Tuesday, January 07, 2003

"Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff". Bob Dylan's debt to the hidden industry that he (unwittingly) helped create. [Salon.com] 9:23:39 PM    comment []

Very strange. Earlier posting, Pirated Sites, should have this url, but doesn't. Will fix later. http://www.pirated-sites.com/ (Later: fixed.) 6:59:57 PM    comment []

Four from BNA News: NORWEGIAN TEEN ACQUITTED ON ALL CHARGES IN DECSS CASE A Norwegian court has acquitted Jon Johansen of all charges in a much-anticipated ruling involving the creation and posting of the DeCSS program. The court ruled that Johansen did nothing wrong when he helped crack the code on DVDs, finding that there was no evidence that he had used the decryption code for illegal purposes nor that he intended to contribute to illegal copying. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030107/80/dhzq5.html http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article.jhtml?articleIDF6519 CANADIAN COURT REFUSES TO ENFORCE ONLINE SECURITIES CONTRACT A British Columbia court has ruled against the online brokerage arm of Merrill Lynch in a dispute over a cancelled securities transaction. The court ruled that ML's disclaimers posted on its site and its user agreement were not enforceable. It added that the due to the nature of its services, ML owed a higher duty of care than ordinarily expected in the provision of services and that ML's computer system did not meet that standard. Case name is Zhu v. Merrill Lynch HSBC. Decision at http://www.provincialcourt.bc.ca/judgments/pc/2002/05/p02%5F0535.htm WHITE HOUSE CUTS CYBERSECURITY PLAN The Associated Press is reporting that an internal Bush Administration draft on its cybersecurity plans reveals that nearly half of the planned initiatives have been cut. The revised plan grants more responsibility to the Homeland Security Department and eliminates regular consultations with privacy experts. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/4887829.htm TWO MEN INDICTED IN $60 MILLION NET SCAMTWO MEN INDICTED IN $60 MILLION NET SCAM A California grand jury has indicted two men -- one a California computer expert and the other a Canadian - on 24 counts of fraud and money laundering. The charges stem from what officials describe one of the largest Internet investment schemes thus far. http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/5791486p-6760858c.html 5:59:50 PM    comment []

More hoops: Detectives on deadline: NBA advance scouts constantly watch, report, travel, by Sekou Smith, Indianapolis Star. 1:58:40 PM    comment []

Pirated Sites showcases side-by-side comparisons of web sites that are suspected of borrowing, copying or stealing copyright-protected content, design or code without permission. 12:59:02 PM    comment []

William Gibson's weblog: The thread about the bridge in Virtual Light had me remembering where that all came from . . . . . . . . . . a website can become a Cornell box full of friends. Having seen that happen elsewhere, and been a part of it myself, my best hope for this site would be that, for some of you at least, that will happen for you here. (If it does, it won’t have much to do with me, and everything to do with you.) So welcome, and special thanks to those of you who arrived early and started colonizing the place before it was even completed. That really cheered me up, a couple of weeks ago. I don’t have to feel I’m moving into an empty (and dishearteningly brand-new) structure. There is already some human space here, the start of that sense of duration and habitation, and soon there’ll be, I hope, more. In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi- Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis. (And elsewhere on the site: I do have an email address, yes, but, no, I won't give it to you. I am one and you are many, and even if you are, say, twenty-seven in grand global total, that's still too many. Because I need to have a life and waste time and write. ) Gibson's new book is Pattern Recognition. 12:58:59 PM    comment []

And the Wizards get to .500, against the Celtics, yet! 12:58:51 PM    comment []

