House Slows Down Speed Bill Free Speech7/26/2000; 1:57:36 PM 'A House committee voted to delete the most controversial sections of an antidrug bill on Tuesday. 'Gone is the most widely criticized portion, which would have permitted police to conduct secret searches of homes and offices....'Civil libertarians and some conservative groups managed to remove restrictions on publishing or linking to information related to illegal drugs or drug advertising.'Excellent! Now I don't have to go to jail for talking about the laws.

French Court Gives Yahoo More Time Country Watch: France7/25/2000; 8:20:29 AM 'A French court has extended its order against Yahoo (YHOO) to Aug. 11, giving the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company three more weeks to either remove Nazi-related items on its auction site or block the access of French citizens to such items. According to the original order issued by Judge Jean Jacques Gomez on May 22, certain items on Yahoo's U.S. auction site violate a French penal code outlawing the trivialization or denial of the Holocaust.''But Cyril Houri, founder of New York City-based Infosplit, disagrees [with Yahoo's claims of inability to selectively filter French people out based on geography]. Houri says he was contacted by Yahoo's expert witness, Paris-based EdelWeb, to simulate a server system using the company's software and see whether the system could determine the geographic location of visitors to the site. The test project worked, enabling the controlling Web site to block access to certain users. '"If you are in France, you would have seen a site that said, 'Access denied,' " says Houri, who listened to both sides testify before Gomez on Monday. According to Houri, Yahoo's experts did not mention his test trial in court.'As far as I know, these geographical location services work by collecting massive databases of IP addresses (which every computer must have), and recording where those IP addresses are used. For instance, 35.8.x.x - 35.10.x.x would be listed in East Lansing, Michigan, USA, because those are the IP addresses of Michigan State University, recieved from the Merit 35. class A block. (More techical description of IP addressing; just read up to Class D.) There are no other technilogical tricks they can play to find out where you are.These services can be very accurate, because IP addresses must have a certain order corresponding to the real world to them in order to be routed correctly. If someone in France labels their computer as 35.9.24.53 and claims to be a computer from MSU, that's fine, but all the return packets that a server tries to send back to that server from any external network will cross the Atlantic and end up at 35.9.24.53 here on my campus, where they will be either discarded or just plain lost if there's no computer with that IP.However, it's not perfect because you can use a proxy server, which will make all requests look like they are coming from the proxy computer, not the actual requesting computer. Most of the anonymizing services work in this way (including Anonymizer). If you still want to get at the geographically locked data, it can be done, and it's not all that hard, esp. in a 'community' of people that will be passing around instructions on how to do this, even if they don't understand what they're doing.'Plaintiffs are not demanding that Yahoo necessarily alter its content, but rather that it make it impossible for France and its territories (including Corsica, Reunion, Guadeloupe and Tahiti) to access prohibited content. If Houri's claims are true, then Yahoo and other international companies can no longer dodge such situations by saying that the technology does not exist."Of course Yahoo is not willing to block access," says Arie Aboulafia, VP of business development at Infosplit. "Every single country will ask them to start blocking sites."'That would be an impossible burden for any but a huge company with lots of money.

TheStandard.com: Germany Won't Block Access to Foreign Nazi Sites Country Watch: Germany7/25/2000; 7:55:41 AM 'Germany, which has some of the world's toughest laws banning race hate propaganda, has conceded defeat to the cross-border reach of the Internet and given up trying to bar access to foreign-based neo-Nazi sites.'Deputy Interior Minister Brigitte Zypries, the government's Internet security chief, said this week in an interview with Reuters that it was unrealistic to try to shield Germans from foreign Web sites, even though police do aim to stop homegrown Nazi and other offensive material, such as child pornography.'Also some other interesting statements...'Sensitivity about the past also means that Germany has a strong culture of personal privacy and so far the government has shied away from efforts being made in the United States and Britain to monitor certain e-mail for signs of illegal activity.'"Germany, because of its history with state restrictions, is especially careful and we are very sensitive about state intrusions into the private sphere," Zypries told Reuters.'"Anyway, the Americans are not further along in the fight against organized crime even though they have these rights."'An understanding that privacy and complete law enforcement powers may be a contradictions... not bad!'Discussing recent computer virus attacks, Zypries said business must play the lead role in protecting themselves.'"It is business which must develop over the Internet and it is these businesses that must create the security," she said.'"It is the same as a bank here in the city which must make themselves secure against a break in. We don't surround them with police either."'This is an even better policy, as it's easier to protect against a computer attack, in general.

FBI defends email scanner to House probe Surveillance and Privacy from Government7/25/2000; 7:50:26 AM 'Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., called yesterday's hearings amid concerns from privacy groups about an ordinary computer filled with special software that the FBI calls a "reasonable balance" between privacy and law enforcement in an age where crime has gone online.'"Carnivore raises the question as to whether existing statutes protecting citizens from 'unreasonable searches and seizures' under the Fourth Amendment appropriately balance the concerns of law enforcement and privacy," said Canady, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's Constitution panel. Rep. Melvin L. Watt, D-N.C., said, "There seems to me to be a growing level of generalized concern about Big Brotherism that I suspect is being fed by the increasing electronic world."...''FBI officials said Carnivore has been used 25 times, including 16 times this year. None of those cases has yet gone to trial, so the FBI would not disclose detailed information about them.'

