AOL's New Filter on the Block
Censorship5/7/2001; 11:43:28 AM 'America Online has begun using new filtering technology to power its "parental control" options for kids, young teens and older teens. The automated technology -- provided by filtering company RuleSpace -- recognizes eight languages and can analyze the content of 47 million webpages per day.''Because patents are pending on the context recognition technology, details are fuzzy. But the basic idea is that, rather than searching for objectionable keywords, it analyzes text and assigns it to a category of similar kinds of text. In this way, the program can supposedly distinguish between a lurid tale and a clinical discussion of STDs.''"This happens every year," said Chris Hunter, a civil liberties expert at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy center. "They say they've found new artificial intelligence that will be effective. Then it gets tested and the examples of over-blocking come out."'I've seen what constitutes "state of the art" in text recognition; I just took the final exam in that class 
. Believe me, it was not hard to do better then the previous generation, which was typified by the most naive approach to the problem possible. Even the most untrained of computer users know that filtering on the simple presence of key words won't work. Duh! (Yet the filter makers made millions.)Now someone's finally commercializing techniques that have been developed in the last decade for text recognition, and yes, it's a lot better at automated classification. The problem is, while many distinct techniques for such classification have been developed, they all tend to plateau at the same level of accuracy. Accuracy depends on domain, of course, but we're usually talking around 80-90% accurate, hitting 95% if you're lucky... that's as many as one in five documents incorrectly classified.Even if we assume a groundbreaking, earth-shaking, award-winning accuracy of 95%, that's an inaccuracy rate of one out of twenty, and I don't know of any system that's ever come close to doing better, except of course a human. Of course, the line between "indecent" and "decent" is one of the fuzzier ones, even by purely human standards, which makes it even harder. I'm sure the demo of the product went just swimmingly but automated classification is still not the answer.To put it simply, the status quo remains. A lot of things will slip through, and a lot of things will be incorrectly banned. It still doesn't address one of my main concerns, which is the amount of power we're handing a corporation.But worst of all, this system will be defeatable, if it becomes common enough to make it worthwhile for anybody. Put the phrases "safe sex" and "condom safety" a few times on your page, and you'll probably be able to pass anything through this filter. Humans who run these websites are smart, as humans tend to be.
Rambus loses patent fight
Patents
5/5/2001; 10:24:37 PM This is news I've wanted to pass on for months now.
'Rambus, the pugnacious memory IP designer, has received a bloody nose its US court fight against Infineon, with the judge dismissing the three remaining patent claims against the German chipmaker.'
Videocard->Monitor Protection System Details Leaked
Misc.
5/5/2001; 10:03:43 PM This is the stuff that's supposed to prevent us dastardly consumers from tapping into our monitor lines and obtaining copies of content that way. Technical reading, leaked to cryptome.
Coalition Developing DVD Watermark DVD & DeCSS5/5/2001; 9:51:19 PM 'An alliance of seven technology companies has developed a digital watermark technology that it says could be available on DVDs as early as September. 'The Video Watermarking Group (VWM) is a combined venture of Hitachi (HIT, info), NEC (NIPNY, info), Pioneer (PIO, info), Sony (SNE, info), Digimarc (DMRC, info), Macrovision (MVSN, info), and Philips (PHG, info). The companies have come together after months of negotiations to combine their technologies and produce a digital watermark that will be embedded in original DVDs, says John Fread, director of public relations for Digimarc. 'Detector circuits in future DVD recorders and playback machines will read the watermark, says Miz Nakajima, spokesperson for Digimarc. The technology does not work with today's DVD players.'It won't work in today's players... of which millions exist... and it's far too late in the DVD cycle to just suddenly mandate a switchover and expect everyone to upgrade. Exactly what good is this supposed to do?Also see Wes' remarks, w/ my reply.
While the finer points of the Digital Millennium Copyright A DMCA5/2/2001; 2:27:54 PM 'While the finer points of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act take center stage in a New York appeal's court, a team of researchers continue to protest the heavy-handed use of the law by the recording industry.''On Tuesday, a trio of federal judges heard arguments about the legality of distributing the DVD-descrambling utility DeCSS. The panel, which appeared to be taking a pro-entertainment industry stance, gave both sides until May 10 to file 10-page supplemental briefs.'I can kind of understand the judicial reluctance to recognize the argument that the DMCA stifles free speech... the interesting question is how many real life examples are necessary before they start to understand. Suppressing academic research is fairly easy to understand... let's hope that will help the inevitable breakthrough.
