My apologies Personal Notes2/28/2001; 11:38:58 AM I'd like to apologize for the further lack of posting to this 'blog. My computer system has recovered, but my biological systems went down. Next week is Spring break, and boy do I need it! I think I want to spend an hour just sitting on the couch, doing nothing but basking in the sun (although the odds of there being sunlight are about one out of five, no exagerration unfortunately... that's Michigan).Also, FYI, I think I'm going to lower the level of privacy postings. They've been dominating for a while. The main reason for this, I think, is that it's become an acknoleged issue, even in the mainstream media. Good for privacy advocates, but it does tend to flood this site. I'll still post the good ones, of course. The real purpose of this 'blog is, to the best of my abilities, to be ahead of the curve, not merely tracking it.

Napster Ruling Requires Devs. Ensure No One Misuses System Programmer's Rights2/28/2001; 10:54:00 AM 'The 9th Circuit's holding also dramatically narrowed Betamax's protection against vicarious liability by requiring technology providers to affirmatively police their systems for potential infringement, a practice which essentially forces technology creators to serve as law enforcement for the content industry, even in the absence of notification that specific infringement has occurred.'Another ruling that makes perfect sense... if you never look past the case at hand. This may make sense in the context of Napster, but is this really such a great idea in the long run? This is an incredibly restrictive standard... one content owner claims infringement and suddenly you're liable for everything that goes on in your system (bearing in mind that the music companies still have not demonstrated infringement, merely alleged it. I think there is infringement going on by legal standards, yes, but it's disturbing that nobody's willing to actually prove it's happenning.).Why on earth, under these standards, would you ever release anything that might even as a side effect allow people to share content? Geocities ought to shut down now and get it over with, before they get sued for everything they've ever hosted that was infringing. This ruling, as the EFF essay points out, was anything but balanced.

Stallman: The GNU GPL and the American Way
General IP Issues
2/27/2001; 11:27:56 PM

'Addendum: Microsoft says that the GPL is against "intellectual property rights." I have no opinion on "intellectual property rights," because the term is too broad to have a sensible opinion about. It is a catch-all, covering copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other disparate areas of law; areas so different, in the laws and in their effects, that any statement about all of them at once is surely simplistic. To think intelligently about copyrights, patents or trademarks, you must think about them separately. The first step is declining to lump them together as "intellectual property".'

All's quiet on the UCITA front... but that's about to change
UCITA
2/25/2001; 3:52:59 PM

'THE UNIFORM COMPUTER Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is the proposed state law that carries all manner of horrors for IT organizations, technical professionals, consumers, librarians, and so on (see www.infoworld.com/ucita for background information). Since being passed by Virginia and Maryland last year, UCITA has fortunately made little headway. But with most state legislative sessions now in full swing, things are starting to heat up again.

The DeCSS Haiku DVD & DeCSS2/25/2001; 3:24:19 PM

Dr. David Touretzky, who made the Gallery of CSS Descramblers, has recieved a threatening legal letter ordering him to shut down his site. Dr. David Touretzky politely returned fire and asks them to be more specific. Interesting letter.

There is also a new descrambler, this one in psuedo-haiku:

So here's how you doit: first, take the first byte ofim -- that's byte zero;OR that byte with thenumber 0x100(hexadecimal --that's two hundred andfifty-six to you if youprefer decimal).Store the result int1.  Take byte one of im.Store it in t2.

IBM CPRM Plan Replaced with Similar Copy-Prevention Plan
General IP Issues
2/24/2001; 5:35:44 PM

Slashdot sez

Several people submitted the news that IBM withdrew its CPRM plan yesterday - some of them with blurbs like "We Won! Yay!". But only a few people got the additional information that it was simply replaced with another extremely similar copy-prevention scheme, this one from Phoenix Technologies, well known for their widely used BIOS's. Even though the committee responsible for this has been deluged with email in opposition, the CPRM group (led by Paul Anderson and Jeffrey Lotspiech of IBM) continues to press forward, distributing propagandistic lies about how the system will protect [sic] your fair-use right to access and use digital content. Update: 02/24 7:20 PM EST by michael: The Register has even more information from Andre Hedrick.

Michigan Considers a Cybercourt
Misc.
2/22/2001; 12:50:26 PM 'To lure technology companies to Michigan, Gov. John Engler wants to establish a separate "cybercourt" for cases involving technology and high-tech businesses, where virtually everything would be done via computer rather than in a courtroom.

