Well-Informed Citizens Increasingly Rare in Information Age Technology & Sociology7/18/2000; 10:26:59 AM 'While more than 70% of the people the NSF surveyed knew that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, and that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist, only 16% could define the Internet and only 13% could accurately describe a molecule. At least those numbers are going up, the report's authors noted diplomatically--five years ago, only 11% could define the Internet and only 9% could describe a molecule.' ...'Ten years ago, Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center, said, "The ultimate irony of [our] findings is that the Information Age [has] spawned such an uninformed and uninvolved population." There doesn't appear to be sufficient reason to change this assessment even five years into the boom of the Internet.' ...'The simple truth is that deep study of science, math, history, literature, art or familiarity with current events cannot compete with celebrity gossip and scandals, large calamities, TV and video games, voyeurism, consumerism, instant fortunes, advertising and popular but ephemeral fascinations.''University educators, like me, are constantly astonished at the depth and breadth of students' knowledge about popular culture and consumer products and by the weakness of their grasp on valuable and vital subjects. They are learning, but not what we usually think of as "learning." Too many are learning answers to the questions on the runaway hit TV quiz show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," instead of the answers to life's most important questions.'
DeCSS Trial Begins in The Matrix DVD & DeCSS7/18/2000; 9:16:24 AM 'Pirating DVD on the Internet is not nearly as easy as the entertainment industry claims, attorneys for 2600 magazine suggested during cross-examination Monday.'Eight motion picture studios sued the hacker-zine in January, claiming it illegally distributed the DeCSS utility that facilitates decoding and redistributing DVDs. The trial, which began this week, is the first to test the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.'Frankly, nothing interesting has happened yet, but it has begun and I'm sure there will be updates as events warrent.Or you can go straight to the source: The EFF Page for the trial. You can subscribe to their mailing list. Or enter the land of press releases and executive summaries and see the MPAA Press Release page. (Both are slanted, but the EFF sounds human.)(Note: The odd title of the piece was the original title of the Wired news story, which I liked. They've changed the story's title to "DeCSS Lawyers Press MPAA" (so much more boring), but the HTML page's title is still the "... the Matrix".)
Meta-Improvement on Userland's Editting Improvement Administrative7/17/2000; 10:47:57 AM If you are using IE 4 or IE 5, and you edit a text message on a Manila site, you will see a bar over the top of the text edit area that contains shortcuts for Bold, Italic, Underline, Color, Font, Alignment, Format, and adding a link.I've added keyboard shortcuts to this site only for Bold, Italic, Underline, and Add Link. Unfortunately, for technical reasons you still must highlight something to apply the formatting to first, and I can't seem to drop-down the drop-down menus via scripting. (I can focus them, but not display the choices.) Anyhow, the following should now work:
- CTRL-ALT-B: Bold.
- CTRL-ALT-I: Italic.
- CTRL-ALT-U: Underline.
- CTRL-ALT-A or CTRL-ALT-L: Add Link. ('A' is for the tag name, 'L' is for Link.)
File Downloader Spying Privacy from Companies7/17/2000; 10:38:06 AM 'As you will see below, if you use the RealNetworks RealDownload, Netscape/AOL Smart Download, or NetZip Download Demon utilities . . .'EVERY TIME you use one of these utilities to download ANY FILE from ANYWHERE on the Internet, the complete "URL address" of the file, along with YOUR computer's individual Internet IP address, and a UNIQUE ID TAG that has been assigned to YOUR machine, is immediately (and secretly) transmitted to the program's publisher.'This is not new news, but importent nonetheless.First item posted with Manila Express for News Items. Thanks David Carter-Tod.
ACLU seeks Carnivore Information via FoIA
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
7/17/2000; 8:57:04 AM 'In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sent today to the FBI, the ACLU is seeking all agency records related to the government e-mail "cybersnoop" programs dubbed Carnivore, Omnivore and Etherpeek, including "letters, correspondence, tape recordings, notes, data, memoranda, email, computer source and object code, technical manuals, [and] technical specifications."
'"Right now, the FBI is running this software out of a black box," said Barry Steinhardt, Associate Director of the ACLU and author of the letter. "The FBI is saying, ‘trust us, we're not violating anybody's privacy.' With all due respect, we'd like to determine that for ourselves."'
