Slashdot Mirror

morrison writes "The 2008 Google Summer of Code is on. We have discussed this four-year-old tradition before (2005, 2006, 2007). Google will once again be hosting a program that gives computer science students a $4,500 stipend to work on open source software projects. Last year, Google funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries. As noted in the program FAQ, this year they hope to do even more. The #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode is already buzzing with activity."

TheProcess writes "Back in February 2003, IBM predicted that AMD would be dead in 5 years (original article here), with IBM and Intel the only remaining players in the chip market. Well, 5 years have passed and AMD is still alive. However, its finances and stock price have taken a serious beating over the last year. AMD was once a darling in this community — the plucky, up-and-coming challenger to the Intel behemoth. Will AMD still be here in 5 years? Can they pose a credible competitive threat to Intel's dominance? Do they still have superior but unappreciated technology? Or are they finally old hat? Can they really recover?"

Travoltus writes "Privacy advocates are frequently confronted with the rhetorical question, 'If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have a good reason to worry about losing your privacy, right?' This AP story uncovers a vast, distributed, decentralized epidemic of snooping into databases of personal information by workers at major utilities, the IRS, and other large organizations. In a number of cases these incidents have led to real harm. One striking example involves now ex-Mayor of Milwaukee Marvin Pratt, who had a pattern of being late paying his heating bills. This fact was leaked to the media by a utility worker and may have led to Pratt's losing a bid for re-election. As one can imagine, the harm becomes much greater when this same snooping is done by Government officials to deal with political enemies, or by corporations to uncover whistleblowers."

HockeyPuck writes to let us know that Microsoft has decided to stop making HD DVD players for the Xbox 360. No word on supporting Blu-ray on the platform though. "Microsoft said Saturday it would continue to provide standard warranty support for its HD DVD players. Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida last week estimated about 300,000 people own the Microsoft video player, sold as a separate $130 add-on for the Xbox 360."

SonicSpike writes "According to the AP, Ralph Nader could be poised for another presidential campaign. Nader will appear on NBC's 'Meet the Press' tomorrow to announce whether he will launch another White House bid. Nader kicked off his 2004 presidential run on the show. Kevin Zeese, who was Nader's spokesman during the 2004 presidential race said, 'Obviously, I don't think Meet the Press host Tim Russert would have him on for no reason.'"

A number of readers wrote in about the launch this morning of a Japanese H-2A rocket carrying a Kizuna ("Winds") satellite into orbit. Kizuna is intended to provide "super high-speed data transmission" for Japan and Southeast Asia. The news stories on the launch, such as the AP's linked here, are short on technical detail. For example they say the satellite successfully achieved orbit 175 miles above the earth — hardly suitable for Internet communications to a specific area on the surface (remember Teledesic?). Reader nebulus4 provided a link to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency site with an illustration and a little more detail. Such as the fact that Kizuna is destined for geosync orbit, and that a 45-cm antenna will equip eventual users for 155 Mbps down / 6 Mbps up, whereas a 5-m antenna will allow enterprises and ISPs to tap into 1.2 Gbps down. Given the latency to geosync orbit, you probably wouldn't want to use Kizuna to play an online shooter.

fab writes "Italian car designer Leonardo Fioravanti (who worked for Pininfarina for a number of years) has developed a car prototype without windshield wipers. This amazing technological feat is made possible thanks to the use of 4 layers of glass modified using nanotechnology. The first layer filters the sun and repels the water. The second layer, using 'nano-dust' is able to push dirt to the side. The third layer acts as a sensor that activates the second layer when it detects dirt, while the fourth layer is a conductor of electricity to power this complex mechanism. I haven't been able to find an English article, but there is always a google powered translation of the Italian article."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Supreme Court refused without comment the ACLU's appeal of a lower court ruling that prevented them from suing over the government's warrantless TSP program. The problem was a Catch-22: they lack legal 'standing' to sue over it because they can't prove that they were suspected terrorists, but neither can they find out who was actually suspected, because this is a matter of national security." Update: 02/20 00:17 GMT by KD : Removed an incorrect statement after a reader pointed out that, with the expiration of the Protect America Act this weekend, foreign surveillance will revert to oversight by the FISA court.

beuges writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students. "The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.""

