Index to and links for Observer columns for
2000
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| Links for 31 December 2000 | |||
| The streamed video of the Engelbart 1968 demo is here. You will need the (freely-downloadable) RealVideo player to view it. Warning: the server seems easily to get swamped so the streaming stutters unless you have a broadbank link. Be patient. | The segment relevant to the BT patent suit is the one in which Doug demonstrates capability of his NLS software to jump between levels in the architecture of a text, making cross references, creating Internal linking and live hyperlinks within a file. Links can be made visible or invisible. | Websites
of the Year
Am I Hot Or Not is www.amihotornot.com |
My review of the Internet year is here. |
| Column for 17 December 2000 | |||
| Column for 10 December 2000 | |||
| Column for 3 December 2000 | |||
| ...................................................................................................................... Links for 19 November 2000 ...................................................................................................................... |
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| Arnold Steinberg's article on his experience of hanging chads appeared in the online edition of the National review. | |||
| ...................................................................................................................... Links for 12 November 2000 ...................................................................................................................... |
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| Thanks to the many readers who pointed out that it was not Northcliffe who described journalism as the art of relaying the news 'Lord John Smith dead' to people who did not know he had been alive. What it is to have literate readers! | The quotation should be attributed to G.K. Chesterton who has Father Brown say "Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." | ||
| ...................................................................................................................... Links for 5 November 2000 ...................................................................................................................... |
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| The UCLA study is available in full from the Center's website. If you don't have Adobe Acrobat installed, you will need to download the Reader to access the text. | |||
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 29 October 2000 ....................................................................................................................... |
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| Here is the text of the message from Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn about Al Gore and the Internet. | Scott Rosenberg explored the origins of the Gore/Internet story in an interesting piece in Salon. | ||
| ....................................................................................................................... Column of 22 October 2000 is here. ........................................................................................................................ |
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| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 15 October 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| Salon had an interesting interview with the guy who founded MojoNation which modestly describes itself as "a revolutionary new publishing and content-sharing network. It combines the flexibility of the marketplace and the distributed computing power of the Internet to go far beyond current filesharing systems". | "We're not just trading MP3s here", it goes on. "Mojo Nation is building an efficient, massively scalable and secure marketplace for distributors and consumers of digital content." | Danelle Brown
wrote a thoughtful
and sceptical article on the down side of Napster
and Gnutella.
The Freenet home page is freenet.sourceforge.net/ |
Meanwhile, two researchers at Xerox PARC have published a study which claims that a statistical survey of Gnutella users shows that most of them are takers, not givers. This might support my conjecture on the changing nature of the Net as 'ordinary' folks who know nothing about its original co-operative ethos pile onto it |
| Links for 8 October 2000. | |||
| For a summary of the new Segal Quince Wicksteed report on the Cambridge Phenomenon see their site. | There are lots of essays on Alfred Marshall on the Web, for example here. | ||
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 18 September 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| The Berkeley SETI project site is here. All these metacomputing sites require that you download a special 'client' program which liaises with the central server which co-ordinates the project. | The Parabon site allows collaborators to donate their earnings to charity. They claim they will start paying a fee in the Fall. That's now, by my reckoning. |
Distributed Science claims to be "leading the supercomputing revolution", if you please. "Where earlier large investments had to be made to rent or acquire and maintain an expensive supercomputer, we are offering a cheaper, faster, more powerful alternative: fee-based distributed computing." |
The Popular Power site -- "Using the Internet, Popular Power brings together the power of computers all over the world. By becoming a member of Popular Power, you can donate or 'sell' your computer's idle processing time and resources to help tackle problems previously thought insurmountable. Install Popular Power and unleash your computer's potential."" |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 10 September 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| There's a nice piece in today's New York Times examining the legal ironies in the music copyright disputes. Here's the paper's report on the verdict. | The Industry Standard also carried an illuminating report on the case. | ||
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 3 September 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| If you're really desperate the Big Brother site is here. | |||
