b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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US Trade Rep Creates Copyright Confusion
US Trade Rep Copyright Watch List
Open Access Education Journals
Cell Phone Life Gets Interesting
RIAA, Students Settle Piracy Suit
Big Losers File for Refunds
Knowledge Capture Mindmap
Sacrificial Lambs
Multiple RSS Feeds
Anti-RAVE Act Becomes Law
HP Time-limits Ink Cartridges
DMCA Goes Global
Alabama Won't Legalize Sex Toys
Mobile Number Portability
The Cost of a CD
'Method' Patents in Medicine
Free Country?
Friday, May 2, 2003
'24' is a Documentary
I've quoted this post in its entirety from Privacy Digest, but you really ought to go read the full article in the New York Times.According to the article, the Bush administration is now attempting to deploy the US Military and the CIA on American soil. The language authorizing this groundbreaking expansion of powers was attached, unannounced, to a broader intelligence bill now before Congress. The provision was apparently added by Senator Pat Roberts, R-Kansas and chairman of the intelligence committee, at the request of the Bush Administration.
I never, ever thought I would look back on the Clinton Administration with longing...
New York Times - free registration required Broad Domestic Role Asked for C.I.A. and the Pentagon.The Bush administration and leading Senate Republicans sought today to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon far-reaching new powers to demand personal and financial records on people in the United States as part of foreign intelligence and terrorism operations, officials said.
The proposal, which was beaten back, would have given the C.I.A. and the military the authority to issue administrative subpoenas -- known as "national security letters" -- requiring Internet providers, credit card companies, libraries and a range of other organizations to produce materials like phone records, bank transactions and e-mail logs. That authority now rests largely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the subpoenas do not require court approval.
The surprise proposal was tucked into a broader intelligence authorization bill now pending before Congress. It set off fierce debate today in a closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, officials said. Democrats on the panel said they were stunned by the proposal because it appeared to expand significantly the role of the C.I.A. and the Pentagon in conducting domestic operations, despite a long history of tight restrictions, officials said.
After raising objections, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and other Democrats succeeded in getting the provision pulled from the authorization bill, at least temporarily, Congressional officials said.
In a closed vote, the committee passed the bill unanimously without the proposal. But Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the intelligence committee, indicated to panel members that he wanted to hold further hearings on the idea, officials said.
There was some disagreement over exactly how the provision originated. Several Senate aides active in the debate said that Senator Roberts had included it in the authorization bill. But a senior Congressional official said the Bush administration had initiated the proposal and that Senator Roberts had not objected.
A C.I.A. official said the provision had come from the Bush administration, after the White House's Office of Management and Budget signed off on it.
The official said that Congressional leaders had asked the Bush administration whether there were any additional powers needed to help combat terrorism. The administration responded with the proposal to give the C.I.A. and military the power to use the national security letters, the official said. Another Congressional official said the move came at the urging of the C.I.A. The White House had no comment last night.
[ ... ]
They said that while the F.B.I. was subject to guidelines controlling what agents are allowed to do in the course of an investigation, the C.I.A. and the military appeared to have much freer reign. The F.B.I. also faces additional scrutiny if it tries to use such records in court, but officials said the proposal could give the C.I.A. and the military the power to gather such material without ever being subject to judicial oversight.
Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the proposal "dangerous and un-American."
Mr. Edgar said that "even in the most frigid periods of the Cold War, we never gave the C.I.A. such sweeping and secret policing powers over American citizens."
[ ... ]
New figures released today also showed that the Justice Department is relying with increasing frequency on secret warrants that allow the officials to go to a secret court to get approval for surveillance and bugging warrants in terrorism and espionage investigations without notifying the target.
[Privacy Digest]
Terry Frazier at 11:28 PM
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US Trade Rep Creates Copyright Confusion
ZDNet's Charles Cooper discusses the USTR flap noted Wednesday.U.S. may add to copyright confusion. ZDNet May 2 2003 7:58AM ET [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Terry Frazier at 12:30 PM
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US Trade Rep Copyright Watch List
More on info on the USTR's program of creating a worldwide oligopoly for the US Copyright Cabal.
Text: U.S. Releases Special 301 Report on Intellectual Property. Washington File May 2 2003 0:17AM ET[...] USTR placed 36 trading partners on the watch list for IPR violations: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovak Republic, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
Another 11 trading partners, including the European Union (EU), were placed on the priority watch list, which entails a greater level of scrutiny. The 11 trading partners are Argentina, the Bahamas, Brazil, EU, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and Taiwan. [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Terry Frazier at 12:25 PM
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Open Access Education Journals
From the folks at open-education.org comes this pointer to a lengthy list of fully accessible ejournals in education.
