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Friday, October 24, 2003 |
Do-Not-Call list privacy. Techdirt discusses the lack of privacy around the Do-Not-Call list, which has been created in the US. It is possible to view other phone numbers, add numbers of others and there is no way to change mistakes.
It surely looks like a badly implemented service. This also calls for a distributed solution (RSS again), where the owner of the information can change his info when he needs. A Do-Not-Call flag... [Blueblog]
10:09:25 PM 
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Judge ponders Microsoft license sales. WASHINGTON - A U.S. District Court judge has asked the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate why only nine companies have signed up to license Microsoft's technology for their own software products, an offering that is part of the federal antitrust settlement with Microsoft. [InfoWorld: Top News]
10:01:31 PM
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Publisher's Lunch on Amazon.com's Search Inside:
Search Inside as Prelude To…
For the most in-depth piece on Amazon’s new Search Inside the
Book feature, check out the coverage in Wired: Amazon's scheme
would never work if users really wanted their books in digital form. The
magic of the archive lies in the assumption that physical books are
irreplaceable. The electronic text is simply an enhancement of the physical
object. I have to note, though, that I enjoyed the piece a little more
before I
read Wired’s press release hailing it as an exclusive account of Amazon's
plans,…the result of two months of insider access to company executives
and to the new technology.
The piece marvels at how relatively simple it was on the technology side.
Amazon sent some of the books to scanning centers in low-wage countries
like India and the Philippines; others were run in the United States using
specialty machines to ensure accurate color and to handle oversize
volumes…. Amazon was already doing so much data processing in its
regular business that the huge task of reading the images of the books and
converting them into a plain-text database was handled by idle computers at
one of the company's backup centers.
Their larger vision sees Amazon becoming a repository of books awaiting
POD orders, pointing towards redefining "in print" as finding through an
electroinc search rather than findable on a bookstore shelf: An electronic
archive through which readers can find books is an essential counterpart to
Bezos' original vision of an infinitely big bookstore,… This shifts power
away from the people who own finite sets of copyrighted material and
toward the people who offer access to information about where this material
can be found. Information about books, not ownership of copyrights,
becomes a new center of power. Manber is correct when he says that
Amazon's Search Inside the Book is not an ebook project. It is merely a
catalog. But a decade of Internet history proves that the catalog is exactly
what you want to own.
In a short news item, the WSJ quotes two more publishers on the new
venture. O’Reilly & Associates head Tim O’Reilly is blown away, but
is not participating for now (perhaps because, as a Slashdot
poster points out, he already sells access to a searchable archive
of his company’s books on his own site). If they end up being a
Google for published content . . . we need to think better about
what publishers get out of it, he tells the paper. And Rodale’s
Marc Jaffe says, Given industry concern about possible
electronics right issues, we decided not to participate for now. It is
something we'll consider in the future.
12:38:44 PM
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Hollywood takes anti-piracy message to school (AP)
The Motion Picture Association of America paid $100,000 to
deliver its anti-piracy message to 900,000 students nationwide in grades
5-9 over the next two years, according to Junior Achievement Inc., which is
implementing the program using volunteer teachers from the business sector.
Civil libertarians object that the movie industry is presenting a tainted
version of a complex legal issue -- while the country's largest teachers'
lobby is concerned about the incentives the program offers.
"What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship'" launched last week with
a lesson plan that aims to keep kids away from Internet services like Kazaa
that let users trade digital songs and film clips: If you haven't paid
for it, you've stolen it.
We think it's a critical group to be having this conversation with,
said MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor, suggesting online piracy may not have yet
peaked. If we sit idly by and we don't have a conversation with the
general public of all ages, we could one day look back at October of 2003
as the good old days of piracy.
. . .
This is really sounding like Soviet-style education. First they're
indoctrinating the students and then having students indoctrinate their
peers, said Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. The takeaway message has got to be more nuanced. Copyright
is a complicated subject.
Melinda Anderson, a spokeswoman for the National Education Association,
says it's unsettling when corporate presence in the classroom is tethered
to sponsored incentive programs.
In this case, Junior Achievement is offering students DVD players, DVD
movies, theater tickets and all-expenses-paid trips to Hollywood for
winning essays about the illegalities of file-sharing. Teachers, too, can
win prizes for effectively communicating the approved message in class.
What it speaks to is kind of a new era in commercialism emerging in
classrooms where the attempts to connect with students are becoming more
and more sophisticated. Schools that are often strapped for cash are more
tempted to partner with these organizations, Anderson said.
Coming from school, these companies are getting a tacit endorsement for
their product, Anderson said. That's not a school's role -- to be
the purveyors.
The program got a rocky start during its first presentation, to some
relatively cyber-savvy teens at Raoul Wallenberg High School in San Francisco.