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 27 August 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| Bruce Schneier runs an Internet security company called Counterpane. | His new
book is entitled Secrets
and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World (ISBN
0-471-25311-1) |
The quote I used in my piece came from the Preface. | |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 20 August 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| Mea culpa. Many readers e-mailed in in frustration to say that the date for registering to vote in this year's elections for the ICANN board had passed. | I screwed up -- I mistook the end date for endorsing candidates (August 31) for the end of membership registration. Apologies. | I also underestimated the number of people who have registered as 'Members at Large'. ICANN claims there are 150,000 of us. Thanks to those readers who tactfully pointed out my mistake. | |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 13 August 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| The New York Times ran a terrific report on the DeCSS case and Touretsky's testimony. | The NYT also ran an earlier piece about the Norwegian kid who was accused of first posting the DeCSS code on the Net. | For other stuff on this page about DeCSS and related topics, click here. | |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 30 July 2000 ........................................................................................................................ |
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| The
judicial injunction shutting down Napster has generated a wave of
disapproval across the Net. Some people are calling on music
buyers to boycott
records sold by members of the
RIAA. There was a nice piece about the decision in Intellectual Capital. "Laws against possessing, trading, or even creating software to possess or trade copyrighted files were duly passed on every level of government, even through international treaty. |
Yet they
cannot be enforced, and the group asks why. The answer is that the
consensus of online users holds that such rules are nonsense. You
can no more stop people from passing files around than you can make
the sun rise in the west."
Scott Rosenberg, the perceptive technology commentator on Salon wrote an excellent piece on the Napster decision. He makes the distinction between the Napster the company -- which is no different from any venture-capital funded startup -- and Napster the phenomenon, which is something much more significant. |
"Already", he writes, "projects like Gnutella and Freenet are beginning to provide Napster-like functions with one key difference: There's no central server, and thus no one to sue. Napigator lets users find Napster servers that aren't run by Napster Inc. Over at Opennap, open-source programmers are developing free, Napster-like software for every computing platform under the sun. On the open Net, a thousand new Napsters are blooming. | "And
what will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster?
These projects -- small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in
the shadow of Napster the company -- will be flooded with energy.
Users will flock to them, and talented software hackers will work
overtime to perfect them.
From the recording industry's point of view, it is slaying one enemy only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents -- opponents who are, not incidentally, its own best customers." |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 23 July 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The guy who talks most sense on website design and usability generally is Jakob Nielsen. | Here's an interview with him which provides quite a good summary of his views. | Nielsen's personal site is here. One of the most interesting things about it is that it has NO graphics. Now I wonder why that could be. And why do I get fed up waiting for all the graphics boxes on most company websites to load? | Executives charged with overseeing major web projects ought to be forced to read his book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 16 July 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| For up to date information about the RIP Bill see the Foundation for Information Policy Research site. | Quote from the Lords debate on the Bill: "It is absolutely obvious what is in the Bill--at least it is to me--and that is, yes, trawling becomes legal. The Home Secretary has to renew the warrant every three months, but he can trawl on grounds of economic well-being and serious crime, as well as terrorism, to any extent that he wishes." (Lord Lucas, 12/7/00). | One of the government's motivations in pushing the RIP Bill through is to bring its age-old snooping and surveillance practices within the 'law'. If you would like to see the kind of contortions this involves, then see this explanation of the implications of the 'trawling' authorisation enabled by the Bill. And then perhaps go and lie down in a darkened room for a while. | |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 2 July 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Yahoo's decision to drop Inktomi for Google was extensively covered. Here is the San Jose Mercury News story. The 'News' is Silicon Valley's daily paper. | Google issued a Press Release claiming that it now indexed more of the Web than anyone else. "Google's new gigantic index means that you can search the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 70 miles high in less than half a second," said Larry Page, Google CEO and co-founder. | The
Google claim is based on the notion that there are currently over a
billion pages on the Web. Google says it now has a full index
of half a billion and a 'partial index' of another half billion.
Presumeably this is why they're not calling it
'gigaGoogle'.
One nice symmetry in the Yahoo-Google deal is that both companies were founded by pairs of Stanford graduate students. |
A site
called Search Engine Watch provides acres of useful
information about search engines and also offers a regular free
e-mail newsletter.
