U.S. to China: Change Crypto Regs Surveillance and Privacy from Government5/2/2000; 10:36:13 PM Feb 15, 2000: She [Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky] said her U.S. negotiators have repeatedly pressed China authorities to reform these rules and also dismissed Chinese efforts to restrict information over the Internet as futile. LOL! When the US wants to restrict encryption and regulate the Internet, it's for the protection of our children, only a matter of obtaining and using the right censorware, importent for the preservation of right-thinking society, etc. etc. When the Chinese want to restrict encryption and regulate the Internet, it's "futile".I think the US Government is just jealous of China. As the article says in the last paragraph, The United States eased its restrictions on exports of products containing encryption earlier this month, despite the fears of security agencies that it could help criminals. Ms. Barshefsky, could I ask you to please talk to the security agencies and the rest of the Executive branch and explain to your own government why 'restricting information over the Internet is futile'? It'd be much appreciated.

Wide Open News -- Virginia House and Senate Pass UCITA Bill
UCITA
5/2/2000; 10:34:10 PM Feb 15, 2000: Virginia's House of Delegates unanimously passed the Uniform Computer Information Act late Monday. The state senate quickly followed suit, unanimously passing UCITA on Tuesday. Grrrr......

Wondering why I'm so down on UCITA? Try reading a UCITA introduction. "All you ever wanted to know about the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is contained here." Or just read an overview of the problems; and please understand that overview does not exaggerate in the slightest.

Virginia House Passes UCITA
UCITA
5/2/2000; 10:27:24 PM Feb 15, 2000: My jaw drops... not so much at the passage but at the unanimous passage.

"E-commerce is a burgeoning business, but there really aren't rules and regulations that stipulate how you'll do business," May said in an interview shortly after the House of Delegates vote. "Primarily the objective was to establish an even-handed treatment of buyer and seller so neither side has the advantage." Bull. If that was the primary objective of the bill, then maybe it might have actually protected the buyer in some significant way, rather then the seller, seller, seller at all costs as the bill is currently set up.

DoubleClick Plan Falls Short
Privacy from Companies
5/2/2000; 10:02:27 PM Feb 15, 2000: Privacy advocates prefer opt-in plans, where companies can't collect information unless the consumer has actively provided consent, over opt-out. For a company that promised really hard, honest to never collect data ever, so help them the BBB, only opt-in makes sense for them. Anything else is a lie.

Slashdot on License Bombs
Humor/Amusing
5/2/2000; 9:59:11 PM Feb. 15, 2000: A few days ago I used the phrase license bomb to describe putting a license on some copyrighted material that you must accept in order to use, almost identical to a software license. Does anyone know how far that could be taken? Could I put a license bomb on my resume? My web pages? My registration information? And what with UCITA passing (assuming it continues to do so), maybe we could make a truly absurd license and attempt to enforce it, claiming that UCITA protects this. This slashdot message has the idea, and I think it's genuinely worth trying; why wait for "the industry" to provide an acid test?

"By using this registration information for any purpose except verification of warranty, you agree to pay me $100 or 90% of the revenue you recieve from the selling of my information net, whichever is greater, to be paid before so selling my information. A late-payment fee of 25% will be compounded monthly for failure to pay, capping $25,000 or 10,000 times the net revenue recieved, whichever is greater." Think it would work?

News Item Record Personal Notes5/2/2000; 7:02:26 PM I've probably set a News Item record for one day today that will stand for a while... I'm through the first 1.5 months of the 5 months this site has been running and I've created 77 News Items, including this one I've been converting and neglecting my normal 'duties'... I recommend the Privacy Digest. I'll eventually catch up...In the meantime, this is part of the reason I'm doing this: Look at this historical view of the MP3 fracas: My template needs cleaning up, but this is so cool!I'm need to study for tommorow's exam and I'll be leaving for home soon which complicates my updates... then I'm getting married... then I have a little honeymoon thing going on... so the site will be intermittent to non-existant for a while. Wish me luck on all counts.

University officials block MP3 site
Music & MP3
5/2/2000; 6:41:51 PM Feb 14, 2000: Another university bans Napster, claiming that 50% of the campus bandwidth was consumed by the program. "This was not a knee-jerk reaction," Bruhn said. "We started looking at this since the middle of January."

Do You Yahoo? Good Laws, Bad Uses5/2/2000; 6:39:26 PM "The suit alleges that the companies' use of cookies, or little text files written into a personal computer's hard drive to identify a computer user, violates Texas' anti-stalking law."No no no! This is a thoroughly bad bad bad idea. It may seem like a smart use of the law, but it's smart as in "smart-aleck", not "smart Nobel Prize winner". Cookies are not stalking. If cookies are to be compared to anything in the real world, it would be radio tagging an animal, except that cookies only work some of the time, and the tags can be removed or rejected (see, even that's not such a good metaphor). You dare not start down the path of creating metaphors for all Internet activity and then start legislating based on that; it will not work. It creates a miasma of legislation and will not 'scale', in engineering parlance; you are constantly creating new special cases for the Internet program du jour.I've written elsewhere that metaphors are not arguments, and a more general expression of that idea is "Metaphors are useful only for explaining, never deciding." (Perhaps On Deciding... Better should do a bit on what I call the 'metaphor' fallacy. I'm tempted to do so myself, it just wouldn't be as good. Too many people thinking about Internet issues resort to metaphors, which unfortunately is a form of intellectual laziness in this environment where so much is new.) Cookies and the privacy invasions they've been used for (note: 'been used for', not 'caused') should be treated as all-new types of crimes that may, upon further inspection, happen to bear some relationships to old-style crimes.

State of the Web
Essays
5/2/2000; 6:33:54 PM Recent reactions to my writings indicate there is a need to answer a very legitimate question: "Why should I care? Nothing's hurting me." If I can't answer this question, then I might as well fold up shop. This is what I think the answer is.