Andrew Irgens-Moller, 14, buried his head into a backpack on his desk and
rolled his eyes as the guest teacher warned of computer viruses and hackers
that could take control of a user's desktop via file-sharing programs. He
objected that antivirus software could scan downloaded files and only
sophisticated hackers could pull off the remote desktop computer takeover.
Then the teacher cut him off.
Bret Balonick, a tax accountant on loan from PricewaterhouseCoopers to
teach the anti-piracy class, was arguing that some downloaders have been
affected by malicious activity. Besides, he said, it's illegal to upload
and download unauthorized content online.
If it's illegal in America, host it in Uzbekistan, snapped the 14-
year-old.
11:38:34 AM
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News from Swarthmore:
College removes Diebold memos,
By Matthew Fitting, The Phoenix.
More than 13,000 pages of internal memos filed by employees of voting
machine maker Diebold Election Systems have, in the past two days, served
as the center of a controversy that has the potential to be legal,
political and national.
At their most eye-raising, the memos include excerpts that admit that a
precinct in Florida in the 2000 presidential elections gave Al Gore minus
16,022 votes when uploaded into the county tally — more than the number of
votes by which Gore lost the presidency. Another admits that a generic
Smart Card, available for purchase by the public, could attain
administrative status on a voting machine — and thus change the number of
votes counted — simply if someone inserted it into that machine.
Downloaded from an internal Diebold Web site that could be accessed
publicly, the memos came into the possession of a college network user, who
is also a member of the organization Why War? How Diebold knew the memos
were on the user’s computer is unclear, though Why War? posted the memos on
its Web site two weeks ago. According to Wired magazine, the corporation
has asked half a dozen other people hosting the memos in the United States,
Canada, Italy and New Zealand to take the material down. It did the same
Tuesday, contacting Information Technology Services and ordering the
college to cease and desist in providing a server for these memos.
. . .
The question of whether Diebold has a copyright on these items — that’s
not a question, Salmon said. Diebold does, in fact, hold such a
copyright on these items. The question is whether reproduction of these
memos is a fair use of that copyrighted work. Using the memos in the
context of discussion and publicity, as Why War? hopes to do, is legal, in
the opinion of Salmon and the EFF.
Four criteria generally determine fair use: first, the purpose of
reproducing such a work; second, whether the work is factual or fictional;
third, the amount and substantiality of the excerpts from the work; fourth,
whether the fair use has a negative impact on the marketability of the
copyrighted works.
First, according to Salmon, these memos are critical to a national,
political discourse, a purpose protected by copyright provisions. Second,
factual works, as the memos undoubtedly are, are accorded more leeway than
fictional works. The third criteria, as well, is generally applied to
fictional works. It applies here because the memos do not constitute a
substantially expressive work; they are a collection of facts, rather than
a cohesive, creative effort, but they are still less likely to fall on
legal ground. In terms of the fourth criteria, since there was never a
market for these memos to begin with, their value is not adversely affected
by their reproduction.
10:38:25 AM
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I Like to Watch. When nostalgia turns toxic: Mariah Carey prattling on about "Hungry, Hungry Hippo" in VH1's "I Love the 80's." Plus: The breakout star of the current reality shows. [Salon.com]
7:37:11 AM
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Three R's: Reading, Writing, RFID. Undeterred by fretful privacy advocates, a charter school in Buffalo has adopted RFID technology to track student attendance. The school's chief says it's all in the name of safety and efficiency. By Julia Scheeres. [Wired News]
7:35:21 AM
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MIT decides to disband RFID research center. The Auto-ID Center, a not-for-profit group established by the MIT to develop standards for using the Internet to identify goods anywhere in the world, using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, will be dispersed at the end of the month. The partnership involved almost 100 blue-chip companies and five universities: MIT, University of Cambridge, University of Adelaide, Keio University and the University of St. Gallen.
The Auto-ID Center has designed software technology called Savant to act as the nervous system of the network. It uses a distributed architecture and is organized in a hierarchy that manages the flow of data. The center’s vision is to deploy Savant running in stores, distribution centers, regional offices, factories, on trucks and cargo planes. Savant nodes will gather, store and act on information and interact with other Savants.
The announcement doesn’t mean the effort is going to stop. According to Kevin Ashton, executive director and co-founder of the center, "the thing has gotten too big for the university to handle. We're not going away, but the transition to this new organization is recognition that the (RFID) system is going live."
Howard reported here that a California legislator called for hearings about the privacy implications of RFID tags last August. Here's a link to Kevin Ashton's testimony.
MIT plans to hold a RFID Privacy Workshop on November 15th “to bring together RFID technologists, boosters, critics, privacy advocates, and journalists covering the space to establish some technical truths and a framework for discussing the policy issues”. The workshop will be chaired by Simson Garfinkel.
It might be an interesting event to attend.
Link to the workshop blog. [Via News.com]
[Smart Mobs]
More coverage of RFID technology and issues here at A blog doesn't need a clever name.
7:32:57 AM
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