OneWorld is here. |
| ........................................................................................................................ Links for 25 June 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Reders puzzled by the sum of £XX printed as the price of the book by Dan Miller and Don Slater should know that all Observer subs are classically trained and think in Roman Numerals. | Publication details for the book
are: The Internet: an ethnographic approach, by Daniel Miller and Don Slater, Berg, 224pp. Prices: £42.99 hardback, £14.99 paperback. |
ISBN
#s: 1 85973 384 0 & 1 85973 389 1 (respectively) Official publication date is 30 June 2000. Berg Publishers are based in Oxford. Phone 01865 245104. E-mail iemsley@berg.demon.co.uk |
There is
also a splendid web-site associated with the
book. The Observer has printed a splendid piece by Caspar Bowden about the RIP Bill, plus minister Charles Clarke's standard-issue feeble response. |
| ........................................................................................................................ Links for 18 June 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Hansard is now online, so you can follow the debate on the RIP Bill more or less as it happens. Here's the exchange in which Bassam maintains that the clickstream is freely-snoopable 'communications data'. The Hansard account provides a vivid picture of the boobies who are trying to push the Bill through. | The Financial Times published another leader attacking the Bill. It was prompted by the release of a report commissioned by the British Chambers of Commerce, and carried out by academics at the London School of Economics, which argued that the Bill might add as much as £46 billion to the costs | of British businesses. "The RIP Bill as it stands is entirely inadequate as a mechanism to achieve efficient and reasonable interception and surveillance Its effect is likely to be loss of confidence in e-commerce, unacceptable costs to business and to the UK | economy,
confusion and uncertainty at numerous levels of business activity,
and an onerous imposition on the rights of
individuals."
The Guardian published a forthright leading article arguing that the Bill should be dropped, as did the Times. All in all, quite a week. It may be that if the RIP Bill is defeated it will because of fears about its economic impact rather than its assault on liberty, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers. |
| ........................................................................................................................ Links for 11 June 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The New York Times has covered the Microsoft trial from the beginning. For those who are gluttons for punishment, here is the index to the NYT coverage. | Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who invented the Web and now heads the World Wide Web Consortium, has made an outspoken attack on the RIP Bill. | The idea that the PC as a general-purpose computing engine is doomed is an old one. The person I first heard articulate it is Don Norman, a wonderful man who has thought more about how ordinary people use technology than anyone else I know. | Judge Jackson's ruling on the Microsoft case is, of course, available on the Web. It's in pdf format (beloved of lawyers), so you will need the (free) Acrobat reader software to access it. |
| ........................................................................................................................ Links for 4 June 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Interested in knowing more about the RIP Bill? The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) is a great clearing-house for information on the Bill and its progress through Parliament. My 'Focus' piece which seeks to explain the significance of the Bill is here. | The BBC News Online report on gagging the Net is here. | Donald Watts Davies, the British scientist who co-invented packet-switching -- the technology which underpins the Net -- died this week after a valiant battle with cancer. Jack Schofield wrote a nice obituary of him for the Guardian. | Alan Cane wrote this obituary in the Financial Times. |
| ........................................................................................................................ Links for May 28 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The
Reuters story about the French judge barring Yahoo from carrying
certain materials is here.
Everything you ever wanted to know about DVD is here. |
The redoubtable Wendy Grossman has written an excellent, succinct piece for Scientific American on the DeCSS/DMCA business. | LinuxWorld magazine did a fascinating interview with Jon Johansen and his Dad. The most striking thing is how calm and rational the lad seems to be. | StartUpFailures is, not surprisingly, http://www.startupfailures.com/. |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for May 21 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| For a
useful piece on how Napster works (including an animated diagram),
see this CNet article.