Smordnys s'regrepsA writes "Fidel Castro, the leader of the island nation of Cuba has declined the possibility of keeping his seat as President, after the February 24th National Assembly election. "I neither will aspire to nor will I accept — I repeat — I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief," Castro wrote almost 19 months after a severe illness caused him to hand power temporarily to his brother Raul."

GSGKT writes "Google's Anti-Malware Team has made available some of their research data on malware distribution mechanisms while the research paper[PDF] is under peer review. Among their conclusions are that the majority of malware distribution sites are hosted in China, and that 1.3% of Google searches return at least one link to a malicious site. The lead author, Niels Provos, wrote, 'It has been over a year and a half since we started to identify web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically. During that time we have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware. During the course of our research, we have investigated not only the prevalence of drive-by downloads but also how users are being exposed to malware and how it is being distributed.'"

bosoxsux writes "Rogue DNS servers are an increasingly popular tool for scam artists, according to a new report. Their numbers are on the rise, in part because they're difficult for antivirus software to deal with. 'There are now approximately 68,000 rogue DNS servers across the Internet, The authenticity of the sites such servers redirect to varies greatly, from near-perfect copies to laughably bad, but the problem they represent is quite serious. Once an end user's computer has been modified to use a poisoned DNS server, the system can be directed to any fake web site the malware author feels like serving up.'"

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton sends in his latest, which begins like this and continues behind the link. "When Google's VP of Engineering announced their proposed Knol project, where users can submit articles on different subjects and share in the AdSense revenue from the article pages, he didn't mention "Wikipedia," but practically everyone else did who blogged about it. Here's what I think will happen, if Knol is implemented according to the plan: Even though it won't technically be a "Wikipedia fork," it will quickly become equivalent to one, with a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol articles hoping for a piece of the AdSense dollars. But I submit this will be a good thing, especially if bona fide experts in different fields join the gold rush as well and start signing their names to articles that they've vetted."
First, I've been saying for a while that someone should fork Wikipedia and start assigning "ownership" of articles to credentialed experts where possible, so that an article can be cited as a source that has been vetted by a recognized individual, and to guard against vandalism. Citizendium does something like this, but started from the ground up rather than fork Wikipedia. I argued that they should fork as much as possible from Wikipedia (having experts "bless" the content in the process); the project's official reason for not doing this was that authors are more motivated when starting with a clean slate than when taking over someone else's article. True, we all know the energizing feeling of a clean slate compared to the sluggish feeling of taking over a 50%-completed project with all of its flaws and compromises, but the "energizing feeling" often doesn't make up for the advantages of having 50% of the work already done for you (which is, in a nutshell, the only reason people ever finish 50%-completed projects instead of starting over!).

So could some other Wikipedia fork achieve the same thing? Programmer/blogger and Guardian columnist Seth Finkelstein, a frequent Wikipedia critic, has pointed out that other sites such as http://veropedia.com/ have tried to build a "verified" version of Wikipedia. "But," he writes, "it doesn't work for many reasons:

1) Maintenance
2) Nobody knows the site exists, or uses it.
3) Google will kill the site's ranking, because of "duplicate content"
4) Roughly 99% of Wikipedia's value is the Google-rank it has, and sites trying to copy its content don't have — or get — that Google-rank.

All true. But Knol has a shot at solving all of these problems. #1 should be mitigated if users earn money for maintaining articles — and besides, many articles like "Abraham Lincoln" won't need much maintenance anyway. #2 should not be an issue since it's a Google project. #3 and #4 depend on how Google lists Knol pages in its search results. The VP's blog post says only,

"Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge."

Of course the question on everyone's minds, not answered directly by those sentences, is whether Knol pages will get any special treatment in search rankings. Google would probably be criticized if they manipulated the results outright. But they might achieve the same result indirectly — for example, having a tab across the top of their search results page for "Knol results," along with the tabs for Web, images, and news. Or if Knol results get killed for "duplicate content," Google might (legitimately) consider this a bug and tweak their duplicate-detection algorithm. Thus Knol would have the same advantage in Google that Microsoft's Media Player has on Windows: The operating system doesn't favor Media Player directly, but compatibility problems with Media Player will always get fixed first (while the RealPlayer people have to watch their programs get broken by Windows upgrades). One way or another, it's pretty certain that Knol results are not going to be "unfindable" on Google.

