Congressman: I Want My MP3 Music & MP39/27/2000; 9:12:10 AM 'A bill introduced in the House could dramatically alter the landscape that led to massive copyright violations against MP3.com, and open the door for competitors to stream into the digital locker space unimpeded by licensing agreements. 'Representative Rich Boucher (D-Virginia) -- along with three Republicans -- introduced legislation Monday that would make it legal to create a database of sound recordings for the sole purpose of transmitting those recordings to individuals who had previously purchased music.'Wired links the words "database of sound recordings" to the text of the proposed bill, which is kind of odd, but at least they're trying.I think this is an excellent reminder that laws aren't the final say in whether something is right or wrong, because the law is easily changed by the right people. For some reason this has been a particularly big issue in the digital music debate.

LinkBack reset again LinkBack9/27/2000; 8:49:24 AM LinkBack was reset again, due to a large number of issues, including the computer it is running on only having 64 megabytes of ram, which I was being rather wasteful of. A new slimmer LinkBack is now running, which will hopefully stay stable, except for the lousy network connection @Home gives me, which I can't do much about.To make up for that, I'd like to extend a Manila-only offer to LinkBack participants (I think that's all anybody's using anyhow). If you'd like to have a "Sites Recently Linking To Me" box on your sit (that you can call whatever you like), please let me know. What I can do is create two messages on your site. One will contain the details listing (like this) and one will just have a list of links, seperated by BR tags. (If you'd rather have a bulletted list that can be arranged.) I'm not quite ready to do this, but please let me know if you'd be interested. If nobody's interested I'll just leave the hack in that lets it work for me and not make it systematic so it will work for anybody.

Non-Profit Research Team To to Review Carnivore Surveillance and Privacy from Government9/26/2000; 9:07:39 PM Having failed to convince any University computer departments to review Carnivore, the Justice Department has found a non-profit organization brave enough to tread where academics fear to.'IITRI's review team, including unspecified faculty members from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, was to start work immediately and wind up by December, when a report was to be made available for public comment. The review itself is technical, not legal.'IITRI is apparently associated with the Illinois Institute of Technology, so apparently there will be some technical people involved in the review, despite TheStandard's lack of info on the topic.

Web Advertisers Want To Cut Spam Down Spam & E-Mail9/26/2000; 9:36:22 AM 'The Responsible Electronic Communications Alliance, which includes DoubleClick, 24/7 Media, Bigfoot Interactive and ClickAction Inc., says [their proposed] standards will cut down on the number of unwanted emails, or spam, that Internet users receive.'OK, correct me if I'm wrong, because I could be, but isn't the primary business of the four mentioned companies web advertising? Do we really care if the web advertisers make noises about reducing spam? I don't know about you, but doubleclick.net hasn't sent me much spam lately.Something tells me this won't affect anything.

CueCat profiling potential described Privacy from Companies9/26/2000; 9:26:38 AM 'Freebie bar-code scanner CueCat, which enables users to swipe bar codes in print media and have their browser immediately directed to related information on the Web, uses software which transmits all the information that maker Digital:Convergence would need to record every bar code that every user scans, and which could be used to profile users, an advisory by the Privacy Foundation explains. 'Another feature enables users so inclined to connect their PC sound card to their TV audio output. The CueCat software then listens for signals encoded within the audio of television programmes and advertisements that convey information comparable to a barcode.'Normally, I'd have linked directly to the report, but I wanted to reward The Register for being clueful enough to include a link to the report at the end of their article!Anyhow, the article in question is here.

A Watchdog With Some Bite Privacy from Companies9/26/2000; 9:16:19 AM 'Based at the University of Denver, the Privacy Foundation joins a dozen or so other watchdogs – including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse – guarding consumer privacy. But as an independent foundation, it should have more clout than industry groups such as TRUSTe and the Network Advertising Initiative, which police their own members. Barton's foundation has one other distinction: Concentrating on technology rather than on public policy, it will sharpen the debate between companies that gather private information and the groups that monitor them.'Let's hope it works as well as they hope.Also don't miss the "Defenders of Data" table at the end.

Little bit o' Javascript helps site scanning Fun Stuff!9/25/2000; 8:13:14 PM For those who scan the same basic set of sites daily it can be easy to miss one or two in a day. So I added in a bit of Javascript on my sources page that will pop open a window easily for each source in the list. It's easy to add sources with Manila (though there's nothing Manila-specific about the script).If you want to steal, errrrr, use it on your own site, look in this site's Javascript (http://static.userland.com/gems/irights/site.js) for the OpenAllChildLinks function. There's a lot of stuff in that .js file, but this funtion is independent of everything else (except a global variable it uses).Have fun!

Secrets & Lies: Digital security in a networked world
Misc.
9/24/2000; 1:07:40 PM 'The following is an edited excerpt from "Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World" by Bruce Schneier.'

This is a good chance to read some very good material without buying the book. Please do read this.

How do you make online privacy policies stick? Privacy from Companies9/24/2000; 1:00:18 PM 'So perhaps it's time to look at privacy policies and opt-in agreements as legal contracts or license agreements. Digital signatures have been around for years and the law is starting to recognize them. So why couldn't a company draw up a virtual contract on privacy that's binding on both sides? Every time I click on a licensing agreement, I'm warned how I might be subjected to imprisonment, fines, and fierce noogies from the Feds should I violate it. Can't those stipulations work both ways?'Lets work some numbers here:

  • Number of lawyers the company drawing up the policy has: Tens - Thousands
  • Number of lawyers the person agreeing to the privacy contract has: Zero.
It's wrong to set customers against that many lawyers. The corporate lawyers could write contracts with every loophole imaginable, thus not really affecting the status quo, and then for bonus points, they could (and would) bind the customer in this new contract to any number of things in the fine print. The clause that leaps to mind as plausible would be "Thou Shalt Not Say Nasty Things About This Site". UCITA allows software manufacturors to put the equivalent into software licenses.Creating privacy contracts is a good thought, but the two-way nature of the contracts is scary. I'm not going to sign the equivalent of a EULA just to use your e-commerce site, sorry. What we need to do is either make companies stick to their original promises (which has problems, as that could drive companies out of business if they start by promising too much), or, ideally, create a legally binding system that restricts what all companies, Internet or otherwise, do with customer data. And we need to not be sidetracked by arguments like this:'It's a fundamental law of Internet commerce that privacy and convenience are at loggerheads: To gain one, you must sacrifice the other. 'E-commerce companies find themselves in a bind. E-commerce is plagued by complaints of a cold, nonpersonal experience. Where's the love? But a company can't very well give you a personalized experience without knowing something about you. 'Hence the privacy policy, which is the company's promise to only gather data about you in the interest of serving you better -- never to sell as marketing or demographic data.'The third paragraph flatly contradicts the first paragraph, and it's the third that's correct. I have no objection to sharing data voluntarily with a company so they can provide me service, but that just does not require that they sell that data. There's two 'privacy' issues here, not one: 1. Customer sharing with company and 2. Company sharing with company. We need to not be mislead by people trying to lump them together and propounding logic that boils down to "Customers need to share data with companies to get service, therefore privacy is not possible (therefore companies must share with companies)."I hate to rag on the article so hard, because it's good to play with ideas like this and see where they lead; it's how progress happens . However, the author should have played with it a bit more before writing a story.