Lawmakers prepare digital music bill
Music & MP3
'Long live Napster. Or its idea, anyway. Two Capitol Hill lawmakers are getting ready to introduce legislation that would loosen copyright laws to help legitimate, Internet-based music services get up and running without the threat of being shut down by the courts for infringement.'

I could have sworn that somebody had already introduced this bill (or a similar bill). In fact I wrote about it, but now I can't find it. At any rate, if this could pass (ha ha!), it would certainly crack open the debate, which (at least in Congress) has been so blatently corporate that you'd think that even Congresscritters would start to get queasy.

FBI Bugging Case Goes to Court
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
'The legal limits for these new investigative tools will get a test Monday when a federal court in New Jersey examines a mob case in which agents, without a wiretap order, recorded a suspect's computer keystrokes....

'Armed only with a search warrant, the FBI broke into Scarfo's business and put either a program on his computer or an electronic bug in his keyboard -- officials will not say which -- and recorded everything typed by the son of the jailed former boss of a Philadelphia mob.'

Techs Must Report Child Pornography

Misc.
For South Carolina" 'Tucked into a new law on education standards for day care workers is a requirement that private technicians tell police if they find child pornography when servicing computers.'

*blink* *blink* On the one hand, these people shouldn't be required to perform in a law enforcement capacity. On the other, giving computer folks a little law enforcement capability could be very interesting... *extremely evil chuckle*

The Great CNET Spam-off
Spam & E-mail
'CNET contributor Matt Lake opened 12 free e-mail accounts (and monitored some older ones) and dedicated each to one typical online activity. He even opened accounts at each e-mail provider and left them untouched just to examine the myth that just having an e-mail account can generate spam. Next, he joined up at sites that require you to register an e-mail address, posted messages on message boards around the Web, registered domain names, and visited chat rooms. In each case, over a few months, he checked to see which activities attracted the most unsolicited e-mail to an account, then tried to figure out how to remove the spam. Finally, he categorized those behaviors in terms of high, medium, and low risk, and the results were somewhat surprising.'

Taming the Wild, Wild Web

Misc.

'"We don't have any control over the Internet," said Michels, president and chief executive of Maryland-based CSP Inc., which helps big clients protect priceless corporate data in the event of an earthquake, computer network outage or other disaster. "If something goes down, you don't even know who's accountable. The Internet is, like, 'Who ya gonna call?' "

'That's an example of how the Internet's leading virtue, its unruliness, is increasingly getting cursed by business executives and economists as its worst flaw. After years of fruitless efforts to make money selling goods and services over the Web, many entrepreneurs and other businesspeople are starting to blame the system's fundamental design for their failures.'

Still in DMCA Prison
DMCA

From Slashdot:

Let's go over the Sklyarov situation. Sklyarov is still in jail. In fact, he's still in Las Vegas, where he is being held without even a bail hearing, much less bail. The excuse given for not having a bail hearing when he was arrested on July 16 was that he was being immediately transferred to San Jose and would get a hearing there. Anyway, a recap of the protests: San Jose, more San Jose, New York, Seattle, Chicago writeup and Chicago pictures, Moscow writeup and Moscow photo and news coverage: New York Times, Business2.com. Wired has Washington's viewpoint - Representative Coble says "there have been very few complaints from intellectual property holders". Well, duh. Linuxplanet has an opinion piece exploring the Digital Millennium Rape Act. Finally EFF has written a letter to U.S. Attorney Mueller, asking for the U.S. to drop the charges against Sklyarov. It seems pretty doubtful that he will, since he won't want to be seen as soft on crime during his Senate confirmation hearings.

The Copyright Cops Go Too Far
DMCA
7/24/2001; 11:40:29 PM 'It's also difficult to understand how the prosecution of Skylarov will help Adobe -- not to mention the rest of us -- which is supposed to be the justification for criminal laws. So far, the arrest has done little more than galvanize anti-DMCA activists and create a barrage of negative publicity for Adobe, which I'm willing to bet has not translated into an increase in the already pathetic sales of eBooks. As for the underlying problem of copyright protection on the Internet, it's still an open issue, but bringing out the police is not the solution to our problems. If nothing else, the arrest underscores the fact that the DMCA is a law that needs rethinking, and soon.'