From Scott Rosenberg's interesting piece on the Napster phenomenon in
Salon some time ago... "As a Napster user, you designate a folder on
your hard drive, where you will store the MP3s you're willing to
share with the world. Then, every time you turn on Napster, your
computer temporarily becomes a server, allowing other Napster users
to download the MP3 files in that folder. The minute you log on,
Napster will |
This is
how Napster
describes its product: "Imagine...an application that takes the
hassle out of searching for MP3s. No more broken links, no more slow
downloads, and no more busy, disorganized FTP sites. With Napster,
you can locate and download your favorite music in MP3 format from
one convenient, easy-to-use interface. " "What else does it do? Quite a bit, actually. Some highlights include: CHAT - Allows users to chat with each other in forums based on music genre. AUDIO PLAYER - Plays MP3 files from right inside Napster, in case you don't have an external player or would prefer not to use one. HOTLIST - Lets you keep track of your favorite MP3 libraries for later browsing. " |
Here's
an FT story about the pressures on US universities to
ban Napster from their networks. Wired News also covered Yale's decision to ban the
software.
The New York Times ran an interesting piece assessing Napster's chances of a legal victory. The conclusion: not good. Hence the drive towards FreeNet and other approaches. For a semi-technical briefing on FreeNet, see this. There is also a related project called Gnutella. |
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| ........................................................................................................................
Links for May 12 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Professor Charles Oppenheim has written to argue that my analysis of the Demon libel case "is based on a misunderstanding of the Demon case. In UK law, the ISP is only guilty of libel, if it can be shown the ISP knew the material was defamatory and nonetheless helped the libel along. This was the key point of the Demon case. Godfrey complained by fax to Demon, and Demon ignored him. If Godfrey had not sent the | fax,
Demon would not have been found guilty. The Court judgement rightly
concentrated on this one point at issue. The Demon decision was, in
fact, consistent with previous US court decisions and the truth is,
the two legal systems are not that different when it comes to
Internet libel law. I think UK law is perfectly reasonable in this
regard."
I'm grateful for the correction and embarrassed that it was necessary -- but relieved that it implies that the position in the UK is not as bleak as I had supposed. |
The CERT
report on the 'Love Bug' is here.
The New Hacker's Dictionary (third Edition) by Eric S. Raymond is published by the MIT Press (ISBN 0 262 68092 0). Scott Rosenberg's tirade against Microsoft's Outlook mail client appeared in Salon. |
Bill Gates was given Time Magazine's 'Essay' slot to launch his extended whinge about the government's anti-trust action. |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 7 May 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The
judgment that the US Supreme Court upheld in the Lunney vs. Prodigy
case is here.
More on the costs the RIP Bill will pass on to UK ISPs when they are obliged to install the kit needed for extensive e-mail snooping... The Home Office commissioned an independent consultant to assess the likely costs of what they propose for ISPs. The consultants reported that it would be at least £30 million. >> |
Caspar Bowden, Director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research is not impressed. "The Government has been telling us for weeks that the million pound price-tags put on interception were just scare-mongering. Now their own consultants think it will be more than £30 million – and that’s only the beginning, before the next wave of broadband e-commerce is rolled out in 2001, with 3rd generation mobile Internet (UMTS) following in 2002...." >> | He goes on: "It also does not take into account the cost to the tax-payer of processing and safeguarding the intercepted material, or answer the basic question of whether interception will continue to be useful for law-enforcement as encryption becomes widely used for personal and business applications." >> | "The terms of reference also constrained the approaches that the consultants were allowed to consider - they weren’t allowed to comment on how much cheaper it would be to intercept via phone lines or mobile networks rather than at the ISP. They’ve clearly no idea how diverse and complex large ISP networks can be – and most crucially they’ve not assessed whether all this money will net them anything more than encrypted email and secure, unreadable, web traffic." |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 30 April 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Neal Stephenson's wonderful essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" is all over the Net. You can find a copy here. | There must be thousands of sites which tell Microsoft jokes. For a good selection (including a variant of my helicopter joke), see here. | Louise Kehoe's column speculating about the support implications of a Microsoft break-up was a rare lapse from her usual good sense. The FT.com site maintains an archive of her pieces. Follow the 'Columnists' link for a selection. | For a
good, succinct account of the US Department of Justice's proposal to
break Microsoft into two companies, see this CNN
report. The DoJ's files on the case can be found here. |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 23 April 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| If you'd
like a tutorial on DSL technology, try here. A more technical briefing is here. The University of New Hampshire
maintains an ADSL resources site.
Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a lovely piece in Salon about how the multi-media industry is barking up the wrong trees about Broadband. Interested in cable modems? Sharon Gillett of MIT has prepared a primer on the subject. |
More on the scenario I discussed last week on the powers the government is seeking to force the surrender of cryptographic keys. A reader has e-mailed me to point out that the situation is worse than I had suggested. "In last weeks scenario", he writes, "Alice has not simply compromised her employers commercial secrets, she has released her firm's signature. Anyone with that key can forge contracts, | purchase
orders and electronic payment orders, and they will be totally
indistinguishable from the real thing. Forced release of keys facilitates perfect robberies". This is because encryption keys (in a public key infrastructure - ie. that used by e-commerce) have two purposes: * they encyrpt private data * they double as signatures. |
By releasing the company's encryption key, Alice has also surrendered the company seal.Anyone having that key can not only read all the company's data - they can also forge, perfectly, all of it's contracts, orders, electronic payments, everything. This is the fatal flaw of all encryption disclosure schemes - they totally undermine the integrity of e-commerce." |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 16 April 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The full set of Charles Lindsey's sombre scenarios of what could happen when the RIP Bill becomes law can be found here. | For continually updated information about the RIP Bill, see the FIPR's briefing site. | The text of the Irish government's E-commerce Bill is available online in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. There's also an explanatory memorandum to accompany the Bill. If you don't have the (free) Acrobat Reader software you will need to download it to read these documents. | |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 9 April 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| If you'd like a rather detached view of the Microsoft anti-trust verdict, Jon Katz posted this in Slashdot.org. And here's Scott Rosenberg's excoriation of Microsoft for hiring a right-wing lobbyist known to be close to Presidential hopeful George W. Bush. | Autonomy has just launched a different kind of search engine (called, for some reason, Kenjin) which you can download free. It looks interesting, not least because it can search your hard disk as well as the Web. | Patti Maes's new venture is Open Ratings. Here's a useful Business Week piece about it. It's a development of her work on 'collaborative filtering' done at the MIT Media Lab. | |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 26 March 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Stand, one of the organisations campaigning against the RIP Bill reports that its web-to-fax gateway has delivered over 1000 faxes to MPs in its first week of operation. | Justice
commissioned a 'human rights audit' of Part III of the RIP
Bill. Here's a summary of their findings.
For an overview of criticisms of the Bill see the FIPR site and Stand. The one consolation is that usually the collective IQ of the Net is greater that that of all the goons Jack Straw could conceivably muster. See Ross Anderson's site for some illustrations of what I mean. |
Progress on Patents?
On March 28, the US Patent and
Trademark Office announced |
patents,
to Amazon's Jeff Bezos himself. According to Reuters, "Patent commissioner Todd Dickinson said second reviews of applications would become standard and he outlined efforts to make better searches of previous inventions and industry practices." Here are some reports: Patent Office Changing Net Rules (Reuters) Online Patents to Face Tighter Review (Washington Post) Federal Agency Rethinks Internet Patents (New York Times) |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 19 March 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| James Gleick has written a wonderful article in the New York Times about the Amazon patents. "When twenty-first century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system", he writes, "they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: 'the patented 1-click feature,' Bezos calls it." | O'Reilly
Associates, the well-known publisher of (invaluable) computing
books, maintains a site giving information about business-process
patents.
Tim O'Reilly wrote this letter to Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, protesting about its use of business practice patents. Somebody's done a wonderful cartoon lampooning Amazon's obsession with patents. There's also a campaign site protesting at Amazon's corporate behaviour. (Thanks to Karen Shipp for these links.) |
Jeff Bezos (Amazon's CEO) has published a response in an Open Letter to all those who have e-mailed protests to him. A careful reading suggests that Bezos still intends to use his patents to limit competition, but the tone of his letter is conciliatory -- certainly compared to that of his professional peers. He's calling for a campaign for a new kind of short-duration patent which would meet the objections of some critics. It looks like just a smart PR move. Where's the beef, Jeff? | Richard
Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has been organising a
boycott of Amazon because of its stand on patents. Here's his view of the Bezos
response.
