Use a firewall, go to jail: on new state bills, including in Florida, designed to extend the DMCA in new and unfriendly ways. These are being pushed by the MPAA, complete with model legislation.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal -- with no exceptions.
See also: The EFF's State-Level "Super DMCA" Initiatives Archive [via Rebecca's Pocket]
Elsevier's Vanishing Act: on a risk of electronic publishing compared to the print form: articles cannot be removed from a print journal. [via Booknotes]
Thought Communication: in which Stephen Bush and Amit Kulkarni advance the notion that emergent behavior in active networks will lay the foundation for a radical change in the amounts and types of information which can be transmitted over a network, possibly leading to the ability to move structures representing the human thought process between collaborators.
Calendar Converter: a Javascript tool that will convert dates between different calendar systems. [via abuddhas memes]
The Congress, in a push led by John Shimkus, is well on it's way to passing a law, the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002, to enable a kids safe domain: .kids.us. The Coalition to Protect Protozoa shows it's really not that complicated by introducing .protozoa.us.
In a followup to the "dot kids" legislation (H.R. 3833) to create a "dot kids dot us" domain proposed by Congressman John Shimkus (R-Illinois), the Coalition to Protect Protozoa has taken the initiative to create a new safe place for protozoa on the Internet under the "dot protozoa dot us" domain.
"This is the perfect place to locate material which has been reviewed for acceptability and viewership by America's protozoa," creator Matthew Kaufman explained. "Protozoa are the most abundant animals in the world in both number and biomass, significantly outnumbering our own children, and we have now taken the first step to safeguard our nation's protozoa."
[via Politech]
Global Village Idiocy: Thomas Friedman on the spreading of misinformation over the net and the tendency of people to believe what they read.
At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we've ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool we've ever had.
Virtual Diasporas and global problem solving project: looking at the uses, both good and bad, of the net and other communication technology to bring communities together from wherever their members have spread to.
See also: Dial-in Diasporas
[via Red Rock Eater]
Censorship Wins Out: on the obstacles to the Internet being used as a free flow of information from opaque countries, in particular the control of governments over technological and economic access to the net.
A decade or so ago, it was all clear: the Internet was believed to be such a revolutionary new medium, so inherently empowering and democratizing, that old authoritarian regimes would crumble before it. What we've learned in the intervening years is that the Internet does not inevitably lead to democracy any more than it inevitably leads to great wealth.
[via Snowdeal]
mozBlog: an add-on to Mozilla that supports the Blogger API, letting folks post to their blogs directly from the browser. Now that's cool. [via Confessions of a Mozillian]
Beyond Skepticism: The Rise of 9-11 Conspiracy Theories and the Discourse of Armchair Sleuths
Thanks to the Internet, evocative information spreads faster than kudzu. Whereas in the past only the most dedicated would take the time to spend hours in that dark library microfiche room, it now is remarkably easy to become an amateur stay-at-home sleuth finding what may appear to be inconsistencies in official stories. We no longer need to get close to that strange man on the corner to read his placard or take a pamphlet. The Internet again becomes the whipping boy of modernity, exacerbating the old customs of gossip and credulity as only it can.
Filtering Software: The Religious Connection: Nancy Willard from CATE's Responsible Netizen examines the relationships between eight companies which produce internet filtering software and conservative religious organizations. [via BookNotes]
direct search: a huge collection of specialized search engines for the invisible web. These are the places that Google just doesn't get deep enough to find. [via Red Rock Eater]
A Tangled World Wide Web of Security Issues: Joris Claessens, Bart Preneel, and Joos Vandewalle survey security on the web. [via Red Rock Eater]
This set of examples of how to link to a Thomas document should prove quite useful, since the URLs returned from many of their searches are transient. [via Boing Boing]
The Vatican on the ethics of the Internet
Use of the new information technology and the Internet needs to be informed and guided by a resolute commitment to the practice of solidarity in the service of the common good, within and among nations. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice and peace and love. Now, even more than when the Pastoral Instruction on the Means of Social Communications Communio et Progressio made the point more than thirty years ago, media have the ability to make every person everywhere "a partner in the business of the human race".
[via NewsTrolls]
The Web Is for Serving, Not Surfing: on control of bandwidth, and hence content, by broadband providers as reflected by terms of service restricting home servers.
The three central tenets of the Internet are peer-to-peer, distributed control and free speech. If you ask me, the broadband companies are in favor of none of these. Since all of the broadband companies are also involved in the "entertainment" business, peer-to-peer distribution of entertainment, news, movie, books and music has them running scared. After all, if end-users of broadband also can be service providers, the power of the entertainment establishment is lessened.
I agree with the worry over the consolidation of content and bandwidth providers, but preventing home servers isn't really a symptom of that. It's cheap enough to get hosting these days. [via dangerousmeta]
If you are spending too much time on the internet and are concerned that it is affecting your concentration, you are not alone.
The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish.
Hey, did you see the U.S. version of the Register? [via Plep]
Two interesting sites with similar names but quite different in their own way:
- Exquisite Corpse: A journal of letters and life
- An Exquisite Corpse: Tag-team surrealism with Photoshop
Cybercrime Bill Ups the Ante: on the increased penalties for computer crime proposed in the Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2001, in particular up to life for those where the alleged evildoer knowing trying to cause death or serious injury. I haven't figured out the rest of the impact on penalties, but I don't think that specific one is a bad thing. Opening statements from committee members and witnesses at a House Subcommmittee on Crime hearing earlier this week are available from their site and include:
- John Malcolm, Department of Justice
- Susan Koeppen, Microsoft corporate attorney
- Clint Smith, United States Internet Service Providers Association
- Alan Davidson, Center for Democracy and Technology
Scrambling the Equations: Potential Trends in Networking: Andy Oram on the near future of the net.