Report on last month's MLA convention: The Droves of Academe, by Tom McGeveran and Rebecca Traister, New York Observer (time-sensitive url) The famous line about the M.L.A. is that you’ve never seen a convention where people drink so much and fuck so little, said Michael Bérubé, an English professor from Penn State University. Mr. Bérubé was on the revolving 49th floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel at 11 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 29, hanging out with Governors State University professor and fellow Queens native Deborah Holdstein. The M.L.A. is about a different kind of performance anxiety, Ms. Holdstein said with a laugh. Two days earlier, nearly 11,000 English literature and modern-language professors had descended on midtown Manhattan for the start of the Modern Language Association’s annual conference, the place where intellectual superstars like Stanley Fish, Elaine Scarry and Kwame Anthony Appiah share hotel space with hundreds of desperate Ph.D.’s interviewing for a meager handful of jobs. . . . For recent Ph.D.’s looking for positions in the fields of language and literature, the frantic surroundings of the M.L.A. convention offer the only dusty rays of hope. It’s a bleak landscape for academic job-seekers in any field, but this year, a flyer in the conference press room trumpeted the sharpest decline in Language and Literature jobs since the 1992 recession. The total number of English-language jobs fell from last year’s 983 to 792. Only half of these are tenure-track. These jobs are all that are available for the 977 people who received English doctorates in 2000-2001, not to mention the hundreds of frustrated job-seekers from previous years, on top of those with so-so jobs who are looking to trade up. . . . Already getting soused in the Hilton lobby bar were a group of three friends who had met in the Rutgers Ph.D. program. Julian Koslow, a 35-year-old Milton scholar, had just completed a job interview for a university he wouldn’t name. That’s why I’m wedged into my suit, said Mr. Koslow, who was practically gulping his beer and said that he was looking forward to getting drunk with the hedonistic masses. One of Mr. Koslow’s companions was Ryan Walsh, who has not yet completed his dissertation on Shakespeare’s history plays and will not be on the job market until next year. Mr. Walsh, in a comfy sweater, surveyed the hundreds of potential colleagues chatting each other up in the bar and lobby. He was a little slack-jawed. I cannot imagine having to do this, said Mr. Walsh, who said that at least the attitude of the conference was high-tension, high-release. Their friend Tom Harris said that he’d dropped out of the Rutgers program to become a private investigator, a job which he characterized as involving long periods of boredom punctuated by terror. Mr. Koslow, looking calmer now that most of his beer had disappeared and his tie was looser, agreed with The Observer that this description also applied to the academy, except there’s less terror, more despair. . . . We need to remind ourselves and gesture toward the fact that this is not an esoteric private club, said [MLA President] Mr. [Stephen] Greenblatt. It’s as big as the people riding on the subways with their noses in books, or at home watching television shows. Our culture is saturated with the making and consuming of stories. 8:22:31 AM    comment []

Tech doctorates decline 7 percent. The number of science and engineering doctorate degrees awarded in the United States dropped by 7 percent from 1998 to 2001, according to a new survey. [CNET News.com] 7:26:56 AM    comment []

365 days For the entire year of 2003 (January 1st to December 31st) this page will feature one mp3 file (every day) to download. The content will be focused on musical pieces, but will also include spoken word. Listeners of the incredibly strange and outsider realm take note, for this is the majority of material that will be made available. (thanks, Adam!) 7:26:34 AM    comment []

As featured in the New York Times this morning: http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/index.html See An Exhibition That Borrows Brazenly, by Chris Nelson. It sounds like a plan for drawing hordes of screaming lawyers to your door: create compilation CD's with sampled music from the likes of the Beatles, James Brown and Johnny Cash, not to mention the voice of Dan Rather; include as many songs as possible that have already sparked legal battles; do it all without getting permission from the copyright owners; and distribute the CD's at a nationally touring art exhibition. Oh yeah, and give the music away online for the millions of people around the globe who can't make it to the show. So far this operation has not sparked even a lawyer's angry voice mail, said Carrie McLaren, curator of the exhibition, "Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age," where the potentially inflammatory CD is available free, and of its Web site, illegal-art.org. They know it'd be like a minefield, said Ms. McLaren, who contends that the music, visual art and video pieces in the installation are protected by the "fair use" provision in copyright law that allows for parody and commentary. The exhibition, she says, takes the potentially illegal and makes it untouchable. Maybe she should talk with Paul McCartney. Sir Paul's spokesman, Paul Freundlich, is examining the apparently unauthorized use of the Beatles' song "Tomorrow Never Knows" on the "Illegal Art" track "Psycho of Greed" by the rap group Public Enemy. Both Public Enemy and Ms. McLaren are violating the law by distributing copyrighted work without permission, Mr. Freundlich said. The people that are actually doing this exhibit are just as guilty as anybody else who's pirating anybody's artwork, he said. Once again, stay tuned. 7:22:38 AM    comment []

Don’t set the people free: Theodore Dalrymple says that many poor souls need institutions, but the ideologues and cost-cutters insist on giving them autonomy. 4:44:02 AM    comment []

Elsevier's Vanishing Act: To the dismay of scholars, the publishing giant quietly purges articles from its database, by Andrea L. Foster, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 1:43:34 AM    comment []