Wired News also showed great skepticism about Bezos's motives. "The argument put forth in the letter mixes a declaration that Amazon will keep its controversial patents with a call for radical changes in the patent process that granted them... People were calling for (Bezos' suggested reforms) six years ago. It is still mostly public posturing." |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 12 March 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The text of the RIP Bill is available online. Note that Citizen Straw has signed a declaration at the head of the Bill stating that he believes it is in conformance with the European Convention on Human Rights. If you have only a few minutes, do look at Sections 46 and 47. | The Foundation for Information
Policy Research is one of the few outfits in the UK currently
capable of giving the RIP Bill a hard time. They're holding
a conference
on these issues on March 22.
The RIP Bill would be declared unconstitutional -- if Britain had a constitution. What makes it worse is that the RIP Bill is on a 'fast track'. It could be law by October! |
The other organisation doing serious work is Stand, which has posted the kind of sustained scrutiny that Citizen Straw's bill badly needs. (Makes one wonder what what our legislators are doing. No doubt they think it's all rocket science and best left to the experts. But you'd have thought that even they will balk at Jack Straw's proposal to end the presumption of innocence until proved guilty.) Stand has built a web-to-fax gateway which makes it easy for you to fax your MP directly. It's clever and simple to use. | The Guardian and the Financial Times had excellent leaders about the Bill. "Serious crooks will find other ways of keeping their secrets", writes the FT. "But internet commerce will only flourish if all parties are confident of security. The idea that internet providers should fill police computers with credit card details, bank statements and commercial contracts may be far from Mr Straw's intention. But this bill makes it possible. He must think again." |
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 5 March 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Salon had a fascinating piece some time ago about Jay Walker -- the guy who's been patenting all those business practices. | In the wake of all the hoo-hah over DeCSS, the multimedia companies have lawyers combing the Net for sites offering downloads of DeCSS -- the program that decrypts DVDs and plays them on Linux systems. Now some joker has written a harmless little program - also called DeCSS - and is distributing it all over the Net. This DeCSS simply deletes Cascading Style Sheets -- sounds painful, but is actually trivial. The main effect of this ingenious prank, of course, is to drive the MPAA lawyers crazy. Dontcha just love the Net! | ||
| ........................................................................................................................
Links for 27 February 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| ZDnews carried a hilarious story about Windows 2000, including quotes from that Microsoft internal memo. They also had one of their daft 'polls'. "Do you plan to buy Windows 2000 -- an OS with 63,000 known 'defects'?" The results (when I checked at 23.40 hours on 22/02/2000) were: Yes 7446 (23%) No 24364 (77%)! | Jonathan
Zittrain's ingenious remedy for Microsoft was published in Intellectual Capital, an
excellent online magazine.
Zittrain works at the Berkman Center at Harvard, which has pioneered the idea of 'Open Law' projects -- i.e. using open source methods to create legal arguments for use in public-interest defence cases. The Center has launched an OpenLaw project |
on the DVD case. As reported in an earlier column, the current controls of CSS prevent people who have legitimately purchased disks in DVD format from making full use of those works. As there are no licensed DVD players for the Linux operating system, an entire class of computer users is completely cut off from viewing | DVDs. A tool such as DeCSS is needed to enable the creation of software DVD viewers for Linux. Yet rather than welcoming these potential additional viewers, the industry appears to fear that permitting broader interoperability of its format would weaken its monopoly on player devices. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 20 February 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| As reported below, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a complaint against DoubleClick with the Federal Trade Commission. Several other privacy groups have voiced their concern. DoubleClick's response has been to form a privacy group of its own. This, observed the Financial Times, "sounds a lot like the fox guarding the hen house." | An interesting glimpse of how the corporate PR world views the Net came from this excerpt from an industry newsletter (O'Dwyers Inside News of PR, Feb 7 2000) which was widely circulating on the Net: "The Internet is the dream tool of activist groups that want to thwart the corporate power of multinationals", it warns. The Seattle WTO meeting was when the Net "came into its own as a vehicle for non-government organizations to rally others to causes such as environmentalism, anti-free trade, anti-Americanism and, most astonishingly, anarchism". It seems that "Countering the growing influence of these cyber-powered anti-American, anti-corporate international organizations is one of the greatest challenges U.S. corporate and government PA practitioners will face in this new millennium." Well, whaddya know? | Louise
Kehoe of the Financial Times returned to the Yahoo! fray,
wondering aloud whether the only thing to be done was to create a
business-only Internet. "There are two options", she writes.
