SDMI Challenge Participants May Face DMCA DMCA4/21/2001; 11:25:48 AM "Everyone has probably forgotten the SDMI challenge to hackers to try to break a handful of proposed watermarking and "other" protection mechanisms? Well, it was recognised that a group of researchers at Princeton University broke all of the protection mechanisms and were due to publish a paper on at the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop (25-29 April) but have been threatened with the DMCA if they publish the results. So much for academic freedom, eh? SDMI seem particularly upset because one of the protection mechanims broken in the paper, The Verance Watermark, is currently used for DVD-Audio and SDMI Phase I products. Oops. Somehow, a copy of the threatening letter and the full paper entitled "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge" has appeared on John Young's excellent Cryptome site. SMDI's urge to "withdraw the paper submitted for the upcoming Information Hiding Workshop, assure that it is removed from the Workshop distribution materials and destroyed, and avoid a public discussion of confidential information." seems a little weak now...."If you have a background in signal processing, you'll be able to follow the paper. What's amazing is that for three of the four, I'd say the attacks were trivial... one of the solutions was to shift the entire piece of music by one quarter tone, doable with standard software (and there's free software that can do this). That's the kind of thing somebody with no clue about the details of signal processing would try, not a highly sophisticated attack requiring a PhD in the subject.I have a new theory: SDMI isn't trying to quash this paper because it will reveal how to break algorithms, they're trying to quash it because it's amazingly embarrassing.

Linking Records Raises Risks Privacy from Companies4/20/2001; 7:18:24 PM 'In a report called Record Linkage and Privacy, the General Accounting Office posits that the ability of government research teams to ever more efficiently combine and cross-reference records from different agencies poses considerable privacy risks.'As techniques for mining data grow increasingly sophisticated, GAO officials believe there's an increased likelihood that information that was meant to be anonymous may be matched to particular individuals.'"This is a phenomenon that the increasing power of computers has permitted to begin to occur," said Nancy Kingsbury, GAO managing director of applied research and methods.'

Judge: chat room users' identity won't be revealed Free Speech4/20/2001; 2:32:42 PM 'Chat room users accused by a bankrupt Internet company of posting critical messages in an effort to drive its stock price down will not be identified, a federal judge has ruled....''[U.S. District Judge] Zilly said Thursday he agreed with 2TheMart attorneys that ``rights to speak anonymously are not unlimited.'' But he said the company's reasons for wanting the names were not sufficient, saying the firm made no direct claim against the users, except for ``innuendo'' they had manipulated the stock.'The right ruling for the right reason. That's pretty rare.I cannot find a copy of the actual opinion; I hope to do so in the near future and post it.

Handhelds: Tagger's Best Friend? Free Speech4/20/2001; 11:57:40 AM 'A San Francisco company has developed a wireless content application called HaikuHaiku that will let people with Web-enabled Palm or WAP-enabled mobile phones leave trails of digital messages wherever they go.'Interesting idea that's way ahead of its time.'"The challenge we face is how to build a location-based service when location-based technology is not yet available," said Ori Neidich, Neoku's wireless engineer.'Practically speaking, I have to wonder why you'd bother so soon? Seems like they'd spend a lot of time spinning their wheels on that issue when it'd be a lot more concrete when the tech's in place... But putting that aside, the obvious comparision is to Third Voice. So obvious, in fact, that the reporter followed up on that:'You've got to be kidding about that," Eng-Siong Tan, founder of Third Voice, said about Neoku's wireless Web graffiti plan.''"It's all well and good to promote free speech, but if you're going to run a business, you need to figure out how you're going to pay for this," Tan added.'Somebody's learned some wisdom the hard way. I do not envy those who created start-ups a couple of years ago... thank goodness for bankruptcy laws.'Tan also said that in a community application like Neoku's, the signal-to-noise ratio could be a problem, with users spamming each other with inane comments. "If you leave it open, it's going to go to the lowest common denominator," Tan said.''But Bain and Neidich are unfazed, and say they hope people will use HaikuHaiku in ways its developers never anticipated.'Bain and Neidich really ought to listen to Tan. They're singing exactly the same song Tan sung in 1999. Tan's observation about spamming problems comes from hard experience... excesses of spam was the biggest problem Third Voice experienced in terms of getting respect from the press. Most members of the press tended to more-or-less dismiss the objections people like me had to Third Voice, and reported them mostly out of a desire to cover both sides of the story, but the near-complete lack of non-spam definately failed to impress journalists.Now, about the service itself. Speaking as one of the louder critics of Third Voice, I would like to observe that this service shares none of the relevant properties of Third Voice. Third Voice sat on top of web pages and essentially modified those expressions, which I believe should be considered morally wrong at the very least. (Many people (others too) rationally disagree with this assessment.) This service is not modifing anybody's expression or "defacing" anything. Ethically and legally, there's really nothing wrong with this.That said, I suspect the service will be even less compelling then Third Voice. The article mentions "critical mass" as an issue. Basically, for an application like this, every "location" in the system has to independantly attain critical mass. In the case of Third Voice, only a handful of sites managed to attain critical mass (and a disturbing number of them were the protest sites ). Only a handful of sites really independantly obtained the critical mass necessary to promote actual conversations: Microsoft, the White House, a few others.This wireless application faces at least four more hurdles then Third Voice faced in order to become compelling:

1. You must be physically present on a site. This alone strips the candidates for even the most interesting locations to only a few thousand, leaving only a few locations where hundreds of thousands of people are in (Times Square, stadiums, little else). Microsoft's homepage gets a lot more hits then most physical locations get.
2. Wireless technology is harder to use right now, and will be for the near future. (The input method stinks.)
3. Wireless technology will be more difficult to obtain. The amazing preponderance of Yuppies in San Fransico is not normal. Out here in the "real" world, I can count on one hand the number of people with the fanciest wireless phones currently available... and none of them use it. And remember, I'm in a Computer Science program at a major university... ask a class of seniors to hold up all their electronics on their persons and you'll have well in excess of one gadget per person. I live in gadget central by any but San Fransico standards.
4. And finally, haikus are too short to conduct any meaningful conversations in. This hurts... badly. Meaningless messages tend to attract more meaningless messages, and chase away people who might make meaningful messages.

"Dead startup walking!"

The Jinx Misc.4/20/2001; 10:29:56 AM 'If the company actually goes through with this, it will be the worst decision made in the personal computer business since Micropro copy-protected the Wordstar 2000 word processor about 20 years ago....'Whether the same thing happens to Microsoft remains to be seen. What Microsoft is considering implementing in the upcoming Windows XP operating system is essentially a complex scheme to police the use of the software. The current plan, as I understand it, is that the software will demand to be registered. The suspicion is that in the process, registration will include a comparison of the product's serial number with serial numbers in a large database. If the serial number is a copy or if there is any similar problem, the operating code will be disabled, rendering the computer unusable.'I hate to be trite, but Microsoft needs to be reminded of a basic principle: The Customer is Always Right. Ask a good salesman what it means. Of course it doesn't mean the customer really is always right. It's an attitude, an attitude that stands in stark contrast to what XP represents: The Customer is Always Wrong.There be dragons here, Microsoft...

The Value Of Privacy
Privacy from Companies
4/19/2001; 6:18:59 PM "The FTC charged Monarch Services, Inc. and Girls Life, Inc., operators of www.girlslife.com; Bigmailbox.com, Inc., and Nolan Quan, operators of www.bigmailbox.com; and Looksmart Ltd., operator of www.insidetheweb.com with illegally collecting personally identifying information from children under 13 years of age without parental consent, in violation of the COPPA Rule." For collecting things like name and age (and in the case of the BigMailbox.com, making the info available to a 3rd party), the three companies were fined a sum of 100,000 dollars.

Broadband fans busted over Gnutella
Music & MP3
4/18/2001; 5:25:22 PM

'The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has sent hundreds of letters to major Internet service providers and universities, warning them that some people on their networks are violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by trading copyrighted movies through Gnutella.

'Some of the universities that have been targeted in the MPAA's investigation include Harvard University and the University of Connecticut. Meanwhile, ISP Excite@Home has sent out about 20 e-mails and letters over the past four days telling Gnutella users their services will be terminated within 24 hours if their alleged movie sharing continues.'

Is the FCC Quelling Free Speech?
Misc.
4/18/2001; 4:37:00 PM

'Claiming Americans get their fix of diverse viewpoints on the Internet, media conglomerates are using the Web as an excuse to consolidate their power in the offline worlds of television, radio and print media.

'At least that's the argument the FCC is making in its effort to tear down decades-old laws that have prevented Big Media from growing even bigger.

Here I Go!
Administrative
4/18/2001; 11:50:54 AM Alright, massive redesign is in progress and may take a couple of hours. Wish me luck! When I'm done, a fully standards compliant site will be here (with minor exceptions on certain pages). Note that Netscape 4 viewers (and IE4 I believe) will see the site get substantially simpler looking. I recommend upgrading... except for bandwidth constraints, there is no good reason not to use the latest Mozilla build. (Note that I do not recommend Netscape 6... get Mozilla.) I'll update this when I'm done, and ask for complaints.

Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
Personal Commentary
4/17/2001; 8:47:49 PM

'When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.'

At the risk of matching this profile to a "T", I'd like to observe that this statement is true in more then just software engineering. Many philosophers are guilty of the same thing. I have to try my best to avoid it on this site.