The Worldwide Computer: on efforts to take Internet distributed computing to the next level, Internet-scale operating systems. [via also not found in nature]
Company says it owns hyperlinks patent: on the preliminary hearing into the British Telecom hyperlink suit. It sounds like there's a clueful judge handling this cases.
British Telecom will try to defend its claim that a patent it holds covers hyperlinks on the web in Federal Court tomorrow in a hearing involving an infringement suit it filed against Prodigy.
See also:
- Patents on Hyperlinking
- Tollbooths on the Information Superhighway
- British Telecom Patent: Lachey, Uninfringed and Invalid?
[via Boing Boing]
Contact and Impact: Over the Lines: on communication and the Internet in a time of war, using a recent lecture by Mark Poster as a jumping off point.
In 1996 Mark Stahlman, a former technology
analyst on Wall Street, espoused his theories about the rise of the
New Dark Age. At that time, he couldn't have foreseen how quickly
circumstances would develop to this end. Even so, the new dark age has
turned out to be not exactly what he -- or many others like him --
thought it would be. Then, in the heyday of the "Internet Revolution",
it was considered that technology would play a fundamental role in the
new dark age. In essence, the new dark age would be primarily a
digital dark age.
Recent events, however, have shown this not to be the case. Unlike
Stahlman's prophecy that we would be psychologically programmed and
that new media networks would become the mechanism of psychological
destruction and seamless surveillance, the new dark age has descended
in a much more simple manner: that of self-censorship and collective
amnesia. In other words, the latest in technological wizardry is not
required to plunge us into the depths of darkness.
[via also not found in nature]
The Grid: A New Infrastructure for 21st Century Science: on the next step for the net.
What many term the "Grid" offers a potential means of surmounting these obstacles to progress. Built on the Internet and the World Wide Web, the Grid is a new class of infrastructure. By providing scalable, secure, high-performance mechanisms for discovering and negotiating access to remote resources, the Grid promises to make it possible for scientific collaborations to share resources on an unprecedented scale, and for geographically distributed groups to work together in ways that were previously impossible.
[via Metafilter]
This time of day page leaves me speechless. Of course, that's not hard today. [via jrobb]
The Internet's Invisible Hand: on the anarchy of the net, predictions of impending disasters, and how it can continue to grow.
Did you know you can put keywords in Mozilla bookmarks, then use them in the URL bar? I didn't. [via dangerousmeta]
The U.K Public Records Office has made its 1901 census available online as part of a project that is also working on 1881 and 1891 data.
CNN mentions one way to get translations of Arabic news, like Al-Jazeera: the Ajeeb web-based translator. It seems to have a problem with some of the longer pages unfortunately. There's also WBUR's translations of Al-Jazeera, which I've linked to before. They've been on vacation since the 20th but should be back tomorrow.
Internet Leash Can Monitor Sex Offenders: Sangamon County in Illinois is installing Security Software Systems' Cyber Sentinel on the computers belonging to four sexual predators on probation in order to monitor what they do online. Peacefire looked at how Cyber Sentinel works and the effectiveness of its blocking last year.
AOL's spam filters have been rejecting mail sent from Harvard to its early applicants. [via Red Rock Eater]
Wishing you hadn't upgraded? Try OldVersion.com. They don't have a lot of programs yet but it's a neat idea. [via linkfilter]
Arbor Networks has a slide show and tech report available on their research into the Internet's dark address space, which I linked to last month. [via BBC News (story)]
2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home: Cory Doctorow takes on the idea that it's possible to have a reliable business model, at least on the level that business is used to, on the Internet because, by definition, the Internet is not that reliable. [via Voidstar]
Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet: On the conflict between the "Content Faction" and the "Tech Faction" over what we can do with our computers. [via the null device]
Brace Yourself for the Segmented Internet: on the possibility that local censorship policies will increasingly pressure countries into implementing gateways that control access to foreign content. [via Interesting People]
Partnership for an Idiot-Free Internet: dedicated to educating the new Internet user. [via wood s lot]
I'm not sure how useful this is, but it's kind of neat: the Hubble's deep field shot of the universe used as map of the blogspace. [via abuddhas memes]
The NY Times looks at open editing on Wiki's, in particular the Wikipedia. [via Voidstar]
So, why is it illegal to link to DeCSS, but it's legal to post instructions on how to make a Pink Hello Kitty Laptop? [via linkfilter]
A new Federal lab, The National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center, was created by the Critical Infrastructures Protection Act. One of it's first acts will be to draw a map of the Internet to identify places needing protection. I certainly hope they're going to use pencil. [via Interesting People]
The Authority Finder: Type in a statement and it finds quotes to support it. [via jerrykindall]
Brazilian architect Argus Caruso Saturnino is planning on riding his bike through 29 countries, posting photos and journals to the web as he goes, with translations to English and French.
I don't know who these people are, but they get around. [via http://www.kottke.org/">kottke.org]
Tracking down references on the previous item led me to Quintessence of the Loon: devoted to weirdness and madness on the World Wide Web.
A look at whether the Internet affects the community standards doctrine - is the whole country the community now?
Excite@Home has started dropping parts of its network: 850,000 AT&T customers were cut yesterday after AT&T refused to make a $100 million payment in order to continue service.
Random access memory: an experiment in collective recollection [via Bifurcated Rivets]
NPR's Nina Totenberg gives background on COPA and then reports on the Supreme Court hearing on the law.
Playboy.com has been cracked. The attacker, going under the name "martyn luther ping", has apparently contacted customers with their credit card info. [via Metafilter]