'Briefs could be filed online, evidence viewed by streaming video, oral arguments delivered by teleconferencing, conferences held by e- mail. Lawyers would not have to be in Michigan or even be licensed to practice in the state. Cases could be heard any time of the day, even at night, and judges would be trained to understand the complex issues that arise in technology disputes.'

An Actual Weblog-Type Entry
Personal Commentary
2/22/2001; 11:22:25 AM

iRights has suffered for the last few days, but I think it's over. Windows NT is still running, LinkBack is cranking, and I'm Interneting.

Thing is, while a lot of stuff went by, I don't feel like I've missed much that's actually important enough to make it worthwhile to post. Sure, Napster is discovering that letting the music industry run it is the fast track to destruction, but hey, who other then Napster and the music industry didn't see that coming? (And to be fair, Napster may have seen it coming.) So, I thought maybe an actual weblog-type entry is in order. 

Can John Doe Stay Anonymous? Free Speech2/21/2001; 11:14:20 AM 'What kind of lawsuit do you have when the plaintiff is happy to drop the charges and the defense attorneys wish they could have gone to trial? ...'In the suit, Rural/Metro subpoenaed Yahoo, demanding the identities of the four individuals involved in the postings. 'Rural/Metro dropped the suit Tuesday, saying it had accomplished its goal of having the messages stop. But the defense attorneys said they were disappointed the case didn't go to trial, because they hoped to set a legal precedent saying companies couldn't gain access to private information just because they allege they were wronged. 'Privacy and free speech advocates saw the Rural/Metro case as a missed opportunity. Had the case gone to trial, the court would have addressed whether, or under what circumstances, Internet Service Providers would be required to divulge private information.'The good cases never go to court, only the ones where the courts rule that large companies have the right to make money, no matter what the cost to public. I really wish that was a sour-grapes statement, rather then the truth it is.

More tales of Woe Administrative2/20/2001; 9:34:48 AM Update: I think I've got it going. It's stable and working. RU was a bit tipsy but I still need to upgrade to the latest version.I did have everything working again recently, but events conspired against me and I'm now below fully functional. It'll be a little bit again (though I hope to be back up today).The long version is this: LinkBack has been running on a Windows 95 machine. Every hour on the 25, when it begins processing, the computer coughs, chokes, and becomes sluggish for a few minutes while the program runs, because Windows 95 has no ability to regulate how much of the processor a program consumes. This has been annoying my wife, justifiably so, and I like my wife unannoyed whenever possible. Call me "Whipped and Proud Of It". So I recently came across a copy of Windows NT, and I sez to myself, "Hey, self, if I install Windows NT, I can kick the priority of Radio Userland into the background, where it will happily do everything it wants to do, and we'll never even notice the computer is running it! Wouldn't that be great!" So I start installing Windows NT. And everything goes great until I get to the graphics card. *FREEZE* Well, damn! Just once, I'd like to install an operating system without having to beat it into submission."The beatings will continue until morale improves!" is no joke when you're trying to make an operating system and a motley collection of hardware play nice.I've seen conflicts between two pieces of hardware before. I've seen graphics cards that hate my COM port (back in the early days of consumer hardware acceleration), I've seen sound cards and network cards that will not stop until one has killed the other, but for the first time, I'm seeing a genuine bona fide three way incompatibility! From the update page for my motherboard:'VIA VxD v. 2.6 and newer, in combination with latest BIOS, makes i740-related problems on MVP3-based FIC motherboards such as VA-503+, PA-2013, running Windows95, appear less often. Currently there is no solution to i740 problems under WindowsNT. 'Care to guess what kind of graphics card I'm using? "Currently there is no solution" is just the sort of thing you need to see at 1 am in the morning, having spent 6-8 hours working on fixing the damn problem.So, anyhow, I'm going to see about picking up the cheapest damn non-S3 card I can find on the open market and sticking it into the system, after which I hope to get that thing up and running, after which not only should everything go back to normal, but reliability should improve as well (though I've been pleased with it overall lately). Also (hint hint) I'm working on another significant improvement, one that will hopefully encourage a lot more weblogs to join... more later, when I have time to work on it and make sure it works, but stay tuned! LinkBack is not done yet. Beta is still the truth, and I'm still learning as I go along.