Tuesday, July 08, 2003

Where Are They Now? Search Engines We've Known & Loved, by Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineWatch.com. 11:31:05 PM    comment []

Lessig on leaving the copyright lane for the public domain. Kim Scarborough sent this (warning: large mp3) wonderful radio show from the Columbia Workshop in 1937 about characters leaving the "copyright lane" for the "public domain." It is a brilliantly complex and funny tale that reveals an understanding about the value of the public domain that would be hard to recognize today. [Lessig Blog] 8:05:10 PM    comment []

Shaken and stirred. Memoirist and reformed alcoholic Augusten Burroughs talks about his $63,000 bar bill, why it's hard to be a drunk when you're allergic to alcohol, and how hard it is to have sex when you're sober. [Salon.com] 8:04:29 PM    comment []

RFID Tracking Site. Digital Earth.org has a posting today about RFtracker, a search engine that tracks and maps the position and movement of of Radio Frequency ID tags. This is either scary or exciting news, depending on your perspective. Paul and Rob Hranac debate the issue here. (Via Starhill) [Smart Mobs] 8:03:50 PM    comment []

Microsoft wants more remote control. The software giant expands distribution of its MSN TV Internet service that gives people access to the Web and e-mail through their TV sets. [CNET News.com] (See also, Tailoring the Web for profit, now old enough to enter kindergarten.) 8:01:28 PM    comment []

The African press on Bush's visit. From Kenya: "Bush's singular achievement has been to make America resented in Africa." [Salon Headlines] 7:54:28 PM    comment []

Have a peek: what kind of mail does a major spammer receive in the course of a day? (cyberangels.nl) If in one day ba@cyberangels receive almost 6000 mails from people who are smart enough to figure that they get bounces because their addresses have been abused by a spammer and who then proceed to redirect those bounces, you can begin to image the volume of bounces that spamruns create, of the sheer volume of those spamruns themselves, and of the that traffic spam creates for decent providers. . . . We received 371 complaints about Cyberangels ... In reply to which we have sent 132 letters explaining the new situation. We received two positive replies to that, and five bounces - apparently, some people regarded our reply to be spam. 146 of these complaints were not about spam but about (repeated) port scans. Some people complained about having been port scanned for weeks, or referred to previous complaints that they had lodged. 4:29:19 PM    comment []

Two from BNA News: 9TH CIRCUIT AMENDS RULING IN THUMBNAIL IMAGE LINKING CASE The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has amended an earlier ruling on the use of links to thumbnail images in search engines. The court orignially ruled that linking to a copyrighted photo on a website without permission violates the copyright owner's public display rights. The court withdrew that portion of the decision and sent the matter back to a lower court to reexamine. Decision at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0055521oP.pdf Coverage at http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1023629.html FRENCH COURT TAKES MUSIC LABEL TO TASK OVER COPY-PROTECTION WARNING A French court in Nanterre has taken EMI Music to task for failing to provide full disclosure of copy-protection on a CD. The company informed purchasers that the CD contained protection but did not advise that it would not work with certain CD players. The court considered the insufficient warning to be misleading to consumers. Case name is CLCV v. EMI Music France. French language decision at http://www.juriscom.net/documents/tginanterre20030624.pdf 3:29:09 PM    comment []

Three years ago, on t'other blog, t'was Water Day. Missle Defense Fails in Key Test Telecoms Miffed at FBI Meddling Internet pornographer Seth Warshavsky, whose Internet Entertainment Group Inc. is one of the leading online porn companies, is under investigation by the federal government, according to a published report. 78 percent of major U.S. firms record and review employee communications and activities, including phone calls, email, Internet activity, and computer files (this number is double what it was in 1997). Clerical turbans have become scarcer beneath the gold-tiled dome of the Iranian parliament. A female legislator has pushed the dress code by wearing a housecoat instead of a chador. And discussion is freely critical of recent moves by the country's Islamic conservatives. The reformist majority in parliament is only a month old, but already its leaders have made their presence felt. Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family 1:28:31 PM    comment []

xian: Apres moi, AOL. >In I remember Usenet, Burningbird weighs the pros and cons of the coming deluge of AOL users into the blogosphere, and recalls the USENET analogy that others have brought up recently. On balance she predicts it will be a good thing, helping the blogosphere outgrow the petty bickering and nanocelebrities that have sprouted in it so far. [Radio Free Blogistan] 9:53:01 AM    comment []

Adam Curry: myv.vom 10 years old. Doug Mohney celebrates mtv.com's 10th anniversary with an accurate history of the 'early' days in 1993 when I owned the domainname: "Remember dear friends, back in '93, the only people who had 'Net e-mail addresses back in those days were academics and some government agencies, and Spam was still something you ate." To complete Doug's article, I'll fill in the missing gap: "The lawsuit between Mr. Curry and MTV Networks has been settled out of court. Neither party has any fourther comment on the matter". 9:46:19 AM    comment []

