Friday, April 18, 2003

New AIM beta adds SMS integration. The latest AOL beta can send instant messages to your buddies' cell phones. Just add their mobile numbers directly to your buddy list, or type their number into the IM form. [Smart Mobs] 8:24:15 PM    comment []

xian: Semi-hiatus coming up. The reverse cowgirl has teased me in the past that whenever I announce that blogging will be light for some upcoming period I usually follow up with an unusually dense flurry of blog postings. . . . . . . . But if you see a lot of posting over the next few days, or regular blogging during the first three weeks of May, it's a sign that I'm falling off the wagon and getting myself into a particularly ugly jam. For my sake, hope that I don't do much blogging for the next month. 8:23:13 PM    comment []

The secret society: Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, America is becoming an Orwellian state where people are locked up and no one can find out why -- least of all a compliant Congress. By Tim Grieve, in Salon. In the war on terror -- and outside of it -- the Bush administration is finding increasing latitude to operate with secrecy as the norm, and accountability the exception. Congress has handed the administration broad new powers without requiring it to account for their use, while courts have repeatedly granted the government the right to operate outside the public view and -- at times -- without any possibility of judicial review. And if Attorney General John Ashcroft and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch have their way, the situation may soon get much worse. . . . Steven Aftergood, a researcher who monitors government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, calls Hatch's proposal a direct assault on Congress' ability to monitor the Justice Department. If it goes through, we might as well go home, he told Salon. The administration will have whatever authority it wants, and there won't be any separation of powers at all. 8:01:38 PM    comment []

Washington Post: Homeland Security Dept. Fills Privacy Post. The privacy rights community generally views O'Connor Kelly as a consensus builder, but it is too soon to say how much influence she will have in protecting Americans' privacy rights, said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. [Tomalak's Realm] 7:57:33 PM    comment []

Distributed computers power new search engine (newscientist.com). A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week. The project's home page says that in the last 24 hours over 36 million web pages have been catalogued by Grub software installed by users on about 1000 personal computers around the globe. Like SETI@home and other distributed computing projects, Grub runs in the background on a computer's spare capacity. It automatically trawls the web and collects details on thousands of pages per hour and returns this information to a central database. The Grub screen saver that displays the websites the program is scouring. LookSmart, the US company behind Grub hopes that eventually the project could provide enough raw data to keep a comprehensive search engine up-to-date. 2:39:35 PM    comment []

Jacques Distler, on the RIAA lawsuit against 4 college students: Why not sue Google, ya pansies! In other words, they were doing what Google does, but for SMB FileShares on a LAN, rather than for for the whole WWW. Even without their search engines, a Windows XP user could still search the University LAN for SMB shared files, just a lot less efficiently. Since the DMCA has a specific exemption for search engines, you gotta wonder what the RIAA hopes to achieve. (Reading this critique of the complaint against one of the students, Daniel Peng of Princeton, leaves little doubt in this layman’s minds as to how the case should be decided.) The obvious answer is that they are engaged in pure intimidation. (thanks, Eszter!) 1:38:52 PM    comment []

FTC Files Suit Against Sender of Porn 'Spam', by Jonathan Krim, Washington Post. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Illinois, alleges Brian D. Westby of Missouri violated federal laws by sending e-mail whose deceptive subject lines, such as "What is wrong?" and "Fwd: You may want to reboot your computer," camouflaged the actual content: images of scantily clad women and links to 20 porn Web sites Westby operated, many of them featuring "married but lonely" women. FTC officials said its spam database, which is receiving about 120,000 e-mails per day forwarded by citizens, collected 46,000 from Westby's various endeavors. The agency further alleged Westby used "spoofing" -- a common spammer practice that disguises the Internet address of the computer that sends the spam -- and provided a means of unsubscribing from e-mail lists that did not work. The complaint said Westby has netted more than $1 million from his porn operations. 12:38:42 PM    comment []

Last year: At CFP2002, Day Two Still reporting also and discussing with others at The Well's Inkwell The day starts with Patrick Ball, Deputy Director of the Science and Human Rights Program, American Association for the Advancement of Science. This cat has done amazing, great, stunning work. [pointers] Just to whet appetitites, we start with paused RealVideo clip of Slobodan Mlosovic on the screen in the front of the ballroom. That turns out to be Mlosovic cross-examining Ball at his trial in the Hague I wrote more notes on Patrick Ball at CFP 2002 Catching up from yesterday, here's some Inkwell discussion on the Biometrics Face-Off. Dan Gillmor, Beth Givens, and Jon Johansen and the Writers of DeCSS were honored with EFF Pioneer Awards this year More reporting on CFP: Newbytes, Gillmor, The Inquirer Canada: Key case restores copyright balance Writing for the majority of the Court, Justice Ian Binnie stated that "the proper balance among these and other public policy objectives lies not only in recognizing the creator's rights but in giving due weight to their limited nature . . . Once an authorized copy of a work is sold to a member of the public, it is generally for the purchaser, not the author, to determine what happens to it." Justice Binnie then continued to emphasize the dangers of copyright that veers too far toward copyright creators at the expense of the public. He noted that "excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization." A pipe-dream fires up [Wi-fi] Three from First Monday: Second-Level Digital Divide: Differences in People's Online Skills, by Eszter Hargittai, in First Monday. Independent Media Centers: Cyber-Subversion and the Alternative Press, by Gene Hyde, in First Monday. Uncloaking Terrorist Networks, by Valdis E. Krebs. Microsoft funds witness's research How Microsoft Conquered Washington: By spending lots of money--of course- -but also by doing lots of creative lobbying you don't know about US Cooking Up a Coup in Venezeula? (December 2001) Ants create united Europe: Invading insect empire stretches 6,000 kilometres. 11:38:33 AM    comment []

A Surprise in Every Package: Privacy policies are hidden in plain sight, but what do they really mean? We asked an expert - and the companies themselves. By Ben Hammer, The Industry Standard (2000). 8:38:04 AM    comment []

Philip Greenspun on the death of the MIT Media Lab. [Scripting News] 6:42:04 AM    comment []

Cory: Why WiFi is crucial to the First Amendment [bOing bOing] 6:41:31 AM    comment []

Madonna's Real Art: Getting Attention. With her blanketing of the media, Madonna continues to keep people watching whatever she does; she maintains a presence, not a message. By Jon Pareles. [New York Times: Business] 6:39:47 AM    comment []

Philadelphia Drops a Manager of Five Elementary Schools, by Sara Rimer (NYT). For 4,500 pupils at five Philadelphia elementary schools, the privatization experiment that began last fall has ended. Philadelphia school officials announced on Wednesday that they were canceling their contract with Chancellor Beacon Academies, the company that was managing those schools, because it had not made significant educational improvements here. There is very little evidence they've had any impact on the schools, Paul G. Vallas, the district's chief executive, said in an interview today. [New York Times: Education] 6:38:16 AM    comment []

EPIC Announces 2003 Privacy Threat Index: Privacy Group Cites Increasing Government Surveillance Authority for Yellow Rating EPIC said it would follow the color-coded scheme established for the Homeland Security Advisory System by the Department of Homeland Security for the EPIC Privacy Threat Index. The rankings from green, blue, and yellow to orange and red signal Low Condition, Guarded, Elevated, High and Severe. Based on developments during the past year, EPIC assessed the current level as Yellow. 3:36:27 AM    comment []