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.

Draconian net censorship push in Australia Country Watch: Australia2/20/2001; 9:14:39 AM 'HARSH internet laws that give police power to prosecute anyone posting content deemed unsuitable for minors are likely to be passed by the South Australian Government next month.''The Classification Amendment Bill, which goes far beyond legislation in place in any other state, allows police officers to decide whether online material is illegal.'Emphasis mine. Of course, here's half of the root problem:'The federal law treats all internet content as film, and requires material to be rated by the Office of Film and Literature Classification accordingly.'The Internet is not a movie. As a small example, when's the last time a movie performed an adult check, no matter how rudimentary or easy to defeat, on somebody? Many Internet sites do.The other half of the problem is the abject terror embodied in the ruling.According to some local correspondants, aka "Slashdot posters" on the Slashdot article, specifically cynthetik, the government may not actually enforce the law.Still, this leaves the axe hanging over everybody's head. The power to prosecute is the power to destroy a persons life, regardless of guilt, and this law is tailor made for that use.

Indefinate outage
LinkBack
2/8/2001; 9:30:58 AM

LinkBack will be suffering an indefinate outage, but probably on the order of one to two weeks. My home internet service was terminated and I can not afford to immediately re-activate it. It won't be long, but until I do, Linkback doesn't work.

BTW, lesson learned here: My credit card company recently sent me a new Visa card, because they suspected that my card number may have been stolen en masse with lots of others, so they were just sending me a new one to be safe. That's really thoughtful of them, but you have to make sure you catch all the people making automatic deductions off of your card to give the update!  I missed the cable/cable modem company :-(

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EU copyright compromise reached
General IP Issues
2/6/2001; 5:23:17 PM

'The European parliament's legal affairs committee agreed on Monday to compromise on far-reaching amendments proposed to the EU's legislation on copyright....

'"We really need a balance between the different cultural and legal rules in the EU," said Enrico Boselli, the Italian socialist rapporteur on the issue. The committee agreed to keep in place many of the exceptions agreed by EU countries to the copyright rules for institutions such as libraries and universities. But Mr Boselli predicted "the mother of all battles" to get the amendments approved by the entire parliament next week.'

Etoys.com vs. etoy domain war ends with Etoys.com's demise
Misc.
2/6/2001; 5:09:10 PM

The linked Wired article merely chronicles Etoys.com's demise, it says nothing about this connection.

Etoys.com is, or rather was, the quintessential arrogant dot-com company. At the height of its arc, flush with funds, ego, and momentum, Etoys.com sued the artistic group etoy.com, which predated Etoys.com's existance by several years, for trademark infringement. To put it simply, etoy.com did not simply take it on the chin... instead they fought back. How they did so is a fascinating tale.

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Privacy problems? Yeah, the Free Market can fix that!
Privacy from Companies
2/6/2001; 9:40:17 AM It's linked on Slashdot, so I feel I have to reply to "The Privacy Cage" by Julian Sanchez in Liberzine. Basically, the essay suggests that the Free Market can solve all of our privacy woes, but in the process tilts with strawmen and seems to be coming from another planet... 'Since users in online interactions have de facto control over what information they will make available, they will have what amount to property rights in interactions where they demand them. If an online merchant charges too much money for a product, you don't have to buy. And you can refuse to deal just as easily if he's "charging" too much in the currency of private information.' If users had real control over their privacy, de facto or otherwise, there would be no concern over privacy issues. We do not currently have effective control over our privacy or this debate wouldn't be occurring. 'If I don't care about getting a bit more junk mail, I may allow a site to make money renting out my address in exchage for a discount. If I am more scupulous about guarding my secrets, I will share information only with sites which guarantee that I'll retain a high level of control over it.' There is currently no guarentee that we will retain that level of control in the long-term. The Toysmart case taught companies something... admit up front that your policies might change in the future, and none of your current customers will care until it's too late to do anything. Meanwhile, the customers have no guarentees of privacy while looking like there is one. The article also almost completely ignores the practical aspects of implementing a market system... which are vitally important to discuss because the smallest details of the practical system affect how it will work and how well it will work. Can people use it, or is it too complicated? Is the control granular enough to be useful? How will it be enforced? By law, by voluntary agreement? Can Joe User be tricked into giving out more information then he intends? Who controls the currency of the market (the data)? You can't simply "empower" the user, because once a company has the data, they can sell it. Who stops them? Without some sort of practical groundwork, this essay is a meaningless puff piece, capable only of stirring debate, but not really participating in it. The only practical solution mentioned is the horribly flawed P3P. To be fair, perhaps if the author made it ten or twenty times as long and did more then casually dismiss the arguments of a lot of other smart people (which the author did far too breezily for my comfort), it might make more sense. But the essay would still suffer the fatal flaw of attacking a straw man: 'If privacy ceases to be about individuals choosing how much information about themselves to release, and beomes instead a one-size-fits-all standard, then privacy is no longer a form of freedom. It's a cage.' I am still unaware of any privacy advocates who seriously believe that people must be disallowed from sharing their personal info with others. Yes, there are those like Shapiro who question whether Joe Public is capable of guarding his own privacy, but that's still not the same as claiming that Joe's decisions ought to be made for him (Sanchez glosses over this difference). Sanchez clearly does not understand the people he attacks.

New E-Mail Vulnerability - Trust Your Neighbor?
Misc.
2/5/2001; 11:12:34 AM

From Slashdot:

''According to this article in The New York Times (free registration required), a trick enables someone to essentially bug an e-mail message so that the spy would be privy to any comments that a recipient might add as the message is forwarded to others or sent back and forth. The vulnerability could facilitate the harvesting of e-mail addresses. Widely used e-mail programs that are vulnerable to the exploit (because they enable JavaScript) include Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Netscape 6.'' A snippet from the article: "The potential for such e-mail spying was first discovered by Carl Voth, an engineer in British Columbia. 'What bothers me is that in this case, my vulnerability is a function of what you do,' Mr. Voth said. 'I can be careful, I can take every precaution, I can turn off JavaScript, and it doesn't matter. If my neighbor isn't diligent and I send him an e-mail, I'm still vulnerable.'" ''The Privacy Foundation, an educational and research organization based in Denver, plans to publicize and demonstrate the technique today.''

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Kafkaesque? Big Brother? Finding the Right Metaphor
Privacy from Companies
2/3/2001; 2:36:37 PM

'The battle of the metaphors is much more than a literary parlor game, said Solove in his article, "Privacy and Power: Computer Databases and Metaphors for Information Privacy." The way a problem is framed determines its solution, he suggested. And if lawmakers are to come up with adequate responses to the lack of privacy online, they need to fully understand the nature of the beast. In short, if they read books, they should read more Kafka and less Orwell.'

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DVD Case Follow-Up
DVD & DeCSS
2/1/2001; 11:45:38 AM

From Slashdot:

''The ACLU made a court brief today concerning the DVD CCA case. The release can be found here.'' There were actually a number of amicus briefs filed at the same time for this case, and now I think most of them are online. Journalists and publishers, law professors, law professors II, the Association for Computing Machinery, programmers and academics, library and public interest, Arnold Reinhold. These are all in support of the EFF's appeal in the case, of course. The briefs make good reading because they attempt to convey, in a very direct and concise manner, the arguments of these various groups against the DMCA.

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