Privacy Digest: Misc. 10/9/2000; 3:07:12 PM Privacy Digest has a good link to an article in Security Focus about an international treaty on cybercrime, including highlights from the author of the article. This is important stuff. It's basically inevitable that we will see international treaties drawing lines; this one is terrifying and I hope it goes down in flames. The article points out that some aspects would violate the US Constitution.

Warner attempts to out-hack DVD hackers DVD & DeCSS10/9/2000; 3:00:24 PM 'Time Warner's home video division has changed DVD's region coding scheme to make it even harder to play movies sold in one territory in another.... 'According to a leaked internal Warner Home Video document posted on Web site DVD Debate, the company began shipping discs with an "enhanced" region code at the start of this month. '"This program is a response to the unauthorised practice of altering DVD video hardware players so that they bypass the region code requirements for DVD,"

Net privacy laws will have to wait Privacy from Companies 10/9/2000; 2:50:51 PM 'After handing the high-tech industry important legislative victories on trade with China and visas for foreign workers, the U.S. Congress is set to adjourn this week without settling the debate over one critical issue: how to protect consumer privacy online.' I have mixed feelings on this; while I would have liked to have seen privacy protection addressed in Congress, I'm not convinced they have enough understanding to make good law right now.

Web-based email services offer employees little privacy Privacy from Companies 10/9/2000; 2:48:16 PM 'Everyone knows the boss can read all of the email you send and receive through your corporate account. 'Unfortunately, security experts say many employees would be surprised to know that Web-based email services also offer little privacy. Messages sent via a Yahoo or Hotmail account, or through instant messaging products, such as ICQ or America Online's Instant Messenger (AIM), are just as accessible to nosy employers.

Publius: Speech without Accountability Free Speech 10/9/2000; 2:35:18 PM 'Consider Publius, a censor-resistant Web publishing system described in mid-August at a computer security conference in Denver. Engineers at the conference greeted the invention warmly, presenting to its creators--Marc E. Waldman, a Ph.D. student at New York University, and Aviel D. Rubin and Lorrie F. Cranor of AT&T Labs-Research--the award for best paper. Publius is indeed an impressive technical achievement: a tiny little program that, once widely installed, allows almost any computer user to publish a document on the Web in such a way that for all practical purposes it cannot be altered or removed without the author’s consent, even by an incensed government.

The Mojo solution Technology & Sociology 10/9/2000; 2:22:46 PM 'Still, Mojo Nation looks more a like a libertarian dream come true than anything else that's out there. It is nothing short of the first-ever encryption-protected, user-run, open-source, file-sharing marketplace. It essentially takes the decentralized model of other Napster alternatives like Freenet and Gnutella and adds on a layer of laissez-faire experimentation. 'Home-brewed currency, or "Mojo," lies at the core of this new world.

Why the Internet won't be metered Technology & Sociology 10/6/2000; 11:00:53 AM 'One of the reasons that the Internet has become so popular so fast in the U.S. is that nearly all users pay flat rates regardless of their usage. But many experts, especially pundit Bob Metcalfe, have argued that Internet access should be metered so that light users don't have to subsidize flat rates for heavier users. 'In a fascinating paper, AT&T mathematician Andrew Odlyzko looks at the history of the economics of communication -- from the English Post Office in the 1840s to the telegraph, telephone, television, and the Internet -- and offers some surprising but well-argued conclusions (see Resources).

In Defense of the Delete Key Surveillance and Privacy from Government 10/6/2000; 10:29:42 AM Wherein a judge suggests that perhaps the delete key should actually delete things, rather then hiding them from the user (and allowing them to be found by later parties), and, failing a technical solution, that the law should recognize that deleted material should not be considered in a court of law (within reason). I think it's an excellent idea.

Patent Battle Takes TV Turn Patents 10/6/2000; 9:31:12 AM 'In an application filed last week, OpenTV moved to extend its existing patent on interactive TV technology, filed in 1994. The extension seeks to expand the original patent, U.S. patent number 5,819,034, to cover one-click electronic purchases -- the technical process by which an online shopper makes a purchase with a single click of a pointing device.' These people appear to have a patent on the idea of a "

Carnivore does more than previously thought Surveillance and Privacy from Government 10/5/2000; 12:53:13 PM 'Heavily censored FBI documents obtained by US watchdog outfit the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, indicate that the FBI's electronic snoop known as Carnivore might be able to monitor a good deal more than just e-mail traffic. 'Among the capabilities that peek out from behind all the indelible black swaths in the documents is an ability to reconstruct an entire Web page as viewed by a subject.