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.

Napster Still Loses, and So Do You
Music & MP3
2/12/2001; 4:27:41 PM

'Napster got a small reprieve Monday, but ultimately the service is toast. That's the practical effect of a federal appeals court ruling (full text), in which the online file-swapping service was ordered to police its users (AP) to prevent the sharing of copyrighted material.'

(Admin note: This site should hopefully return to full functionality on this Thursday.)

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 :-(

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.

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.''

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.'

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.

Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig Misc.1/31/2001; 11:21:07 AM One of many interesting statements:'There are two stages in Internet history so far, which are important to distinguish. The first stage climaxes around 1997, when the Supreme Court decided Reno v. ACLU (the case striking down the Communications Decency Act). This case represents a time when the world looked at the Internet and said, "This is an amazing new technology that we've got to be extremely respectful of." The overriding tone of the opinion is, "Congress, you must go extremely slow when you regulate in this area to make sure that you don't muck up this extraordinarily important First Amendment free-speech context, which is the Internet."... 'But now, in the second stage of Internet evolution, when it comes to copyright issues, that attitude has disappeared. So with the emergence of P2P architectures (which are being used to exchange music in ways that upset the music industry), rather than the court responding in the way that it did in Reno v. ACLU, the courts are in a knee-jerk way acting to shut down this emerging technology on the view that unless you stop it, it will be the end of copyright... 'So much of the legal battle that's going is just to get the court to be as deferential and patient with this emerging architecture as it was in the context of pornography. If you had to choose between protecting children and protecting Hollywood, you would think you would make an exception (to the law) to protect children. But, perversely, our legal system has said children are going to be left to the winds of the Internet and parents have to take care of that themselves, but we're going to march in and back up the power of Hollywood with the courts as quickly as we can to make sure that copyright interests aren't invaded.'