Yahoo in court over Nazi auctions Country Watch: France7/24/2000; 1:47:01 PM 'A ruling last month gave Yahoo's French site until 24 June to make it impossible for people in France to gain access to the auctions - describing them as an "offence to the collective memory" of French people.'Yahoo's French language site, fr.yahoo.com, has already blocked access to the pages auctioning Nazi memorabilia. 'But surfers can browse the same pages, which routinely offer hundreds of real or imitation Nazi artefacts every day, on the global site yahoo.com. 'If the High Court rules against Yahoo, it will make material in a foreign language and not specifically aimed at the French population actionable under French law just because it is possible to access that material in France.'Making French lawyers very rich.

Links to Der Schockwellenreiter
LinkBack
7/24/2000; 1:40:20 PM Der Shockwellenreiter joins the LinkBack program.

Desc: "It's a weblog about, politics, culture, scripting languages (Perl, Frontier, Python), the Mac and me ;o) And yes, this weblog is named after the famous novel from John Brunner."

BBspot - Metallica's New Album is Napster-Proof
Humor/Amusing
7/24/2000; 12:44:55 PM 'Metallica released their long awaited "Download This" CD today, and the band declared it Napster-proof. The 74 minute CD contains one 55 minute song, "Napster Begone" and a 19 minute, one-question interview with drummer Lars Ulrich.

'"We wanted to make an album that those bastards on Napster wouldn't steal and I think we succeeded," said Lars. "We realized that we couldn't stop the Napster movement, so we decided to make a Napster-proof album. The 'Napster Begone' track is so long and so horrible that no one in their right mind would take the time to download it. Our loyal fans will buy it though, because most have spent so much money on our merchandise that they can't afford a computer."'

DeCSS Trial Day 5
DVD & DeCSS
7/24/2000; 12:43:07 PM 'EFF's defense team landed a surprising blow to the MPAA in Court on Friday when it revealed that the Livid Project has built an open source DVD player for Linux machines using DeCSS.... Pavlovich [who led the project to develop the player] stated the Livid Project's DVD player was created by lawful reverse engineering under the open source development model, which relies upon dozens to thousands of programmers around the globe working collaboratively. DVD players such as Livid's, manufactured independently from DVD-CCA and the MPAA, are not legally required to restrict consumer player features because they are not subject to a CSS license. Through this litigation the studios were hoping to ban DeCSS before independent groups used the code to create consumer-friendly DVD players that could compete with DVD-CCA's monopoly on players.'

Slashdot has collected a lot of links on the topic.

Microsoft becomes cookie defender, privacy hero
Privacy from Companies
7/24/2000; 10:43:23 AM 'Microsoft got quite a bit of mileage out of its announcement earlier this week that it would be building cookie management features into Internet Explorer. ... What a difference a day makes, indeed. Wasn't it just Wednesday that Microsoft was the slipshod, careless perpetrator of practically every security hole and privacy infringement enabler in the Galaxy? Haven't Messrs Catlett and Smith spent years compiling long lists of offences perpetrated by the Great Satan of the Security Hole? Indeed they have (links [in article]), but nevertheless from the way Microsoft tells it, the company is now leading the privacy charge, and is the consumer's friend.'

Microsoft has finally gotten around to adding the ability to block third-party cookies in their latest "technology beta", features Netscape has had for years. While nice, the gains are mostly in having Microsoft treat the issue of privacy seriously, as the article goes on to point out. On a technical level, these are long overdue features, not the incredible breakthroughs the marketing division of Microsoft would like to claim.

The Trouble With Regulating Hate Free Speech7/24/2000; 10:37:31 AM 'While some would like to see new laws to deal with these sites – wherever they are and as many as there may be – the U.S. constitutional right to free speech protects most of them. Some European nations, however, lack the same free-speech standards. So, like other Internet policy issues such as data privacy and encryption, Europe's standards on hate speech clash with American ones. It's another instance where there's little or no consensus on how to govern this global medium.''National laws used to be buttressed by geographic barriers, customs inspectors and the like. But innovation has been eroding national barriers for decades, and the Internet has eroded them even further.... For now, Europe hopes to make do with a filtering system being developed by the Internet Content Rating Association, a nonprofit British group that's partnered with AOL Europe and the Bertelsmann Foundation, among others. But ICRA's system hinges on the voluntary adoption of a ratings system by content providers. It's hard to imagine hate sites agreeing to rate themselves.'Heh heh heh... can't you see it now? You're browsing around and suddenly a warning dialog comes up: Warning! The site you are now viewing has been rated as the following by the owner: Hateful to Minorities, Hateful to Government, Hateful to Pinko Liberals. Do you wish to continue (Yes/No)?I don't know what the solution is, but I doubt self-labelling will be it.