Stream of Consciousness

From the virtual desk of Declan McCullagh: Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill (CNET):

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Now Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA’s restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.

This bill likens copyright infringers to terrorists, and would make it a federal offense even to talk about ways of violating copyright. For some background on what the DMCA has done for us so far, see this report published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The idea that such an abomination to free speech could even be considered speaks volumes of the power of corporate lobbiests - when will the American people wake up and demand the end of this crooked institution?

Update: See this coverage at IPac Action.

This is chilling: decisions being made now will shape the future of the Internet for a generation. Before long, all media &mdash TV, phone and the Web — will come to your home via the same broadband connection. The dispute over net neutrality is about who’ll control access to new and emerging technologies.

From http://SaveTheInternet.com:

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its Web site open quickly on your computer.

Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.

Please join and add your voice to help preserve Net Neutrality - don’t let the big telcos determing what information gets to pass through the wires.

For more information, check out Net Neutrality - Not an optional feature of the Internet.

Found on Digg:

3 convicted of jamming phones to a Democratic get out the vote campaign in New Hampshire. Turns out there had been more than 2 dozen calls between these guys and the White House, all within 3 days of election day 2004. Recently the republican party had paid millions in legal bills to defend these people.

See the full story on CNN.com.

It’s watergate all over again…

Yesterday Harry Taylor rose at one of those “Bush town hall” forums in North Carolina to tell President Bush that he’s never felt more ashamed of the leadership of his country. He said Bush has asserted his right to tap phone calls without a warrant, to arrest people and hold them without charges and to revoke a woman’s right to an abortion, among other things. After President Bush, was told by Harry that he should be ashamed of his policies, Bush defended the government’s secret eavesdropping program Thursday and said he would not apologize for listening in on the phone and e-mail conversations of Americans talking to people with suspected al-Qaida links.

On the same day Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee that he believes President Bush has the authority to warrantlessly monitor all internal phone (and other electronic communications) within the US–purely domestic contacts. This position is contrary to Article 4 of the US Constitution which states:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

If you’d like to thank Harry Taylor for his timely and brilliant use of his First Amendment rights, use the first link below.

If you’d like to participate in a public action thanking Harry Taylor click the second link to learn how to do so.

http://thankyouharrytaylor.org/

http://thankyouharrytaylor.blogspot.com/

I have watched in great sadness as well as some very real fear for my profession as I’ve seen software - and worse: process - patents gain hold in this country driven by forces of great wealth and power aimed at maintaining their wealth and power at the cost of innovation. I was in the software labs of the late ’70s when things like object oriented programming, bitmapped displays, email, and modern operating system theory were being developed and nothing was even copyrighted. There was great excitement as people built on each other’s work, creating new concepts - like inter-process communication (IPC as it was known) that are now mainstays of every computer and network in existence (even your cell phone has IPC in it, but it’s so taken for granted these days that few even know about the great efforts that went into the creation of shared memory and socket-based communication systems).

In ‘79 the military got wind of some fantastic new machines - Lisp Machines - that were capable of processing feats way beyond traditional processors. They paid the primary inventors $11 million (if memory serves me correctly) to copyright every piece of software they could that went into those machines. This was born Symbolics, known to some as “Slimebolics,” and the great openness of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, that until that time had no locks on any doors and no passwords on any computers, began to come to an end as a direct result of the desire to hoard this new resource known as “software.”

In the mid-1980’s software patents began to appear. I was doing some time at Oracle and was brought into a meeting with the Oracle lawyers who explained to us that if we were working on anything patentable, that we should bring it to their attention as a candidate for a possible software patent. I was outraged and, though Larry wouldn’t listen, Oracle’s vice president and original architect of the Oracle RDBMS, Bob Miner understood the implications and became an outspoken critic of software patents, even testifying against them to the U.S. Congress. One reason he gave was that Oracle, the second largest software company in the world, would not exist if the IBM RDB code had been patented, as Bob used that as a blueprint for the first Oracle database software. Oracle finally set a policy in place that they would continue to acquire software patents, but not use them against any one who was not itself using them against others. This innovative “no first strike” was overturned by Larry Ellison a few months after Mr. Miner’s untimely death.

So now we not only have patents on software and business models, but also on medical processes that can prevent a doctor from helping their patients for fear of being sued for patent violations. Finally, the Supreme Court is starting to take notice; yesterday they heard arguments on a patented blood test that could save lives if freely available. This is a landmark case and could potentially have far reaching consequences. I can only hope that it marks the beginning of a return to some measure of sanity, though there is so much money/power/momentum behind the current broken system that it will at best take years for things to straighten out.

The bottom line is that software patents, as they are currently structured, severely hamper innovation growth in the state of the art (unless you are well funded enough to routinely run $20,000 patent searches on any new ideas that you have, and if something comes up, have a deep enough patent portfolio to enable mutual patent licensing to prevent possible litigation.

