Thursday, April 17, 2003

White House to Start Online Forum (NYT). 4:33:24 PM    comment []

'Super-DMCA' fears suppress security research: Steganography and honeypot expert Niels Provos may risk four years in prison by completing his Ph.D. By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus. A University of Michigan graduate student noted for his research into steganography and honeypots -- techniques for concealing messages and detecting hackers, respectively -- says he's been forced to move his research papers and software offshore and prohibit U.S. residents from accessing it, in response to a controversial new state law that makes it a felony to possess software capable of concealing the existence or source of any electronic communication. Concealing the existence of communication is my dissertation, and concealing the source of communication takes place in honey nets, says Niels Provos. So I decided to be proactive about it and move it to another location, and for now just deny anybody from the states to download any of my software. At issue are the so-called "Super-DMCA" bills under consideration in seven states, which have already become law in six others. 3:33:16 PM    comment []

NASCAR Fan Faces Prison Time for E-mails, by Mark Pratt (AP). [Michael] Melo designed a program that repeatedly sent the same six e-mails to Fox Entertainment Group Inc. in Los Angeles over a few days in late April and early May 2001. The messages were sent through the company's Boston-area affiliate, according to the federal complaint.He was just very upset that the Red Sox would pre-empt NASCAR, so he decided to send these messages to express his views, said Melo's lawyer, Andrew Good. Fox received more than 530,000 e-mails from Melo. Fearing a hacker was attacking its computer system, the company shut down a portion of its Web site, costing Fox $36,000, according to federal prosecutors. 1:33:04 PM    comment []

Following a screening of a rough cut of Reading Your Rights, a documentary about a Colorado bookstore's efforts to protect customers' privacy, Dan Recht, lawyer for The Tattered Cover, told the secret at last. The police found a bookstore receipt in a methamphetamine lab, along with two books on how to manufacture methamphetamine. They wanted The Tattered Cover to confirm that the guy had bought the books there. The store refused, battling to an important victory in Colorado Supreme Court. And it turns out the investigators' hunch was wrong anyway. The book was Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. But good on The Tattered Cover for its pro-privacy stance in the matter. Bookseller at last tells secret title: Tattered Cover owner fought cops over privacy. By Susan Greene, Denver Post. Recht noted that Meskis could easily have disclosed that information to police because it didn't incriminate Montoya - who since has been convicted on a unrelated drug charge. Instead, he said, she did the right thing and fought the case independent of what book was being sought. For us, it was always about the constitutional issue, Meskis added. Moriarty said she still would pursue the purchasing records if she had to investigate the case all over again. As passionate as Joyce Meskis is about protecting the First Amendment, we're as passionate about protecting the community, she said. Book at center of meth case isn't about drugs: Receipt cops sought was for volume on Japanese calligraphy. By John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News. The Tattered Cover believes that all information about customer purchases is private, Recht said after the forum. The bookstore is not in the business of determining what is helpful to law enforcement and what is not. 12:32:51 PM    comment []

Last year, At CFP2002, Day One I and several other attendees are posting updates and discussing conference stuff over at The Well's publically accessible Inkwell conference. Yesterday, I attended a daylong workshop of fair use and digital rights management technologies. I put together some Thoughts on the Workshop on Fair Use By Design. thanks to Proxim and Salon Timothy J. Muris, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission spoke at lunch here at CFP. One of the things he talked about was the proposed National ''Do Not Call'' Registry, mentioned previously here on X-Ray Net Other conference coverage: Chronicle, Newbytes, AP Almost Half Of World's DSL Users In Asia-Pacific Youngsters targeted by digital bullies More than one in four youngsters in the UK has been threatened via their computers or mobile phones, according to a survey. Children's charity NCH, which commissioned the research, now wants young people to be taught how to deal with 21st-Century bullying techniques. 'Virtual' Child Pornography Ban Overturned An open letter to the research community, (PDF) from Greg Koski, Director, Office for Human Research Protections, DHHS. A key element of the remodelling process in human research protections is the move from a system focused on regulatory compliance to a system focused on prevention of harm. 12:32:45 PM    comment []

This is from last year, but I was struck by it just because I'm reading Dracula just now, and it is hackwork but really compelling. "Dracula's" secretary. The resurfaced manuscript of Bram Stoker's legendary vampire novel reminds us that even a hack can create an immortal tale. [Salon Headlines] 7:18:34 AM    comment []

