes of death also tend to be the newsworthy as a result, which in turn amplifies people’s perception of how common they are.

This has been around for a few days, but there are reports that there may be a backdoor in Skype which allows call interception by authorized parties.

According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.

This would be different than the experience of the German Bundespolezei who, I think it was earlier this year, stated that their inability to monitor Skype was harming counter-terror efforts.

So what does this mean in the Grand Scheme of Things?

First, Skype has traditionally been known to be better-than-POTS for preventing call interception. It allows the parties to a conversation to be reasonably secure versus attempts at eavesdropping on the traffic scheme. This may or may not now be the case where government entities are involved, which makes it no better or worse than POTS in this respect.

Previously, there has been analysis which indicated that Skype might have some crypto flaws and a paper was published at BlueHat a year or so ago which confirmed both application and crypto issues which, when combined, could produce some interesting misbehavior.

So if you’re worried about government eavesdropping, Skype is now at the same level of confidentiality as POTS. You’ll have to find a tool that allows you to do your own key management, which you should have been doing anyway. If you’re not, then it’s still better than POTS.

This is interesting and not surprising–corporate interests follow the money, not principles, but nothing to see here.