Well, that’s a little bit about how I feel about the subject. For more, see these articles:

• This Essay Breaks the Law (Michael Crighton, Mar 19)
• Justices Take on Question of Patents (AP, Mar 21)
• Patently Ridiculous (New York Times, 22 March)

The U.S. Government is suing Google for non-compliance after the DOJ requested Google users’ search records. AOL, MSN and Yahoo all complied with the DOJ requests, which were couched in terms of the fight against child porn. This is being reported by ZDnet, Bloomberg and other sources.

What is not getting much press is that this is a thinly disguised attempt to set precedent for future USA PATRIOT Act searches of everything we search for online. Combatting child pornography, like the fight against drugs and the struggle against terrorism, is nearly impossible to disagree with. The ACLU has stepped in - as they did with the DOJ initially attempted to regulate the Internet due to the fear of rampant child porn - stating that it is impossible to comply with COPA (the Child Online Protection Act) without infringing on the rights of free, legal speech mandated by the Constitution.

It’s a shame that AOL, MSN and Yahoo complied so readily, happily divulging information that is highly personal without so much as a notice to their users. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is attempting to paint Google as a friend to child pornographers when in fact they are fighting for your right to a little bit of privacy. Giving in now will make it that much easier for the Government to install a pipeline from these centers of communication straight to Homeland Security as they have already done with the phone lines.

If, though, you feel that it’s unpatriotic to withhold any of your search information to the government, please consider using the new PATRIOT Search engine - be sure to check out the seach syntax!

At least it’s still legal to laugh…

I regularly read SlashDot, which is a geek news site that gives paragraph intros to a linked full story and then people can comment on it. One section of their site, called Your Rights Online recently published this article reporting about a Dartmouth student being visited by the SS after requesting a book that contains information contrary to the state.

Seems to follow along with this little reported news item regarding Bush and his (lack of) concern for people’s Constitutional rights.

Finally, while Bush has reversed himself and has now said that he’s against torture (more specifically, against any forms of interrogation that are not in the Army Handbook), we learn now about a new, classified addendum to the Army Handbook.

While we enjoy this holiday season, let’s remember that we have a lot of work to do!

The problem with both Root and Attention Trust is that they collect, store and use your data in ways that are not always under your control, and you have no recourse other than to delete your data so they can’t use it anymore - assuming they actually delete it. It’s a fairly serious privacy issue, the upside being that you get to choose your Big Brother.

It would be far preferable to have direct control over your data, acquire and store it in open standard formats, and be able to either market it directly or contract with a third party to do such marketing for you. When doing so, you could use onion routing to provide them with your online contact info, so that you would be protected in case they started selling your data in ways against your contract (always a possibility) at which point you could simply sever the connection, leaving them with “headless data” - that is, data useful in aggregate but not connected to any definable person.

Since the data is owned by you to begin with, and transferred/stored in open formats, you would be able to easily contract with new service providers. It would, of course, be in their best interest to “play fair,” knowing that you are really in control. Only on a level playing field can there be a true “win-win.”

I work with CivicActions, and one of the best things about this gig is the lifestyle that it allows me to enjoy. CivicActions is a small but growing band of technology revolutionaries writing free and open source code for progressive organizations and political campaigns. We’re pulling in more work than we can handle, so I am pretty constantly overwhelmed (we could use good developers and project managers) but though I often don’t get enough sleep, I love what we’re doing and firmly believe that we’re headed down a good path.

We’re a 100% virtual company, which allows me to work from home any ten hours a day I want. This is great as I also get to spend time in close proximity to my family, especially important to me as my four-year-old son is growing and changing daily - I would hate to miss something special because I’m at “the office.” Even though my colleagues and I are physically separate, we connect every weekday morning on a 20-minute “scrum” call where we also get to share some “watercooler” talk about what’s up in our lives. Most importantly, everyone in the company is encouraged to put their lives - and lifestyle - first, though we’re generally workaholics and do whatever it takes to move the projects we’re working on forward.

I think a major reason for the dedication I see at Civic Actions is that we are doing Good Work - stuff that is making the world a better place (one vote at a time, one might say). This is particularly important for me, as I want my son to have clean air, drinkable water, quality health care, and a safe and peaceful world in which he is guaranteed the freedoms that this troubled country’s forefathers fought and died for. I don’t know how so many corporate workers can look at their kids in the face and believe that they are creating a better world for them, other than perhaps purely financially, while they are mortgaging the planet’s future. I am heartened by the fact that I am doing work that already makes my son very proud.

There’s no doubt that I could earn nearly twice what I make now in a corporate environment, but I wouldn’t have near the lifestyle and peace of mind I currently enjoy. And, with my continued work - and that of my dedicated compatriots - I may be able to pull in something akin to corporate dollars in the future so that I can create for my family those things we want and deserve, such as a house with a backyard (though probably not in the Bay Area!). In fact, all of us at CivicActions agree that acheiving such personal dreams are a key part of the measure of our group’s success.

Eugene Kim writes about the social, as well as the technical need for Free Identity. Check it out.