Now, I'm sure Knol will not formally fork Wikipedia. I wouldn't see any problem with them doing that, but it would be too controversial, after the VP announced it without ever mentioning "Wikipedia," and with Google already dealing with speculation that they're only creating Knol to complete with Wikipedia in their own search results. But with users having cash incentives to copy content from Wikipedia, probably most of the content would get replicated very quickly, and I would be surprised if many users didn't start writing scripts to robo-copy as much content from Wikipedia as possible.

Then you get to the point where experts start improving it. If the first couple of entries on "Physics" are just the robo-copied Wikipedia version, "signed" by users that nobody has ever heard of, this is barely an improvement over the unsigned article on Wikipedia itself. But then only one Physics professor in the entire world has to think it's worth their while to read the standard Wikipedia article, make any necessary corrections, and sign their name to it on Knol — and now you have a version that has been vetted by a credentialed expert, increasing its value many times to people who want to cite it as a source, or who want a higher degree of confidence that it's accurate. (Hopefully Knol will allow authors to confirm their e-mail addresses and display them — in an image, presumably, to stop them being scraped by spammers. This will allow professors to prove that they really have faculty .edu addresses and enhance the credibility of their articles, something I suggested for Citizendium.)

So, some criticisms of Wikipedia would not apply to Knol. Author Nick Carr has written of Wikipedia,

"Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper."

When I asked if he would recommend Knol for the same purpose, he was more optimistic:

"Probably. Since a Knol would be written by an identifiable person at an identifiable point in time, I don't see why you wouldn't treat it, in doing research, in a similar way that you'd treat, say, an article by that person. Obviously, you'd need to judge the writer's expertise and authority when deciding whether or not to draw on his or her work, which becomes somewhat more problematic where no editorial or peer-review system applies, as in Knol."

This is where I think the value of a professor's .edu e-mail address comes in, which can at least establish a writer's authority in their subject. I asked Seth Finkelstein whether he would recommend Knol in those same circumstances (verified professor's .edu address, etc.), and his take was, "Of course I would, but you loaded the question in a way so as to remove any problem from it." Well, yeah. I just happen to think Knol actually could remove those problems.

Then there was a little-noticed phrase in Google's blog post that suggests another area where Knol could improve over Wikipedia: the inclusion of "how-to-fix-it instructions." Given that people often need how-to instructions a lot more badly than they need encyclopedia articles, it's surprising that there hasn't been an attempt to standardize around a "Wikipedia of how-to's." Perhaps it's because the Web itself actually does pretty well for that — type in the text of some error message, and you'll usually get some hits on support forums where people ran into the same problem. The trouble is that the ranking of search results depends on the popularity of the site, not on whether the thread ended with someone posting a solution to the problem, so you might have to read through a lot of search results to find an answer. And if you're an expert who happens to know how to do or fix something, there's not much incentive for you to post a page about it (even with AdSense ads), because your page will get buried in the search results beneath all the support forums discussing the same question, even if your post is more concise and useful. Some gurus like Dave Taylor and Leo Notenboom have written so many how-to articles that their own sites have risen through the Google rankings, so if they write a how-to article about something, it will get read (which, of course, creates an incentive for them to write more of them). But for a new expert just starting to write how-to articles, it would take a long time to reach that critical mass.

Knol, however, creates an incentive for experts to start posting how-to-fix-it advice and start reaping the rewards right away, since your how-to articles are just as easy to find under a given subject as anyone else's. Your earnings would start out small as you began to write articles, but they would rise in proportion to the number of articles you wrote, and you wouldn't have to slog along writing for no reward like a typical blogger or site creator, hoping to hit "critical mass" some day. You'd find out early on what the reward would be (financial and otherwise) for the work you were doing, and could decide if you wanted to continue.

Actually, the possibility of "instant rewards" does depend on how Knol articles are ranked against each other within a given topic. The Google blog post says, "For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject," and, "Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it." Presumably the top-rated articles on a given topic will be displayed first by default, so I'm making the assumption that good articles really will get sorted to the top. But if there are already 50 articles on some topic, even if you know you can write a better one, how do you know it would rise to the top of the pile? If 10 people rate your article a 9, and all the other articles have been rated by 100 people each and got an average rating of a 7, then yours should still be listed as the highest in terms of average rating. But how do you get even those first 10 people to see your article? You could invite your friends, but then how do you stop anyone from gaming the system by inviting their friends and asking them all to rate their article a 10?