Engelbart to Help Prodigy Fight BT Lawsuit
Patents
5/1/2001; 10:57:31 PM 'User interface pioneer Douglas Engelbart, who demonstrated a mouse-driven hypertext system called NLS in 1968, said in an interview Wednesday that he will help Prodigy defend itself against a patent infringement lawsuit filed by British Telecom. BT is suing Prodigy for infringement of BT's patent on hyperlinks.'
(Admin note: Apologies for the paucity of posts... my school year ends this Thursday and the final projects are consuming the usual 150% of my available time. iRights should be back with a vengeance this May.)
Attorneys general: Law lagging behind technology Administrative4/30/2001; 10:37:51 PM 'States have fraud-protection laws they could use to pursue egregious offenders, but little for run-of-the-mill Web sites. Attorney General Janet Napolitano thinks having an Internet-specific privacy law would offer consumers basic protections and make prosecutions easier.''Other attorneys general echoed Napolitano's frustrations this past week at a National Association of Attorneys General meeting devoted to online legal trends. Their chief complaint: The law simply cannot catch up with technology.''"It's this unsettling feeling that the ground is shifting (from) under our feet too fast for us to understand what's happening," said William Sorrell, Vermont's attorney general....''How strong should any protections be? Should states move ahead of Congress? Should states retain the right to later pass tougher laws than whatever Washington ultimately decides?'Disconnect. The first three paragraphs are talking about specifics, the last one about generalities. There's nothing wrong with thinking about the two of them, there is a problem with mixing them up.I think what's really necessary at this point is a restatement of our root priorites. What rights do people have? Is the right to privacy real? Work out from there. (Forget corporations for a moment; compared to the harm done to people, there's no real way to hurt corporations in general.) We're spinning our wheels because we can't even agree on what copyright should be doing... what makes anyone think we can pass a decent law about the current particulars when we haven't got even a vague idea about the generalities?
Napster Judge Utterly Frustrated Music & MP34/27/2001; 9:59:16 PM In the RED cor-NER, weighing in at ten to the forty-three kilos, REALITY! In the BLUE cor-NER, weighing in around ten to the second kilos, THE LAW!SEE the law and reality collide! FEEL the bone crushing hits of the reigning champ as it rains down holy terror on the newcomer! WATCH as THE LAW tries the mathematically IMPOSSIBLE! LAUGH MANIACALLY as your intuition is proved correct! TASTE the FEAR of the dreaded RIAA in this MATCHUP to end all MATCHUPS!
'A federal judge overseeing the case against Napster on Friday essentially threw up her hands and appealed for help in stopping the exchange of copyrighted songs.... removing the songs has proved exceptionally difficult, since Napster users constantly make them reappear under different file names. Napster has said it cannot keep up with every variation.''On Friday, Patel said that unless an appeals court clarifies its ruling in the case, she cannot force Napster to identify and remove all those files.'REALITY, the WINNUH and steee-eeeeel CHAM-PEE-UM!Folks, how about a round of applause for the loser! Nice try!PS: No, I don't seriously think it's over... it just fit with the theme. Roll with it, OK...?PPS: With apologies... or thanks, whichever you prefer... to blackholebrain.
Uncopyable CD Strikes the Wrong Note Music & MP34/27/2001; 5:23:28 PM 'Consumers love the compact disc, but the recording industry doesn't always feel the same love for the humble CD. Sure, it's cheap and sounds good -- but it's also cheap and easy to duplicate and share with a few hundred million friends and family members on the Internet....''This interrogate-the-owner tactic used to be the standard procedure with software in the '80s, when programs routinely asked you to type some phrase or word from a page of the manual. Developers gave up this approach when they realized it was too much of a hassle for legitimate users -- and cost them too much in technical support expenses. Today, SunnComm insists it's necessary. Will the music industry learn this lesson all over again?'This lesson has been taught before. The smart money's on these schemes failing, and consumers eventually rebelling.Hey, maybe we'll get lucky and these companies will start coming up with copy protection schemes for each seperate CD... then we can experience a revival of the crackerz scene, which while still technically alive and well, has taken serious hits from the ease of pirating modern mostly-unprotected games. Better brush up on my b1ff-sp34k.
How to Crack Open an E-Book Hacking & Cracking4/27/2001; 5:17:33 PM 'A hacker claims he or she has cracked the code and can remove the encryption on e-books in the RocketBook format, allowing the extraction of the content as plain text.''At the end of March, the hacker started making this information available publicly, and posted one URL to Gemstar's forums and the code and instructions to other Web forums.' '"My goal was, and continues to be, to point out the weaknesses of DRM (digital rights management) systems, in the hope that these systems will either grow so much to collapse under their own weight or be abandoned as futile," the poster said.'