Police chief slams Yahoo! chatroom silence
Free Speech
11/17/2000; 12:56:34 PM

'It has been a difficult week for Yahoo!. Three children's charities including Childnet International, NCH Action for Children and Childwatch lambasted the company for its policy on Internet chat. Later, expert child psychologists warned that Internet chatrooms are likely to increase the number of attacks on children in the UK and urged Yahoo! to act before more children fall prey to the kind of attacks Patrick Green put his victim through.'

The Bubble Has Popped: Amazon Works To Form Union
Misc.
11/17/2000; 11:15:58 AM 'Customer service workers at Amazon.com's (AMZN) Seattle headquarters have started a drive to form a union.

'The workers hope to gather support from a majority of the 400 or so customer service representatives in Seattle. They hope to obtain union recognition and eventually a collective bargaining agreement.'

The dot-com boom is now officially over Dot-coms can't just throw more stock at their employees and expect them to work 70+ hour weeks. In my opinion, this was their greatest real advantage over so-called 'conventional' businesses.

Rights fielder
Misc.
11/16/2000; 11:53:54 AM 'In order to foster and preserve the openness of the Internet, it's imperative to make the right choices now. Mr. Lessig makes clear the danger from efforts to regulate the Internet, which will have long-lasting effects on its growth and development. But following a simple laissez-faire policy is also fraught with problems. Mr. Lessig maintains the approach that the openness of digital code can be used to restructure cyberspace. He also believes that the citizens of cyberspace must grapple with these issues, or else suffer the fate of being coded into a world they don't understand, designed without their help by software developers.'

Why Digital Signatures Are Not Signatures
Misc.
11/15/2000; 11:32:10 PM

'The problem is that while a digital signature authenticates the document up to the point of the signing computer, it doesn't authenticate the link between that computer and Alice. This is a subtle point. For years, I would explain the mathematics of digital signatures with sentences like: "The signer computes a digital signature of message m by computing m^e mod n." This is complete nonsense. I have digitally signed thousands of electronic documents, and I have never computed m^e mod n in my entire life. My computer makes that calculation. I am not signing anything; my computer is....

PORNsweeper
Free Speech
11/15/2000; 11:20:25 PM

'Blocking software in general is vastly oversold. If censorware salespeople sold motor scooters, mining companies would be buying them, having been faithfully assured that a 50cc Vespa can carry 200 tons of iron ore up a 30 degree grade.'

OK, so we've covered how bad image filtering is... but this review is a really fun read.

The Invincible(?) United States
Personal Commentary
11/15/2000; 8:14:37 PM

Nothing much seems to be happening in this site's topic area today, but I wanted to make a comment about something I've found increasingly disturbing over the past few years, and this political fracas over who the next President is isn't making me any more comfortable about it. This Camille Paglia Salon article, Becoming president under a noxious cloud, got me thinking about this.

iRights in Antarti.ca
Personal Notes
11/14/2000; 4:53:55 PM

Scripting News announces Antarti.ca, from Tim Bray.

I think a lot of people are going to be looking to see who their "neighbors" are. Update: OK, maybe not.  Anyhow, here's a pic of what the 3D mode looks like...

iRights in Antarti.ca

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The Internet’s chastened child
Privacy from Companies
11/14/2000; 4:49:27 PM

'As in a Greek tragedy, it was the characteristics that had brought Mr O’Connor so far that eventually failed him. A belief that he could write the rules for advertising on the web, because “there were no rules,” led him to miss the wider social and political impact of what DoubleClick was doing. The trigger was last year’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Abacus, America’s largest off-line database, which contains profiles of 90% of households, compiled from magazine subscriptions and store receipts. Unlike DoubleClick’s data, which is entirely anonymous, Abacus had 88m real names and addresses. Mr O’Connor realised that, by marrying the two, he could identify individual web users and not only track, but also predict their behaviour—making online advertising even more science than art. And he would have data that advertisers would pay through the nose for.

MP3.com, Universal Settle
Music & MP3
11/14/2000; 4:40:10 PM 'MP3.com will pay $53.4 million in damages to Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, to resolve the copyright infringement case between the two companies, a judge ruled Tuesday.

'Separately, MP3.com and Universal struck a deal for Universal to buy "a significant amount" of MP3 warrants, the chief executive of MP3 said.'

Cybercrime Treaty Draft: Take 23
Misc.
11/13/2000; 12:11:14 PM

'The world's first cybercrime treaty is being hastily redrafted after Internet lobby groups assailed it as a threat to human rights that could have "a chilling effect on the free flow of information and ideas."...

'"We were surprised by the violence of these comments," said Peter Csonka, deputy head of the Council of Europe's economic crime division which oversees the drafting.