I'd written about this in the context of whether Wikia Search might try to solve these problems by allowing users to vote on search results, if they could prevent people from gaming the system. That was basically just me thinking out loud that something like that would be cool, before Wikia Search announced any specifics, and I haven't heard that Wikia is trying anything like that. But now that Google has stated that they will use voting and ranking systems in Knol, the question is how to reward new authors while preventing cheating. I suggested some ideas in an article about how to stop cheating and vote-buying on digg. One idea was that you could have a section on the page that showed people links to different articles at random, so that users couldn't self-select on what articles were shown to them, and if those randomly selected users followed the links and voted on the articles, count only those votes in determining the true "rating" of an article. (This is what HotOrNot does for people's picture ratings.) Even if few people rated those articles, the ratings that were collected, would be representative of real users, and not the horde of friends that you'd sent to rate your article. If that did not prove popular enough, then you could give authors the option to pay random users to rate their articles — as long as there was no way for authors to tie payment to higher ratings, the ratings would average out to reflect the article quality, and could be used to sort articles based on their actual merits.

So, I'd like to think that someone in the Googleplex is reading everything I write, but it's probably just a case where great nerds think alike. I wrote in Feb 07 that I thought Citizendium should allow authors to put their name next to articles, both for the "name up in lights" incentives factor and to enhance the article's credibility, and now Knol is going to do that (not to mention throwing in money as well). The same month I wrote that someone should build a search engine that groups together user-submitted articles under different topics, and provides a means for newly submitted articles to rise through the ranks as a result of user votes, and it sounds like Knol will attempt that too. Then in April 07 I wrote about the ways that you could prevent cheating in such a system, and even though Knol hasn't talked about what they will do to address that problem, they're almost certainly thinking about it, and have probably come up with some of the same ideas.

So let's do a test to find out if Google is reading these articles. There's one area where Wikipedia would beat Knol, and that is that everything on Wikipedia can be redistributed for free. That's something really special, and it's the one part of the Wikipedia hype that I actually buy into. I don't really care that Wikipedia articles were created as part of a "worldwide collaborative effort" unless that helps to achieve the goal of being useful. But Wikipedia, for all its flaws, represents the first time in human history that we have a compendium of a huge amount of human knowledge that can be copied freely, that literally belongs to the world, and because it's duplicated in so many places, it can literally never be taken away. That part of the hype really is true, and is quite heady when you think about it.

Google Knol has not declared this as one of their goals; a Knol article might not be freely distributable. When a proprietary project is hosted on a private site, there's always the risk that the company will pull the plug on it. They probably won't pull off the content offline, but they might shut the service down to stop new content from being added, the way Google did with Google Answers. Yes, Knol authors will retain ownership of their writings, so they could try to regroup and continue the project somewhere else, but it would be a huge mess to try and contact all of the authors and get their permission to copy all of their articles to the new location. As currently planned, Knol doesn't "belong the world," and Google never promised not to take it away.

So, I think that Google Knol should include a feature whereby authors can flag their articles as being freely distributable under the same terms as Wikipedia articles. (Any author who copied an article from Wikipedia and submitted it, would be required to set this flag, because under the terms of "copyleft", you can't copy something that's freely copyable and then try to stop others from copying it!) Then a user who wanted a copylefted, freely distributable article, could limit their search to articles that have this flag set. This would give Knol the best of both worlds: if the author of the top-ranked article did not wish for it to be freely redistributable, then they wouldn't put it on Wikipedia, but they could make it available on Knol, and users could choose either the top-ranked copylefted article or the top-ranked article overall, depending on what they wanted. If the best article on a given subject also happened to be flagged freely distributable, then so much the better.