Yesmail Gets Restraining Order Against MAPS Blacklist
Spam & E-Mail7/17/2000; 8:45:43 AM This requires a lengthy explanation to understand. If you already know what the Realtime Blackhole List is, skip to the meat.E-mail was the Internet's first killer app. It dates all the way back to when the Internet was an academics-only network, where anybody online could probably be trusted to not abuse the system. Thus, the early protocols didn't always concentrate on security as much as might be expected today. E-mail servers were all what are now known as open relays, which means anybody could send an e-mail from the server without explicit permission. That mail would be indistinguishable from mail sent by local users of that system, because both local and foreign users were sending mail in identical fashions.By contrast, a closed relay requires verification of permission to send e-mail. This prevents non-local users from sending e-mail that looks as if it originated at the system.Today, open relays are the Internet's Gift to Spammers. Using an open server, any spammer can send out thousands upon thousands of mail messages, using somebody else's resources, and be difficult or impossible to trace, as all attempts to trace the spammer back to the origin would end at that mail server, unconnected to the real spammer.Combatting this is the most common function of the Mail Abuse Prevention System Realtime Blackhole List, though not the only function. The RBL is a list of all known sites that are spammer friendly, either because of overly-permissive policies at an ISP, an open-relay mail server, a site that sends out too much spam, or other reasons.MAPS sends a warning to the adminstrator of a server before listing it, and gives the admin time to correct the reason the server is being listed. My workplace has recieved such a warning for accidentally running an open relay... and we were quite pleased to recieve such a clear warning that spammers could use our mail server at will. Since the RBL system functions based on complaints, that means that it probably had been used by spammers, costing us time and money. We happily closed the hole and notified them that we had. After checking, they took our name off of the potentially-blocked list. This is a valuable public service.The subscribers are free to use this list in any way they choose (MAPS does not impose any sort of usage requirement, it's just a public service), but many, if not most, use it to block all e-mail coming from those servers... legitimate or otherwise. As a result of this common practice, for the first time in their long existance, MAPS are being sued by a company (Yesmail.com) for being listed in the RBL. Yesmail.com has won a temporary restraining order (which in this case is appropriate, BTW).I wanted to go into detail about the RBL so you could understand the issue. Yesmail.com contends that such a listing will interfere with their contractual obligations to send out spam (not that they phrase it that way 
). However, you must understand that MAPS simply provides a listing, which itself does nothing. The subscribers are the ones doing the blocking. This dichotomy means that Yesmail.com is contending that one of the following must be true:
- It is illegal to define what a spammer is, and then communicate to people that a site conforms to this definition of a spammer. (Yesmail.com claims not to be a spammer, but in lieu of a legal definition of the term, their definition really has no more force then MAPS's definition. And by MAPS's definition, they are.)Obviously, this would really limit the free speech rights of MAPS. It can hardly be libelous to say "Yesmail.com uses an opt-out system for marketing e-mail", which is what the RBL listing is saying... and that's all the RBL entry is saying. The listing implies no action. (Some sites merely mark mail as suspicious, allowing users to easily filter it out.)
- It is illegal to block mail from a site. Really, the fact that it happens to be the RBL in this case is irrelevant. What it would really boil down to is that you have a legal obligation to recieve e-mail from any and all sources, at cost to you. Extended more generally, you have a legal obligation to 'listen to' all communication directed your way electronically.Note: If spam was cost free to the end-user I'd agree that using the RBL to completely block mail would be wrong... but as it does costs the user, the admins are merely acting on behalf of the user, who I believe do not have the obligation to recieve any given communication.Admittedly, in this case they would be suing the wrong party, but much like the RIAA suing Napster, they are going after the central party for the activity of the end-users (mail server admins in this case), so it's not like this sort of legal idiocy doesn't have precendent.
European official vows to go forward with U.S. privacy deal
Privacy from Companies
7/14/2000; 1:40:13 PM "Frits Bolkestein, the European commissioner for internal markets, told the parliament's Civil Liberties Committee in Brussels that he plans to advise the full European Commission to adopt a draft version of the safe harbor provisions as "adequate protection" for personal data transferred from the 15 member states of the European Union to the U.S."
This despite the recommendation from the European Parliament, correctly calling it far too weak to protect European citizens. We can't even protect our own citizens, I sure hope the EU doesn't just decide to trust us for No Apparent Reason.