Open e-journals in Education. The AERA SIG Communication of Research hosts a list of more than 130 full access e-journals in the field of education:
http://aera-cr.ed.asu.edu/ejournals/index.html
"To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education.
The AERA SIG Communication of Research supports the Budapest Open Access Initiative and urges ejournals to support the initiative." [open-education.org]
Terry Frazier at 10:09 AM
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Cell Phone Life Gets Interesting
Cell life is about to get interesting. If Mobile Number Portability (MNP) goes into effect in November you can expect chaos while everyone scrambles for a better deal. This Wired article suggest much of the negotiating can start already. Now where'd I put that Sprint customer discipline number...
Let's Make a Cell-Phone Deal. Facing an increasingly competitive market and legislation that will let customers keep their phone numbers even when they switch carriers, cell-phone companies are upping the ante in their bid to attract and retain customers. By Elisa Batista.[...] "After some mild haggling with a low-level rep who wasn't going to budge -- he insisted that he couldn't give me a plan other than those offered to new subscribers -- I asked to speak to a supervisor, who immediately offered me 500 anytime minutes, unlimited night and weekend calling, free long distance and $100 toward a new phone, all for $35 a month. [...] [Wired News]
Terry Frazier at 9:40 AM
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RIAA, Students Settle Piracy Suit
Interesting note in this Wired article regarding the RIAA suit against four college students. All four settled for relatively small amounts -- small, given the millions and millions of dollars RIAA claimed to be losing from their efforts.While the settlement amounts are not insignificant for a college student, it's less than the cost of a top-line Hyundai. Can such a settlement set a precedent for realistic values in future file trading suits?
This seems an interesting balance the RIAA is trying to strike between public hysteria to drive new laws but more restrained actions against actors in their prime target market.
How, exactly, do you treat the vast majority of your customers as criminals while still trying to market to them? Interesting dilemma...
School Blocks Out File-Trading. Amid growing pressure from the Recording Association of America to stamp out illegal file-trading on university campuses, a New Jersey school takes matters into its own hands. By Katie Dean.[...] On Thursday, all four students named in the complaints -- Aaron Sherman and Jesse Jordan of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Daniel Peng of Princeton and Joe Nievelt of Michigan Technological University -- settled with the music trade group for between $12,000 and $17,500 apiece. [...] [Wired News]
Big Losers File for Refunds
Enron, MCI, Qwest, HealthSouth and others are filing, or planning to file, for tax refunds on the billions of income they falsely claimed during their creative-GAAP period. Maybe all that new money can help some of their starving lawyers.
After Inflating Their Income, Companies Want IRS RefundsBy REBECCA BLUMENSTEIN, DENNIS K. BERMAN and EVAN PEREZ
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNALA parade of big companies is under investigation for inflating their earnings during the stock-market boom of the 1990s. Now some of them see an unusual silver lining: They want back the taxes they overpaid along the way.
In the latest wrinkle in the unfolding series of corporate scandals, MCI and Enron Corp. are in the process of collecting or filing for tax refunds or credits from the Internal Revenue Service because of tax payments on billions of dollars they falsely claimed to have earned. Qwest Communications International Inc., which plans to restate $2.2 billion in revenue, also is likely to seek a refund. Embattled HealthSouth Corp., accused of overstating its earnings by more than $2 billion, said that it hasn't made a final decision to file for a refund but is considering it. [...] [Wall Street Journal Online (subscription required)]
Terry Frazier at 9:15 AM
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Thursday, May 1, 2003
Knowledge Capture Mindmap
Matt Mower has created an excellent visual summary of the key elements in knowledge capture. Contrary to a lot of what's written in the mindmap literature, creating a good mindmap is not easy. Condensing thoughts to a single keyword or two, aligning them into patterns that add context, and keeping it clean are much more difficult in practice than in theory.Nice job, Matt.
Thinking about capturing knowledge.[Curiouser and curiouser!]
Terry Frazier at 10:53 PM
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Sacrificial Lambs
RIAA has first sacrificial lambs for its pursuit of individual file traders. This is where the focus should be, and should have always been (on individuals, not infrastructure providers.) Except the DMCA has removed any need for the RIAA to show just cause or submit to oversight for its actions. Essentially, the DMCA has turned the RIAA into an unregulated, unelected, unaccountable enforcement agency. Your government at work.If there were oversight restrictions in place we could be assured that the RIAA would be forced to concentrate on individuals acting with criminal intent. It would not be possible for them to flood entire networks or castigate entire classes of users. As it stands they can go after anyone they want, any time, without incurring significant cost.
