Thursday, June 23, 2005

Fair Use: use it or lose it. Exercising your fair use rights is easy! Here is Stay Free!'s reenactment of the deleted Mad Hot Ballroom scene. You won't get arrested for putting this in your movie (but your movie will suck). Courtesy of Steve Lambert I want to point out something about my Mad Hot Ballroom interview because there is a lot of confusion about these kind of copyright disputes. I've said it before but I'll say it again: there is no law requiring filmmakers to clear everything that these filmmakers cleared. The Mad Hot people did so on the advice of their lawyers and lawyers as a rule are extremely risk averse. Their conservatism may seem to benefit their client in the short run, but in the long run everybody (except the Warner Chappells of the world) lose out. Indie filmmakers don't have much power in using copyrighted works, but they do have fair use. And since so much of intellectual property practices are based on habits rather than laws, when it comes to fair use, we've got to use it or lose it. Copyright reform can't be done by activists and legislators alone. Creative people have to be willing to stand up for the First Amendment by standing up for fair use. I don't mean to pick on the Mad Hot folks; they did an awesome job on the movie. But the excised clip featuring Ronnie's soundbite is a perfect example of spineless lawyering run amok. The chance of Warner Chappell actually suing over this is close to zero. They're not morons. In the unlikely event that Warner Chappell did sue, our filmmakers have to spend a couple of painful years in court. True. But their fellow documentarians and artists couldn't have asked for a better test case. [Stay Free! Daily] 9:30:12 PM    comment []

Google Guide (by Nancy Blachman): http://www.googleguide.com/ Google Cheat Sheet (from Google): http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html Do you "google"? Understanding search engine use beyond the hype, by Eszter Hargittai, in First Monday. 10:44:39 AM    comment []

Groups flock to Rafsanjani in Iran runoff vote, by Brian Murphy, In Salon. 8:44:36 AM    comment []

An interview with Marcus Ranum (Federico Biancuzzi, in Security Focus): IPv6 should be the future. Do you see a more secure future then ? No, IPv6 isn't going to solve anything. IPv6 is just another network protocol, and if you look at where the problems are occurring in computer security, they're largely up in application space. From a security standpoint IPv6 adds very little that could offer an improvement: in return for the addition of some encryption and machine-to-machine authentication, we get a great deal of additional complexity. The additional complexity of the IPv6 stack will certainly prove to be the home of all kinds of fascinating new bugs and denial-of-service attacks. Also, don't forget that the current version of IP has encryption and authentication built in already - and that hasn't helped solve any problems at all. Do you think that the problem is that we can't develop a secure protocol, or that people who define standards underestimate security threats ? That's a profound question. There are a lot of factors that combine to defeat security in up-front design. For example, there's basic human nature: the guys who are defining standards can't resist the urge to leave their personal stamp on the future - which results in standards that generally have been assembled based on a process of negotiation by committee. That doesn't really work. That's what gives us these insanely complex multi-optioned heavily layered standards that nobody really understands: every person on the committee had to lobby to get his or her favorite feature included. I don't think that process in any way helps bring about useful security standards. A case in point would be the IETF's terrible fruitless attempts to establish a standard on IPSEC (IP crypto) It only took something like 9 years. Those of us in the commercial world who needed solutions just went ahead and solved the problem for ourselves while the IETF kept arguing. If I recall correctly, when we added IP crypto to our Gauntlet firewall in 1993, it took my engineer on that feature about two months to come up with a complete proprietary implementation. I don't think that the standards committees underestimate security threats; I just think they're too busy doing things that are more important to them -- like holding meetings and writing minutes, or whatever it is that they do all the time. The standards I've seen that try to address security all seem to be over-engineered and too late, while the standards that ignore security are usually rapidly adopted and full of security problems. It's a no-win situation either way. 8:44:31 AM    comment []

Two Benton Headlines: STUDENT TESTING CAUSES SHIFT IN TECH SPENDING Public schools pressured to keep up with state and federal testing requirements are spending millions on high-tech systems to track and catalog their kids at the same time the federal government is cutting funding for the very same technology. The result: Instead of buying laptops for students or updating old hardware, school systems are raiding technology budgets to pay for data systems that keep track of test scores. The mammoth systems, which give teachers instant access to student information and pinpoint weak academic areas, are fast becoming part of the education landscape nationwide. [SOURCE: San Antonio Express-News, AUTHOR: Jenny LaCoste-Caputo jcaputo@express-news.net] HOW WEB CHANGES YOUR READING HABITS Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store. A group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. ScentHighlights gets its name from a theory that proposes that people forage for information much in the same way that animals forage in the wild. ScentHighlights uncovers the "scent" that bits of information give off and attract readers to it. [SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor , AUTHOR: Gregory M. Lamb] 8:44:21 AM    comment []

Three from the Village Voice: A Right Wing Sesame Street, by Ward Sutton. Handicapping the Supreme Court Vacancies, by James Ridgeway. Indie-Rock Heavy Hitters -- Consumer Guide by Robert Christgau 12:26:11 AM    comment []