"Either security regulations must be imposed on operators of all
computers linked to the internet, or we must have a separate and
more secure business internet. The latter is the more desirable and
feasible choice. But it will not come cheap. Whichever way it goes,
the costs of business are set to soar".
The Village Voice had a nice piece by Jason Vest setting out some possible rationales for the smurf attacks on Yahoo & Co. "After all, eBay and buy.com revolve around not the exchange of ideas but the acquisition of crap. Etrade is all about making money by day trading. ZDNet provides a stream of 'news' stories about how to make even more money...". |
eToy.com is back. "After 81 days of war at the court, on the net, at the stock market and in the press", their statement reads, "now the TOYWAR.troops and hundreds of exhausted internet resistance soldiers are marching off the battlefields after they succeeded in relieving the enemy occupation of etoy's territory www.etoy.com. This is a historical moment for both etoy and the involved toy guerrilla . The victory parade takes place right here / right now, on the historical site". Appropriately, they were playing 'Yankee Doodle' when I visited them early this morning. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 13 February 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| As ever,
Salon's Scott Rosenberg gave the most level-headed assessment of the
attack on Yahoo! et al. It was, he says, as if vandals had
nicked some unlocked cars and left them blocking all the entrances
to a shopping mall's car park. Here's his piece.
There were numerous attempts by online publications to explain how a 'distributed co-ordinated attack' works. Here's one by ZDnews (which, ironically, was itself attacked after this was published). For a simple four-part primer on Internet security see Mark Merkov's E-commerce Outlook site. |
One of the best
efforts to compile a compendium of Yahoo-attack stories was done by
CNET.
Having required that all dealings with the company should henceforth be conducted online, Ford has decided to offer to its 370,000 salaried and unionized full-time employees worldwide Internet access via PCs and printers from Hewlett-Packard as well as services from Uunet and PeoplePC for a nominal monthly fee of $5. Here's the FT story reporting this remarkable initiative. The most interesting thing about conventional media coverage of Yahoo's troubles was its implicit assumption that the only thing that matters about the Internet is the ability to trade on it. |
Louise
Kehoe, the normally level-headed FT correspondent in Silicon Valley,
took the view that the attacks represented "the
most serious security breaches in the history of the Internet",
which is, to put it mildly, a bit overheated. (What about the
original worm virus, for example?)
Still, Louise was one of the few print commentators who seemed to understand that the attacks were enabled by a virus planted remotely in low-security computers with permanent Internet connections. |
Here's
Wired's useful explanation of how a 'smurf' attack
works.
The New York Times had a sensible Editorial about the Yahoo! business. "The worst response to these attacks", it writes, "would be for government to introduce requirements for the Internet that may destroy the freedom of operation that makes it work so well. It would be premature to consider regulations that might require users to identify themselves in all their interactions as they surf the net. ...The businesses that operate on the Internet will probably have to take the lead over government. Businesses and individuals must do more to upgrade their software to make it less vulnerable to attacks". Amen. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 6 February 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The largest advertising company on the Internet,
Doubleclick, is being sued by a Californian woman over its use of
cookies. According to this report, the suit alleges that the Doubleclick cookies have been culling personal information from PC users without their prior knowledge or consent. The suit also claims that this information, which includes names, addresses and financial status, has been sold on in some cases. |
A consumer advocacy group has organized a protest against DoubleClick, encouraging the public to email complaints about the online marketing giant's privacy policies to the company and 60 of its clients. | How to turn off
cookies
In Internet Explorer go to the 'View' menu and then 'Internet Options' and click on the 'Advanced' tab. For Netscape, click on 'Edit' then 'Preferences' and then 'Advanced'. |
The
online journal Red Herring keeps an IPO
scorecard which documents the fact that the real money in stock
market flotations is always made by the people who are able to buy
in at the issue price, rather than the mugs who stampede to buy in
the open market. If you're interested in the way the IPO system works against outsiders, this article in The New York Observer (no relation) by Christopher Byron provides an illuminating glimpse behind the scenes. (Note: if you come to this link late, you may have to search the NY Observer's archives for it -- it's the magazine's 'back of the envelope' section). Thanks to Nick Sweeney for this link. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 30 January 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The Electronic Frontier
Foundation maintains an excellent archive of
material on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the
challenges to it that are currently brewing.
