The Now Economy

There have been quite a few articles about the betting markets on the next supreme court nomination.

The Washington Post noticed that there’s a difference between odds posted by bookies and the results of markets. (The bookies were handicapped by having to make their projects before the news was out about Sandra Day O’Connor retiring first.)

But these markets suffer from the same problem as the market in which Justice would retire first, and which Cardinal would be elevated to Pope: a very small group has inside information, and everyone else is just speculating. For the Supreme Court, it would be much more relevant to have conditional markets in who, if nominated, would be most likely to be confirmed, or to rule in certain directions. These kinds of answers are more useful, both to the ultimate decision maker (the President) and the various lobbyists, and also are the kinds of questions that a much larger group of informed people could usefully weigh in on.

Zocalo is now open source. I have placed source and binary tar files at sourceforge. The project name is zocalo. Here is the direct link to the file download page.

Of course, there are many caveats. The current version is intended to support a particular experiment that will be run at George Mason University. The underlying code has more generality than is needed to support the market that the GMU economists are studying. You can probably learn a lot about our approach by reading the code, but you will also notice that I used a methodology based on Extreme Programming–I didn’t go back and clean up code as often as I would have earlier in my career. If you find things that could be improved in the code, by all means, send my your fixes.

Here are the release notes I uploaded with the tar files:

This is the first public release of the Zocalo Prediction Market code. There is both a source and a binary release here. The INSTALL file gives instructions for installing and running a simple experiment. RELEASE-TODO lists a few of the many tasks left to be done. This is very early in the life of Zocalo; there is much work left to do. The source release includes javadoc as well as the source code, and an ant file (build.xml) that will allow you to build source and binary releases, run junit tests, or regenerate the javadoc. The binary release includes just what you need to run a simple experiment, including the installation instructions.

LICENSE gives the CommerceNet license for the base Zocalo code. Third party code that we have included is described in THIRD_PARTY_SOFTWARE. The only third party code that we include source for is mod_pubsub.

I was the judge for the WTOGam claim on the Foresight Exchange, which concerned the suit by Antigua before the WTO on whether the gambling laws in the US discriminated against foreign providers of gambling services in a way that wasn’t allowed under the Trade Agreements the US had signed. The decision was final in April, and someone called my attention to it about a week ago.

The WTO’s decision is 143 pages long, and the press reports at the time had widely varying views of the results, so it took a bunch of analysis (and consulting with at least one expert) to come up with a ruling.

The WTO appeals body’s decision was complex, (here’s their summary) overruling some parts of the original ruling, sustaining others, and declining to state an opinion on yet others, so deciding how WTOGam should come out wasn’t simple.

My ruling (lots of details there) hinged on the details of what the FX claim was supposed to be about (i.e. did theWTO appeals body overrule the decision of the original panel?) It could have gone either way, but I ruled that the appeals body had upheld the original decision even though they significantly narrowed the grounds for the ruling.

A more important question, now that I’ve looked at all the details, is what did the WTO decide and what does it mean for gambling laws in the US? And will it have any effect on prediction markets?

Excellent paper on phishing from Dhamija and Tygar of UCB, The Battle Against Phishing: Dynamic Security Skins. Doug Tygar, you may know, was co-author of the security+HCI paper Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt. They describe the problem of phishing, make a systematic analysis of the technical challenges, survey current phishing countermeasures, and describe countermeasures of their own.

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Blogging from SOUPS 2005 at CMU.

Ches just gave the keynote talk titled My Dad’s Computer, Microsoft, and the Future of Internet Security, which like all good talks, has been evolving for some time. Money quotes:

• “Dad, your computer is blowing blue smoke all over the Internet!”
• “These virus-building tools have GUIs, *nice* GUIs.”
• On 0wn3rs: “They try not to be too disruptive. They’ve got uses for your computer. It’s called time-sharing. They install patches for you to keep (other) attackers out, they work very hard to get bugs out of their software.”
• “You have to get out of the game. Or, as the Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi says: ”Best block is not to be there.”

Ches quoted spot prices for botnet cycles — 3 cents per week on the low end for spam forwarding, $40 each for machines on targeted networks. Also interesting, the Phatbot command list.

Ping and others are blogging the conference at Usable Security.