Maybe the Knol people have had this idea already. But even so, if they end up implementing it, then I'm starting right away on articles about how Google should implement Google Anti-Censorware, Google Site Hijack Prevention, Google Security Compensation, and Google Sergey And Larry Give Bennett Their Airplane.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton sends in his latest, which begins like this and continues behind the link. "When Google's VP of Engineering announced their proposed Knol project, where users can submit articles on different subjects and share in the AdSense revenue from the article pages, he didn't mention "Wikipedia," but practically everyone else did who blogged about it. Here's what I think will happen, if Knol is implemented according to the plan: Even though it won't technically be a "Wikipedia fork," it will quickly become equivalent to one, with a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol articles hoping for a piece of the AdSense dollars. But I submit this will be a good thing, especially if bona fide experts in different fields join the gold rush as well and start signing their names to articles that they've vetted."
First, I've been saying for a while that someone should fork Wikipedia and start assigning "ownership" of articles to credentialed experts where possible, so that an article can be cited as a source that has been vetted by a recognized individual, and to guard against vandalism. Citizendium does something like this, but started from the ground up rather than fork Wikipedia. I argued that they should fork as much as possible from Wikipedia (having experts "bless" the content in the process); the project's official reason for not doing this was that authors are more motivated when starting with a clean slate than when taking over someone else's article. True, we all know the energizing feeling of a clean slate compared to the sluggish feeling of taking over a 50%-completed project with all of its flaws and compromises, but the "energizing feeling" often doesn't make up for the advantages of having 50% of the work already done for you (which is, in a nutshell, the only reason people ever finish 50%-completed projects instead of starting over!).

So could some other Wikipedia fork achieve the same thing? Programmer/blogger and Guardian columnist Seth Finkelstein, a frequent Wikipedia critic, has pointed out that other sites such as http://veropedia.com/ have tried to build a "verified" version of Wikipedia. "But," he writes, "it doesn't work for many reasons:

1) Maintenance
2) Nobody knows the site exists, or uses it.
3) Google will kill the site's ranking, because of "duplicate content"
4) Roughly 99% of Wikipedia's value is the Google-rank it has, and sites trying to copy its content don't have — or get — that Google-rank.

All true. But Knol has a shot at solving all of these problems. #1 should be mitigated if users earn money for maintaining articles — and besides, many articles like "Abraham Lincoln" won't need much maintenance anyway. #2 should not be an issue since it's a Google project. #3 and #4 depend on how Google lists Knol pages in its search results. The VP's blog post says only,

"Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge."

Of course the question on everyone's minds, not answered directly by those sentences, is whether Knol pages will get any special treatment in search rankings. Google would probably be criticized if they manipulated the results outright. But they might achieve the same result indirectly — for example, having a tab across the top of their search results page for "Knol results," along with the tabs for Web, images, and news. Or if Knol results get killed for "duplicate content," Google might (legitimately) consider this a bug and tweak their duplicate-detection algorithm. Thus Knol would have the same advantage in Google that Microsoft's Media Player has on Windows: The operating system doesn't favor Media Player directly, but compatibility problems with Media Player will always get fixed first (while the RealPlayer people have to watch their programs get broken by Windows upgrades). One way or another, it's pretty certain that Knol results are not going to be "unfindable" on Google.

Now, I'm sure Knol will not formally fork Wikipedia. I wouldn't see any problem with them doing that, but it would be too controversial, after the VP announced it without ever mentioning "Wikipedia," and with Google already dealing with speculation that they're only creating Knol to complete with Wikipedia in their own search results. But with users having cash incentives to copy content from Wikipedia, probably most of the content would get replicated very quickly, and I would be surprised if many users didn't start writing scripts to robo-copy as much content from Wikipedia as possible.

Then you get to the point where experts start improving it. If the first couple of entries on "Physics" are just the robo-copied Wikipedia version, "signed" by users that nobody has ever heard of, this is barely an improvement over the unsigned article on Wikipedia itself. But then only one Physics professor in the entire world has to think it's worth their while to read the standard Wikipedia article, make any necessary corrections, and sign their name to it on Knol — and now you have a version that has been vetted by a credentialed expert, increasing its value many times to people who want to cite it as a source, or who want a higher degree of confidence that it's accurate. (Hopefully Knol will allow authors to confirm their e-mail addresses and display them — in an image, presumably, to stop them being scraped by spammers. This will allow professors to prove that they really have faculty .edu addresses and enhance the credibility of their articles, something I suggested for Citizendium.)

So, some criticisms of Wikipedia would not apply to Knol. Author Nick Carr has written of Wikipedia,

"Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper."