RIAA Suits Against Students May Settle.. RIAA lawsuits brought last month against the four students making and operating network search engines apparently will settle soon. The Daily Princetonian reports that Daniel Peng, and the three others, have been working with attorneys to negotiate an end to this, and expect some kind of announcement today. "It would be really expensive to litigate," said Peng, who has avoided commenting publicly since the filing. "I would like to reach an amicable settlement." In a... [bIPlog]
Terry Frazier at 4:08 PM
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Multiple RSS Feeds
I've been messing around with my RSS feeds for a while, testing the ability of Stapler to create multiple feeds with different parameters. You will notice some new icons over on the right that link to a truncated feed (first paragraph) and a headline-only feed.It works pretty well and Stapler does a good job, but this is a less-than-optimal solution. IMO the aggregator should filter feeds the way a user wants to see them, rather than me having to provide multiple feeds. The RSS reader ought to be configurable to the point that it shows as much, or as little, of the feed as wanted.
The other thing that would be nice is an option for a "summary" of an item to be specifically called out. This would be especially valuable for longer posts. It's a technique John Udell uses pretty often. It's also supported in Conversant, though I'm not sure how it works within the RSS files.
Ideally, the summary text would be an RSS module that would be read if present, ignored otherwise. And the aggregator could be set to display the summary in full (if present), or display some truncated version of the full post otherwise.
I see the summary being used by folks who usually create longer, essay-style posts or by publications that want to syndicate full articles with a summary attached. Maybe something like this already exists. I'd like to know.
Terry Frazier at 2:58 PM
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Anti-RAVE Act Becomes Law
President Bush has signed 'Amber Alert' bill to reduce abduction and save the children. Every good Mommy and Daddy will support this bill.Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) attached his Anti-RAVE bill as a rider to Amber Alert, pushing it through Congress when it failed to survive on its own last year. Anti-RAVE makes business owners criminally liable for the personal behavior of their customers and is a significant expansion of the 'War on Drugs'. The rider underwent no public review, open debate, or Congressional hearings this year.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft hailed the law, calling it a "comprehensive effort to protect our children."
Make up your own mind.
Terry Frazier at 1:00 PM
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HP Time-limits Ink Cartridges
Tag this one with the Lexmark DMCA case, as a logical attempt to extend control, and hence profits, to the greatest reach legally possible. The problem is the DMCA extends this control well beyond previously legal ends by stopping any form of competition or modification that would bypass any of HP's digital intellectual property. It's only a matter of time before HP joins the DMCA legal chorus to enforce its rights under this new industrial monopoly grant.Whole industries -- aftermarket auto parts, aftermarket printer cartridges, memory chips, manufacturers of any performance mechanical parts, radio and computer hobbyists, and others -- could well be destroyed by a few oligopolies embedding sufficient DigIP into their products to make them immune to any form of competition.
I don't see why it would take anything more than simple RFID embedding to establish a DMCA-qualified barrier to modification. Within a few years companies could be embedding inexpensive RFID tags into every conceivable part, linking them to a DMCA-protected control system that stops operation unless all parts are identified as OEM equipment.
Whose law trumps in such a case -- restraint of trade or DMCA?
theinquirer.net - HP inkjet cartridges have built-in expiry dates.PRINTER GIANT HP has built in time limits for its inkjet printer cartridges which means machines may stop working even if the consumable has 75% ink let to go
[ ... ]
HP has told him that the date printed on the ink cartridge is not the expiry date, and that is determined either by a cartridge being in the printer for 30 months, or the cartridge is 4.5 years old, whichever comes first. [...]
[Privacy Digest]
Terry Frazier at 10:36 AM
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Wednesday, April 30, 2003
DMCA Goes Global
Copyright by fiat. Lessig is pointing to a fox in the henhouse. If you can't get a law passed to suit you then bribe the US Trade Rep to negotiate an international treaty that requires us to do whatever it is you want. This is sad, irritating, and funny. Funny because this Administration has no respect for international treaties. Hell, we just told the whole UN to get screwed, backed out of Kyoto, are dismantling NATO. But then, maybe it's more important to American interests to ensure our copyright oligopoly controls the world's intellectual property.
