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The Google Phone has arrived, except that it’s not a phone. It’s an open source operating system for handsets that’s based on Linux and that will be released under an Apache license. Google has lined up an impressive list of handset makers and carriers who will be adopting Android. This really is great news. It’s wide open, it’s got enough big names behind it that it’s nearly certain to take off, and it puts pressure on Apple to open up the iPhone. I expect that we’ll remember 2007 as the year when the mobile phone industry underwent a fundamental change, shifting power away from carriers and toward the people who actually have to use the phones. ...

Last week, I talked about Apple’s self-perception as a struggling company, fighting for good taste in a world of mediocrity. These predictions from the past are why Apple fans still cheer when the company includes Easter Eggs in its products that poke fun at Windows, despite the fact that the company is now a gorilla in the music industry and is stronger than it has ever been. Being forced to listen to those kinds of predictions for years created the “us against the world” attitude that many Apple fans (including myself) still exhibit. I think that most Apple fans in the mid-1990s knew in their bones at the time that all of those grim predictions were very likely accurate. They turned out to be wrong, but only because Apple did a good job with OS X and made a great bet with the iPod. ...

Ars Technica notes that in the wake of the OiNK bust, many sites have already been launched to take its place. As the article says, in the end the OiNK bust will probably already make things worse for the music industry in terms of file sharing. Before the bust, I didn’t even know that there were invite-only BitTorrent trackers that provided access to comprehensive libraries of music. So the bust eliminated a resource that’s relatively easy to duplicate, and exposed the idea of it to thousands of people who may not have even thought about seeking out such a thing. The most interesting thing I learned from the OiNK bust is that plenty of people in the music industry were members. ...

Here’s Tyler Cowen writing about areas where the UN is successful: I don’t hold the extreme view that the UN always fails. It is possibly good when there is a general consensus for action (UNESCO World Heritage sites), or when a well-targeted military action has a defined purpose. The UN is very bad at developing and enforcing open-ended commitments, and very bad at constructing well-run institutions. The wider topic is the Law of the Sea Treaty, which isn’t really all that interesting unless you are more intrigued than the average person by international conventions and regulatory bodies. What is interesting to me is that his description of the strengths and weaknesses of the UN is that I think they apply to technology standards bodies as well. ...

Freedom to Tinker writers Andrew Appel and Ed Felten have put together a series of three posts you must read about AT&T data mining its call records on behalf of the government. How does the system work? The first post explains: What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very clearly in a 2001 research paper from AT&T itself, entitled “Communities of Interest” (by C. Cortes, D. Pregibon, and C. Volinsky). They use high-tech data-mining algorithms to scan through the huge daily logs of every call made on the AT&T network; then they use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the connections between phone numbers: who is talking to whom? The paper literally uses the term “Guilt by Association” to describe what they’re looking for: what phone numbers are in contact with other numbers that are in contact with the bad guys? ...

I wanted to highlight a couple of posts I saw elsewhere that are worth mentioning. The first is John Gruber’s argument that consumers would benefit if Apple had more competition, which I agree with wholeheartedly: The point being that much of what gets chalked up as devotion to/obsession with Apple is, in fact, devotion to/obsession with great design, and there’s a utter dearth of rival PC or handheld gadget makers that value design as Apple does. The last time I was truly interested in an operating system that wasn’t from Apple was BeOS, and that was over 10 years ago. ...

The other day I watched a video from The Onion that captures the tenor of the current Presidential campaign (and every Presidential campaign I can remember) just about perfectly. Politicians from both parties have debates, and nearly all of the coverage is about the campaign rather than the candidates. Who won the debate? Who’s raising the most money? Who committed a gaffe or said something that seems to confirm one of their weaknesses? Are politicians from one party focusing on a candidate from another party because they secretly want them to win? Or are they criticizing them because they want the other party to think they want that candidate to win but really they would prefer to face someone else? ...

Today I learned about a robust industry trading in consumer debt that has been discharged by bankruptcy courts. Business Week explains how firms collect on debts that the debtors have no obligation to pay: In the 1990s, businesses adept at tracking and trading consumer debt expanded their reach to dabble in accounts enmeshed in bankruptcy. That dabbling has grown into a robust market. Some of the trade in so-called bankruptcy paper involves debts that remain collectible. What’s troubling is that the market now also includes billions in discharged debts, which ought to have no dollar value. Owners of canceled liabilities can revive their value in two main ways: by directly pressuring consumers to cough up cash or by gaming the credit system, as allegedly happened in the Rathavongsa case. ...

How different can we be from a country that has its own top model television program?

Yesterday, Michael Urban had some harsh criticism for Apple’s handling of Java in Leopard. There’s a lot of discontent in the Java world because Java 1.6 (err, Java 6) did not make the cut for Leopard, and Urban says that Java 1.5 (Java 5, if you work for Sun) is broken in Leopard as well. Ben Galbraith throws a bit of water on Urban’s complaints, pointing out that while Apple did not deliver Java 1.6, they don’t appear to be pulling back on their commitment to Java in general. ...