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.

License Plate Lust Personal Notes5/2/2000; 6:31:55 PM Feb 11, 2000: I normally try to keep my personal life out of this 'blog, but this is kinda cool I think... I'd actually like to have this license plate someday (though I think my state of Michigan doesn't allow seven letters).How many people's domain names are short enough to fit on a license plate, including the '.com' or '.org'?

Manila Experiences
Internet/Weblog Culture
5/2/2000; 6:29:50 PM Feb. 11, 2000: So, everybody else is posting their experiences with Manila. I thought something a little different was in order, so here are my Manila Experiences. Read these if you're thinking about getting a Manila site, but think you don't need something that is designed for people who aren't too experienced with the web. I was surprised by the results, you will be too.

Reno, FBI feast on bad network security
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
5/2/2000; 6:26:37 PM Feb. 11, 2000: I've been waiting the past couple of days for just this sort of article on the latest Denial of Service attacks. "FBI officials don't appear to know much of anything, except that they desperately need heaps more money, and that Western Civilisation desperately needs their increasing intervention in all matters digital. Indeed, it was such a good setup for DoD that conspiracy paranoiacs will soon be claiming that the FBI conducted the attacks themselves, to justify increased spending and increased intervention in Net-related law enforcement." From The Register.

Speculation on the Motives in the DVD Trial
DVD & DeCSS
5/2/2000; 6:24:38 PM Feb. 11, 2000: More demonstration of why I don't find it impossible to believe that those who would trample our rights can win in the end: An article speculating (though I don't think too wildly) on the real motivations behind the DVD lawsuits. After all, the MPAA don't need to squash all other options, only prevent the public from ever thinking of them as real options.

How many of your friends know what PGP is? (Do you know what PGP is?) I know what it is, but I don't use it. If I don't use it, why would anyone else, who doesn't know half of what I know about these issues facing us? (I suppose this means I should start... but none of my e-mail recipients would have a clue what to do with a PGP-encoded e-mail.)

Passport Access & Resumes Privacy from Companies5/2/2000; 6:16:53 PM Feb 10, 2000: Hey, PassportAccess solves my What Is A Web Page? controversy in their reply to mathowie's request for them to remove his resume from their system.Per your request, we have removed your resume from our database. Our technology works by searching the Internet (public domain sites such as Yahoo and Excite) and collecting resumes that match a specific criteria. Once you post your resume or any sort of material on the internet it becomes public information and therefore, can be spread from site to site very quickly. This is most likely how we got your resume.Wow. Not even any babbling about the DMCA. Folks, did you need any more evidence that there are companies and people who believe they own everything on the internet?Yahoo, are you aware you're in the public domain? Why doesn't PassportAccess get out of the resume business and start mirroring Yahoo, selling their own ads? After all, Yahoo's in the public domain!Exclusive iRights offer!: For a $2000 sponsership, I will post on the public Internet every resume PassportAccess possesses. They charge $995 for a year of access, the other thousand is for my pocket. Depending on how long it takes I may be forced to charge more. But good news! PassportAccess can't complain, because by making those resume's available on the Internet, don't ya know, they're public domain! They can't add restrictions to public domain material once it's in my grubby little hands, and even if they try, if they can usurp copyright, so can I.(Actually, there are some database protection laws proposed that would turn that into an illegal act, but as far as I know, it hasn't happened yet! Act fast!)OK, the offer is satirical, but there's no reason it has to be. There's nothing stopping somebody from doing that, it seems.Hello! Internet companies, wake up! If you don't want people doing it to you, you can't do it to others. In other words, if you claim people's content as your own, so can I.Sheesh.

Privacy bill would control 'cookies'
Privacy from Companies
5/2/2000; 6:09:50 PM Feb 10, 2000: Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., says he wants to control networks' use of "cookies," or digital ID tags, dropped on Net users' hard drives. OK, great, we've got people who want to do something about the privacy issues on the Internet. Is Sen. Robert Torricelli, or any of his staff, aware that Cookies aren't the problem, tracking people is. Banning cookies isn't any good, Doubleclick can still track you by IP address, they just won't be able to trick your machine into doing the hard work for them.

Things need to change, but they need to change at a high level; ban cookies, and tommorow they'll use some other tracking technique. Want to accomplish something (skipping the debate as to the goodness or badness of the something)? Ban a behavior, like user tracking. Don't go after the hammer, go after the idiot beating heads in with it. Tools aren't the problem; uses are.

FTC Investigates Amazon's Alexa
Privacy from Companies
5/2/2000; 6:06:46 PM Feb 9, 2000: Update on yesterday's Alexa story. Using a packet sniffer to monitor the data travelling between his computer and Alexa's servers, Smith discovered that his full home address had been sent to Alexa while he was using AltaVista's yellow-page service. He also learned that Alexa's servers had received detailed information from an airline ticket purchase he made on Travelocity, and a personal phone call he made to a relative in Florida. Wow!