International Counter-Money Laundering Act
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
7/14/2000; 1:36:54 PM 'Introduced in March, the International Counter-Money Laundering Act allows the Treasury Department to require banks to report "suspicious" financial transactions involving other countries. That can happen if the Feds find "any such jurisdiction, institution, or transaction to be of primary money laundering concern."'
'But to opponents, the move toward greater monitoring of Americans sounds a lot like a reprise of the controversial Know Your Customer regulations. That proposal would have required U.S. banks to do extensive, additional surveillance of their customers, but the Clinton administration abandoned the plan after 200,000 irate citizens complained via email.'
Reno to Review the FBI's Internet Wiretap System Surveillance and Privacy from Government7/14/2000; 12:46:50 PM "U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said she would review a new FBI automated computer system that can wiretap the Internet to determine whether it might infringe on privacy rights." ... "She was unable to say whether the system would continue to operate until her review was underway."For a very interesting view on this, see Robert X. Cringely's Meat Eater article:"Why would the FBI need a box [located on the ISP's network]? Here's all the FBI will say about Carnivore. It sits on the network at the ISP, is PC-based, is "a kind of a sniffer," identifies and saves packets associated with suspected criminals, is installed under a court order, and doesn't itself act as a decryption device. There are supposed to be around 20 Carnivore boxes, and they have been in use since early this year. You don't need a sealed box to do any of these tasks, most of which are already being done for completely legal reasons right inside the router at every ISP. Routers look at every packet, determine what type of packet it is, where it is coming from and where it is going to, then the router delivers the packet to its intended destination. This is what routers do. Adding the Carnivore task is a simple matter of blind copying every packet to or from a bad guy to a third address at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC. It's at most a few lines of code and requires no additional hardware."So why the box?"
Recording industry calls Napster defense "baseless" Music & MP37/14/2000; 11:51:54 AM '"Napster...uses euphemisms like 'sharing' to avoid the real issue," the RIAA wrote in its brief. "The truth is, the making and distributing of unauthorized copies of copyrighted works by Napster users is not 'sharing,' any more than stealing apples from your neighbor's tree is 'sharing.'"'I was thinking about this on the way to work this morning. Let's look at the situation again, and really break the situation apart:The basic arguments:Napster basic claim to legality is that music sharing amoung individuals is perfectly legal, and that is exactly what Napster is.RIAA's basic claim to the illegality of Napster is that it is nothing but a tool for piracy. While it is trivially false (there are legal uses), it is their defense nonetheless and deserves to be taken into account. I'm going to defend the softer argument that counter to Napster's claims, not all use of Napster is necessarily legal.In most Napster transactions, there are three parties:
- Napster-the-company, which provides the Napster-the-software search engine for public use
- The person downloading the MP3 file
- The person providing the music file
- Napster-the-company: All Napster does is, in essense, take the user reports of the files they have and make it publicly available and searchable. Music never even flows through their servers. I think that while RIAA may want to shut the Napster system down, they really can't fault anything Napster-the-company is doing. They just aren't responsible for the use by their users... and frankly I'd advise RIAA not to pursue this. (Or do they want one of their members to get hit with a high-profile lawsuit on the next school shooting because the shooter listen's to one of the label's bands?)Speaketh the RIAA's lawyers: "Napster is no more subject to (these legal protections) than would be a defendant whose business consisted of providing customers with a VCR, copyrighted movies, and a room in which to copy them." Sorry, Napster never provides copyrighted movies, it's more like an internet Kinko's. Conclusion: Napster the company is clean... and I hope no stretching of the definition of "providing" will allow Napster to be considered as "providing" music. That would really screw many other things up.
- The person downloading the file: Inasmuch as sharing with a friend is legal, the person downloading the file would seem to be operating in exactly the same capacity. The downloader is clean.
- The person providing the file: Here's where it gets tricky. Unlike the person downloading a file, there is a clear difference between a song provider on Napster and a buddy that gives you a copy of something, and that difference is scope. Giving your buddy something has a scope of one. Providing a song on Napster has a scope of 20 million and rising. There is a very real difference in nature between the two.This may count as distribution, which is one of the importent components of copyright. Therefore, it may technically be illegal to offer files for download on Napster that you do not have distribution rights too... even though the person downloading the file is not in legal trouble. Wierd.