Copyright dweebs are crapping all over democracy. Again.. Lessig reports that the sneaky dweebs on the other side are end-running around the domestic efforts to reform the DMCA by initiating copyright treaties with Chile and Singapore that require the US to not change the DMCA. Ah, the sweet smell of subverted democracy. [Boing Boing Blog]
Alabama Won't Legalize Sex Toys
Alabama, where you can marry a 12-year-old but you can't buy a dildo.
Alabama Votes Against Legalizing Sex Toys
The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 30, 2003; 4:42 AMMONTGOMERY, Ala. - Sex toys are still against the law in Alabama, at least as far as the Alabama Legislature is concerned.
The Alabama House voted against a bill Tuesday that would have removed a ban on sexual devices, such as vibrators, from the state's obscenity law. The ban on sexual devices was added at the last minute when the obscenity law passed the Legislature in 1998.
A federal district judge in Birmingham has twice ruled that the ban is unconstitutional. The first ruling was overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the second ruling has been appealed to the appeals court. [...] [Washington Post Online]
This is undoubtedly the type of morally upright lawmaking that Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania, was defending in his unfortunate statement regarding the Texas sodomy case now before the Supreme Court. For more you can read this decidedly slanted appraisal of Santorum's stance.
Mobile Number Portability
I am eagerly awaiting Mobile Number Portability, since it seems the last barrier to real, customer-centric policies and performance by the wireless carriers. Take away their hold on the number and they will be forced to compete on service, access, coverage, and price. We can all hope the FCC's most recent deadline, November 24, 2003, actually holds and we get relief from the artificial switching costs imposed by the current system.
Mobile Number Portability: lessons from Hong Kong, China.There's a piece Court Hears Fight Over Numbers Used for Cellphones in today's New York Times about the battle to introduce mobile number portability in the United States. There are perhaps some lessons to draw from Asia, particularly Hong Kong, China. In this "mobile-mad" economy, over 90% of the population has a mobile and it probably has the most highly competitive mobile market in the world with 6 providers for slightly less than 7 million people. A few years ago (March 1999), I happened to be in Hong Kong the day the regulator, OFTA, introduced mobile number portability (MNP). [...]
[Robert Shaw: Regulatory]
The Cost of a CD
The RIAA provides an appraisal of the costs involved in creating a CD without providing any actual figures, but assures us:[...] By all measures, when you consider how long people have the music and how often they can go back and get "re-entertained" CDs truly are an incredible value for the money. [...]
Assuming, of course that we don't want to get "re-entertained" on our computers, MP3 players, digital devices, or in any order/combination other than their original.
Oh, wait. They do provide these figures:
[...] Between 1983 and 1996, the average price of a CD fell by more than 40%. Over this same period of time, consumer prices (measured by the Consumer Price Index, or CPI) rose nearly 60%. If CD prices had risen at the same rate as consumer prices over this period, the average retail price of a CD in 1996 would have been $33.86 instead of $12.75. [...]
Maybe they could give away free recordings of "My Heart Bleeds for You" and we could all wear green ribbons on our lapels to support the poor, grubby bastards who can't make enough money with these reduced margins.
'Method' Patents in Medicine
Mayo Clinic granted broad 'method' patent for using anti-fungals.
With New Patent, Mayo Clinic Owns a Cure for the Sniffles[...] The patent, in effect, blocks others from selling an antifungal agent to treat the condition without Mayo's approval. That adds to a similarly broad patent Mayo received in 2001 for treatment of chronic asthma, a disease that Dr. Ponikau says has the same cause. Mayo filed both patents, which received little public notice, in October 1998.
Broad patents such as Mayo's, called "method patents," are rare for a basic reason: Researchers very rarely claim to have discovered the root causes of a disease. In most cases, researchers seek to patent only specific treatments. Approval by the patent office doesn't mean that a product is considered safe or effective -- just that the rights to that product are protected. [...] [Wall Street Journal(subscription required)]
Free Country?
Patriot Raid....A security 'mistake' has the author eating dinner at gunpoint.
Patriot Raid[Ye Olde Phart][...] "You have no right to hold us," Asher insisted.
"Yes, we have every right," responded one of the agents. "You are being held under the Patriot Act following suspicion under an internal Homeland Security investigation." [...]
Three days later I phoned the restaurant to discover what happened. The owner was nervous and embarrassed and obviously did not want to talk about it. But I managed to ascertain that the whole thing had been one giant mistake. A mistake. Loaded guns pointed in faces, people made to crawl on their hands and knees, police officers clearly exacerbating a tense situation by kicking in doors, taunting, keeping their fingers on the trigger even after the situation was under control. A mistake. And, according to the ACLU a perfectly legal one, thanks to the Patriot Act. [...]
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