Dissertation Could Be Security Threat, by Laura Blumenfeld, Washington Post. Sean Gorman's professor called his dissertation tedious and unimportant. Gorman didn't talk about it when he went on dates because it was so boring they'd start staring up at the ceiling. But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman's work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives -- if they could get their hands on it -- would find a terrorist treasure map. Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a soul patch goatee, this George Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them. He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack? In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys. . . . Gorman compiled his mega-map using publicly available material he found on the Internet. None of it was classified. His interest in maps evolved from his childhood, he said, because he grew up all over the place. Hunched in the back seat of the family car, he would puzzle over maps, trying to figure out where they should turn. Five years ago, he began work on a master's degree in geography. His original intention was to map the physical infrastructure of the Internet, to see who was connected, who was not, and to measure its economic impact. . . . When Gorman and Schintler presented their findings to government officials, McCarthy recalled, they said, 'Pssh, let's scarf this up and classify it.' And when they presented them at a forum of chief information officers of the country's largest financial services companies -- clicking on a single cable running into a Manhattan office, for example, and revealing the names of 25 telecommunications providers -- the executives suggested that Gorman and Schintler not be allowed to leave the building with the laptop. . . . The university has imposed the security guidelines. It is trying to build a cooperative relationship with the Department of Homeland Security. Brenton Greene, director for infrastructure coordination at DHS, described the project as a cookbook of how to exploit the vulnerabilities of our nation's infrastructure. He applauds Gorman's work, as long as he refrains from publishing details. We would recommend this not be openly distributed, he said. Greene is trying to help the center get federal funding. (The government uses research funding as a carrot to induce people to refrain from speech they would otherwise engage in, said Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School. If it were a command, it would be unconstitutional.) . . . Is this going to completely squash me? he said, biting his fingernail. GMU has determined that he will publish only the most general aspects of his work. Academics make their name as an expert in something. . . . If I can't talk about it, it's hard to get hired. It's hard to put 'classified' on your list of publications on your résumé. 9:42:18 AM    comment []

Can They Do That? Army Times Bashes Bush. Plastic::Politics::Military: 'Soldier! Where did you get this sorry piece of Bush-bashing tripe?!?' 'From the Army Times, sergeant!' [Plastic: Most Recent] 9:34:01 AM    comment []

hoder: Five things to do to know more about Iran. How can a non-Iranian person know more about iran. Please provide a list of five things that you think would be useful for someone in order to find helpful information about Iranian culture, people, society etc. (Inspired by McGill Report) It may include particular films, books, articles, websites, weblogs, pictures, paintings, songs, etc. Please provide links to related internet resources if you find any. My comment, and I'll try to think some more, was to mention a novel, in English. There are others, and nonfiction, too, but the book I read that to me felt like the Iran I knew when I lived there was Diane Johnson's Persian Nights. With the exception of one moment (she has an Iranian making a gesture that makes sense to an American but is understood to be coarse or worse in Iran), it seemed to me to capture the place. But I'll also continue to think on it. 6:27:03 AM    comment []

Another great page on the Nigerian (419) Scam. Another series of exchanges with scammers ("scammers"), including photos of one waiting at the airport in Dubai and more. 6:26:59 AM    comment []

A year ago on t'other blog: Skip it covered PVR Users Skip Ads (research funded by AOL Time Warner) Iran's Students Step Up Reform Drive How One Spam Leads to Another SpamAssassin Rental car tracking spurs suit: Budget charged drivers for going past boundaries Some info on speakers and panels at H2K2, the Fourth Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference Tollbooths of the mind, by Jonathan Rowe, in The Christian Science Monitor. Centuries ago the concept of property emerged as a means of liberation. It helped to break the shackles of royal power, and served as a bulwark against the impositions of the state. But as Jefferson intuited, taken too far, property becomes another version of what it once opposed – a touchstone of self-justification, an excuse for self-seeking and greed. The challenge now is to restore the balance between the private and the commons that the Founders sought to establish. Imitation nation: Is piracy-crazed China a nightmare vision of the future, or just a developing country going through some severe growing pains? EBay to Buy PayPal in $1.5 Billion Stock Deal Jorn Barger on HTML forever and the three challenges to ''fixing'' the Web The Guardian runs ''top ten'' lists of books, such as: Peter Singer: books on ethics Mary Warnock's favourite philosophy books John Marenbon's fovourite books of philosophy Joan Smith's 10 books for a more moral society (There's one book that turns up on all four of these lists!) 6:26:55 AM    comment []