No free speech @Home for critic who posts service documents
Free Speech
10/22/2000; 11:58:34 AM

'Participants in an @Home-run newsgroup that focused on @Home service topics were the ones up in arms. One of their participants, an AT&T@Home customer named Wesley, had his account shut down by @Home within hours of posting some @Home and/or cable company documents to the newsgroup. The documents included technical support procedures and refund policies, leaving many @Home customers feeling Wesley was guilty only of giving them ammunition to deal with the service outages they've experienced.'

VoteAuction closes down Political Speech10/21/2000; 1:26:49 PM 'Most important, he said, neither he nor Austrian owner Hans Bernhard -- who declined comment when contacted Friday -- ever intended to go through with actually trafficking the votes bought and sold. '"It was never my intent to sell votes," Baumgartner said. "And it was clear when I was setting it up with Hans that he and I had the same principles in mind. We were both doing this as a political satire or media intervention kind of thing."'Maybe it's just me, but satire ought to be clearly labelled. Some satire is so satirical that it sort of labels itself... but if you've got a site that claims to be doing good business in something as illegal as vote trafficking, and shows no hint of humor or amusement, then you better be labelling the site as satire before you get convicted of a crime. I'm certainly still open to the idea that profit was the intent and it simply failed to gain any.

Where Did They Go: Third Voice Website Annotation10/21/2000; 11:50:09 AM Fortune is running a Where Did They Go? piece on Third Voice.'Last year, a Silicon Valley company called Third Voice made a sudden and very loud splash in the technology press with an application that let Web surfers annotate Web pages with "sticky notes." Third Voice (the name of the application as well as the company) was supposed to turn static Web pages into interactive forums. Disagree with something you read on the Web? By using Third Voice, you could post your opinion to the site on a virtual Post-It that other Third Voice users could see and respond to. Have an opinion about a presidential candidate, a new handheld computer or an art exhibit? Just write a note and start a discussion....''Detractors called it graffiti--some Website creators didn't want their pages overwhelmed by yellow notes.'Actually, as one of the larger (louder?) detractors, "graffiti" is one of the nicer words I had for Third Voice.Anyhow, the ruckus and noise didn't hurt them one bit; as the article alludes to, after they "monetized" the service by jamming shopping links into every web page you visit, nobody cared to use the product anymore. In hindsight, I think the service was doomed anyhow; the initial rush looked large, but it petered out after a few thousand users (only a handful of which ever actually posted anything). On the grand scale of things, that's nothing.Third Voice was slick, and there's even slicker stuff out there, but none of it is succeeding, even with huge free marketing boosts from the tech press. I think Website Annotation has been proven to be a dead technology. Nobody cares enough. There are probably more weblogs already then Third Voice users, and I think that the weblogs are more promising anyhow on all counts. The weblog craze may be over, but they're really just beginning to get going.(See Weblog Communities.)

SDMI Beat Goes On
Music & MP3
10/19/2000; 4:27:20 PM

Cracked or not? The SDMI saga continues. from Salon and a back-up article from The Register: SDMI hack: the 'golden ears' ride to the rescue. The Salon article contains further quote from one of the original sources and The Register has some backup info.

The Register seems confused about what a "golden ears" is. A "golden ears" is a person with highly trained hearing. Babies have to learn how to see, and how to break their visual input into discrete objects, because your eye mostly percieves just an array of colors.  Your ears had to be trained the same way. There is a much wider array of skill in ear-usage, because hearing tends to not be so importent on a day to day basis. Basically, a golden ears would be able to hear the distortions in the music with great accuracy. For the most part, anyone with good hearing in both ears can become a golden ears just be expending the necessary effort.

Congressional panel says no to filters
Free Speech
10/19/2000; 3:53:17 PM

'A commission created by Congress to study ways to protect children online will advise against requiring public schools and libraries to use filtering software, even as lawmakers in the waning days of the legislative session consider mandating the use of such tools.'

What does this mean? I think it means that if you sit down with rational people and explain the state-of-the-art in filter software, rational people do not find it acceptable. This is a promising sign in some remote way; so little thought has been going on and so much opining that I sieze upon this sign of intelligent life from Congress.

Letter on Council of Europe Convention on Cyber-Crime
Misc.
10/18/2000; 2:59:45 PM

Link from Privacy Digest.

The letter criticizes many aspects of the cyber-crime treaty. I think the key objection is summed up in this objection to the extreme criminalization of copyright infringement:

'New criminal penalties should not be established by international convention in an area where national law is so unsettled.'

It's about five years too early (number pulled from the air) for this sort of comprehensive treaty. The countries need time to come to grips with the problem and learn what solutions work and what don't. Doing something like this, big and massive and universal, so soon is a sure-fire recipe for causing big and massive and universal disaster.

Recording industry launches project to develop sound ID
Music & MP3
10/18/2000; 9:09:44 AM

'The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Thursday announced a project to develop a worldwide, standardized system for identifying digital music files so that the owner of a recording's copyright can easily track its use and collect royalties....

'Sherman likened the system to the bar codes on merchandise bought in stores, but instead of appearing in print on the package, the code would be embedded in the digital content. It would include any limitations on the use of the music, such as an expiration in a set number of days. The code would present a range of opportunities for offering music over the Internet in different ways, Sherman said. For instance, a user might want to buy one-time access to a database of 100 songs that can be played during a party.'

BountyQuest.com
Patents
10/18/2000; 9:05:36 AM 'BountyQuest is the world's first high-stakes knowledge marketplace, on a mission to strengthen the patent system.   We pay large cash rewards to people who can help find evidence critical to issues of patent validity....

'Simply put, BountyQuest offers monetary rewards for hard-to-find information.  We support an on-line community of scientists, engineers, and professional researchers who have valuable knowledge that can help their field, their industry, and the world community.'

Privacy Treaty a Global Invasion?
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
10/18/2000; 9:00:53 AM 'Civil liberty groups are vexed over a proposed treaty that would grant more surveillance powers to U.S. and European police agencies, and expand copyright crimes.

'Thirty groups -- from North America, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe -- said this week that the treaty "improperly extends the police authority of national governments" and places the privacy of Internet users and the freedom of computer programmers at risk.'

SDMI Cracked! Probably! (The Register)
Music & MP3
10/17/2000; 6:04:26 PM

'The Salon story as a whole however provides one of the two main indicators that SDMI's efforts may all be toast - it has too much detail in it for it to be plausible that someone, somewhere had just made the claims up. The other indicator, of course, is Chiariglione's bizarre insistence that nobody can possibly know until after November 10th - if he believes this, and is sure nothing will leak out beforehand, he's been around recording industry PRs for way too long. The author of the Salon piece, Janelle Brown, actually undermined this anyway in an earlier article published while the challenge was still running, on October 3rd. "One SDMI member" is quoted as saying: "From what we're hearing, it sounds like the technologies that have been broken so far are using fairly easy means, [like] audio software that's easily available for download. This isn't rocket science."

'That indicates that information on entries, as you might expect, has been available since they started coming in - contrary to Chiariglione's claims to Inside. These claims overall are somewhat difficult to credit.'