Julian Dibbell has written a terrific piece for Intellectual Capital on the threats to freedom of expression posed by the movie industry's campaign against DeCSS.
|
More on the eToys vs. eToy
business... Toby Lenk, chief executive of eToys, claims his company "won the holiday". The group's shares have fallen more than a third since Christmas, are down three-quarters from their November peak and now trade below the price of their May initial public offering. If that is victory, says the Financial Times, what would Mr Lenk classify as defeat?... When I last checked (5 February), the eToy site was still unobtainable. (But see above.) The Toywar site, however, was as vigorous as ever (though recommending that one used Netscape!) Reports of Jon Johansen's arrest are all over the Net. Here's the Wired News account. |
DeCSS isn't exactly rocket science, by the way. The program is a tiny (60 KB) utility that copies an encrypted DVD file (which has a .VOB extension) and saves the file on a hard disk, minus the encryption. All that is required is a DVD-ROM drive and a lot of disc space. The faster the CPU, the faster it will process the file. | If
you're intrested in knowing more about DeCSS, try here.
More on the constitutional status of the DMCA... The text of the DCMA is here. On February 3, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York issued his memorandum opinion explaining his decision to grant an injunction against people publishing the DeCSS source code. His ruling specifically finds that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which prohibits the publication of computer programs designed to circumvent copy protection) is constitutional, and does not infringe on the defendants' free speech rights. He also suggests that computer source code is not ordinarily a form of expression, and that, even if it were, Congress could regulate it in order to serve other interests, such as the economic interest of copyright holders. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 23 January 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The Index on Censorship site is here. | You can ask Netcraft's server to find out what software any given site is running. Here is the result of its query of Her Majesty's site. For more information on the Apache Project, see their site. | On Wednesday, after months of teasing the media, Transmeta unveiled Crusoe. | Salon's Andrew Leonard had a nice piece explaining the potential significance of the Crusoe processor. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 9 January 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| Gillian Bonner writes a regular column about technology for Playboy. Her article about Linux is here. Her company is called Black Dragon Inc. | If you're thinking of auctioning a domain name, eBay is obviously the place to start. Then again, given that most of the eBay bids for Year2000.com seem to have been hoaxes, maybe not. (Though there were reports on Friday that the domain had finally been sold for $2 million.) | eBay also has a British site. Alternatively, its home-grown rival QXL might help you shift a .co.uk name. A good place to register UK domains, by the way, is UK2. | Wired News keeps an
eye on the domain-name market. Here's one of their pieces on the Yankees
dispute.
New York University School of Law maintains a useful page on the Trademark Cyberpiracy Prevention Act -- the statute the Yankees are invoking. |
| ....................................................................................................................... Links for 2 January 2000 ........................................................................................................................ | |||
| The text of the OFTEL decision on unbundling the local loop was published on its Web site. | For anyone seeking an antidote to dot-com frenzy, here's a terrific BBC audio interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. (Note that you will need to download the free RealAudio player to hear it. You can get the software from Real Networks. But note that Real Player will do, unless you want to lash out on RealPlayer Plus!) | ||
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© John Naughton 1999,2000,2001. Nothing in this Web page should be construed as offering investment advice. Information is posted here to supplement my column in the London Observer in the hope that additional links and background will be of interest to readers. If you are seeking advice or information about online investment, pay off your credit card bills first and then consult The Motley Fool. If you want to know where the World Wide Web is headed, buy a crystal ball.