Linux: The electoral test that pencil and paper meet Misc.7/24/2001; 12:28:18 PM 'When Carol Boughton's Canberra consultancy, Software Improvements, won a $200,000 contract to provide an electronic voting system for the ACT's October election, it was critically important her team got the technology right.'"ACT" stands for "Australian Capital Territory". This is still a poll-based scheme... you have to come in and vote, it's not a remote thing. (This is good.)What's interesting about this is the system is all open source: 'The only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).''Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, in testimony in January on voting technology before the US Civil Rights Commission, adopted the axiom, "trust no one"...."Truly open source systems are valuable, but they pose threats, too, because anyone can get and modify the code."...'I chopped out quite a bit there; please read the article for full context. I wanted to point out that the phrase "anyone can get and modify the code" is deceptive, and probably doesn't accurately convey what the professor actually said. It may be true that I can download this voting software, make some changes, and compile it, but the effect that would have on the ACT voting results would be precisely bupkis. I would still need to get those changes into the real voting system, which should be virtually impossible, regardless of the details of the actual vote counting software.The machines will be physically secured at the polling location and the counting location (I hope!), and as long as all communications between those two locations are adequately and competently secured (which should be easy to do with something like ssh & certificate authentication), it will be very difficult to affect the system remotely, almost regardless of any weaknesses in the system. That leaves only local exploits... and there are other things that could be done to detect the effects of that. If I were designing this system, I'd put some paranoia checks into the counting system. Is one of the polling computers changing its tune? Is it suddenly registering too many votes too quickly?So, while in a vague theoretical sense, open source voting software might allow someone to discover holes in the system and exploit them, there are still huge (theoretically insurmountable) practical difficulties in exploiting these bugs, and even bigger ones associated with not being detected, assuming competent system design and administration. When considered against the very practical and real problems proprietary voting systems have, with their opaqueness and the power being handed over to the vendors of the system as a result (who could know if they were fudging the vote by a percent or two?), open source is the clear winner for voting software. It may not be perfect, but if you insist on using software, there's no reason to go with closed source.

Sad and lonely in cyberspace? No, not really. Technology & Sociology7/23/2001; 3:22:23 PM 'A new, longer follow-up from a study that linked Web use to poor mental health — heavily publicized three years ago — shows that most bad effects have disappeared.'"Either the Internet has changed, or people have learned to use it more constructively, or both," says the study leader, psychologist Robert Kraut of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.'And now we see that the Internet benefits psychology as much as other sciences... thanks to the "Internet Time" phenomenon, faulty studies from 1998, corrected by follow-up studies in 2001, can dodge the (*cough cough*) psychologically challenging issues of admitting the original study may have been flawed. (Surely that's at least a possibility, nyet?)The previous study is discussed in this this Salon article from 1998:'"Sad, Lonely World Discovered in Cyberspace": The front-page headline in Sunday's New York Times conjured an image of intrepid explorers trekking to the edge of a precipice to win a precious glimpse of some remote tribe. It's a romantic, attention-getting picture, which is no doubt what attracted Times editors to the wording. But -- as so often is the case with media portraits of Net culture -- the truth is far more mundane.'

Go Ahead, Make Ashcroft's Day Misc.7/23/2001; 2:08:20 PM 'So on Friday afternoon, when Ashcroft announced a tough-on-hacking initiative to combat the people of "poor and evil motivations" who seek to bring down the world's precious computers, did cyber-punks flinch and ask themselves if they felt lucky?'Not likely.... The new program will create a cadre of specialized cybercrime attorneys -- called "computer hacking and intellectual property" units, or, stupidly, CHIPs. They'll be based at 10 field offices around the country, from which, Ashcroft promised, they'll be able to respond like lightning to any digital threats....'But that's all the program consists of -- lawyers. Though he cited several statistics to prove to the assembled media how big a problem computer crime is, Ashcroft's was a gospel of prosecution, not of cyber security. His message, peppered as it was with such misnomers as "hacker" to mean "cyber-criminal," indicated a fundamental ignorance of the computer security community and their ethic.'The article has a couple of good examples of why this is not a good thing. If they were half serious, couldn't they afford maybe one technical person on staff?