Doc: Yes, there are more of us. I'm a lot more careful than I may seem, at least when it comes to other family members. So I've been slow to blog about the good work my older son, Allen (who is, like, 24 years older than the younger one), has quietly been doing on a project he only told me about a month ago, long after it was well underway. The project is GlobeAlive, the slogan of which is The World Live Web. It's basically a 'live' search engine: one that finds human beings who might be available to answer questions in real time. There's a lot of synergy with what Britt is doing with Xpertweb, and what Mitch has been saying about the Strip Mall Infomediary, both of which also, like GlobeAlive, could stand to benefit from the kind of identity infrastructure I wrote about in Making Mydentity, and expect to see coming out of SourceID and similar efforts. There are also natural synergies with smart mobbery, social software, moblogging, and most of the stuff in Marc's blogrolling column. Even ActiveWords, to name another potentially interested party. And, of course, instant messaging with presence detection, which is why Allen and friends are currently developing a new Jabber-based client. What prompts me to start talking about Allen's work with GlobeAlive is Britt Blaser's post yesterday, What's That In Your Genes? Britt does a nice (and flattering) job of explaining the fertile ground where the Xpertweb and GlobeAlive circles overlap. Some interesting context: Allen isn't your typical Web entrepreneur. He isn't even a techie. He's a writer and a philosopher whose research tends to want answers he found Google and other Web search engines didn't quite provide. What he wanted were the kind of answers you can only get from live human beings — real experts on, say, relativity theory or Ludwig Wittgenstein (two subjects he mentioned in recent conversations). Not finding what he wanted with Web search engines, he decided to invent an engine that searched for live and available people. Here's how he explained it to me on the phone a few minutes ago: GlobeAlive is for when you want a person and not a site. If you want a site, Google's your engine. If you want a person, GlobeAlive is there for the job. Or will be. We're still in beta, although we have a very devoted group of people involved already. Is it for when you're looking for experts? It can be for any form of interaction; not just an expert answer, even though that's the most common use at this early stage. But I don't want this to be thought of as just another expert site. It's not just that. It's a live search engine. Later we may want to make a distinction between an expert, a conversationalist, or a somebody with something to sell. But for now the primary use will be to find experts, and get expert answers to questions. Where does it stand technically? We've been working and reworking it for going on two years now, but basically it's still in beta. Right now we're working with GlobeAlive desktop, which is a crappy instant messenger. That's why we're working on a Jabber client right now. What we're want next is to scale up on both the supply and the demand side. More experts, more participants, and more users doing searches. Right now it's like Google with a handful of Web sites to search. But we've been at this long enough to know that the idea does work, and it does scale. And it will grow organically, and in value. The bigger it gets, the better it gets. How does an expert keep from getting bothered by the wrong questions? You only come up in searches when you want to be found. Your keywords and nothing else. (It's a bit more complicated than that, I think; but that's what I wrote down.) What about your business model? Revenues come from paid placements. We've played with the word "chatvertising." In any case, appropriate advertising. Positive-value stuff. Nothing insulting or intrusive. And we want to put in financial incentives for participants in the form of tiered revenue sharing. I'm intrigued by the idea that the Web, or the Net, is missing a live element, in spite of all the efforts going on with VoIP, instant messaging and other stuff. And I'm impressed that Allen has already taken this thing as far as he has, entirely on its own bootstaps. He's funded it himself, out of his own pockets, and with the help of many friends who believe in the idea. (Which was, he tells me, partly inspired by The Cluetrain Manifesto.) He's also started a blog. That's in beta too, but coming along nicely for a rookie effort. So check it out. Sign up, if it intrigues you. Since Allen's now out here in the blog world as well, I'm sure he'd be interested in all kinds of connections and constructive feedback. [The Doc Searls Weblog] This reminds me of a vision of my friend, Ken. Ken has wanted a way to be able to put people in touch with philosophers 24x7x365, the way Socrates was said to have slept in the Agora with instructions that others should wake him if they wanted to do some philosophy. That could be a good connection. 7:14:04 AM    comment []

Look Inside the Soul of the Web. The queries come in two per second, 173,000 per day. Spend 24 hours watching the world look for answers at Google, and you can learn a lot. By Michael S. Malone from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 7:09:00 AM    comment []

Microsoft shrugs off dial-up decline. The company's MSN service backs off its growth-at-all-costs strategy as market tastes shift to budget-priced services and high-speed providers. [CNET News.com] 7:07:49 AM    comment []