When I asked if he would recommend Knol for the same purpose, he was more optimistic:

"Probably. Since a Knol would be written by an identifiable person at an identifiable point in time, I don't see why you wouldn't treat it, in doing research, in a similar way that you'd treat, say, an article by that person. Obviously, you'd need to judge the writer's expertise and authority when deciding whether or not to draw on his or her work, which becomes somewhat more problematic where no editorial or peer-review system applies, as in Knol."

This is where I think the value of a professor's .edu e-mail address comes in, which can at least establish a writer's authority in their subject. I asked Seth Finkelstein whether he would recommend Knol in those same circumstances (verified professor's .edu address, etc.), and his take was, "Of course I would, but you loaded the question in a way so as to remove any problem from it." Well, yeah. I just happen to think Knol actually could remove those problems.

Then there was a little-noticed phrase in Google's blog post that suggests another area where Knol could improve over Wikipedia: the inclusion of "how-to-fix-it instructions." Given that people often need how-to instructions a lot more badly than they need encyclopedia articles, it's surprising that there hasn't been an attempt to standardize around a "Wikipedia of how-to's." Perhaps it's because the Web itself actually does pretty well for that — type in the text of some error message, and you'll usually get some hits on support forums where people ran into the same problem. The trouble is that the ranking of search results depends on the popularity of the site, not on whether the thread ended with someone posting a solution to the problem, so you might have to read through a lot of search results to find an answer. And if you're an expert who happens to know how to do or fix something, there's not much incentive for you to post a page about it (even with AdSense ads), because your page will get buried in the search results beneath all the support forums discussing the same question, even if your post is more concise and useful. Some gurus like Dave Taylor and Leo Notenboom have written so many how-to articles that their own sites have risen through the Google rankings, so if they write a how-to article about something, it will get read (which, of course, creates an incentive for them to write more of them). But for a new expert just starting to write how-to articles, it would take a long time to reach that critical mass.

Knol, however, creates an incentive for experts to start posting how-to-fix-it advice and start reaping the rewards right away, since your how-to articles are just as easy to find under a given subject as anyone else's. Your earnings would start out small as you began to write articles, but they would rise in proportion to the number of articles you wrote, and you wouldn't have to slog along writing for no reward like a typical blogger or site creator, hoping to hit "critical mass" some day. You'd find out early on what the reward would be (financial and otherwise) for the work you were doing, and could decide if you wanted to continue.

Actually, the possibility of "instant rewards" does depend on how Knol articles are ranked against each other within a given topic. The Google blog post says, "For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject," and, "Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it." Presumably the top-rated articles on a given topic will be displayed first by default, so I'm making the assumption that good articles really will get sorted to the top. But if there are already 50 articles on some topic, even if you know you can write a better one, how do you know it would rise to the top of the pile? If 10 people rate your article a 9, and all the other articles have been rated by 100 people each and got an average rating of a 7, then yours should still be listed as the highest in terms of average rating. But how do you get even those first 10 people to see your article? You could invite your friends, but then how do you stop anyone from gaming the system by inviting their friends and asking them all to rate their article a 10?

I'd written about this in the context of whether Wikia Search might try to solve these problems by allowing users to vote on search results, if they could prevent people from gaming the system. That was basically just me thinking out loud that something like that would be cool, before Wikia Search announced any specifics, and I haven't heard that Wikia is trying anything like that. But now that Google has stated that they will use voting and ranking systems in Knol, the question is how to reward new authors while preventing cheating. I suggested some ideas in an article about how to stop cheating and vote-buying on digg. One idea was that you could have a section on the page that showed people links to different articles at random, so that users couldn't self-select on what articles were shown to them, and if those randomly selected users followed the links and voted on the articles, count only those votes in determining the true "rating" of an article. (This is what HotOrNot does for people's picture ratings.) Even if few people rated those articles, the ratings that were collected, would be representative of real users, and not the horde of friends that you'd sent to rate your article. If that did not prove popular enough, then you could give authors the option to pay random users to rate their articles — as long as there was no way for authors to tie payment to higher ratings, the ratings would average out to reflect the article quality, and could be used to sort articles based on their actual merits.

So, I'd like to think that someone in the Googleplex is reading everything I write, but it's probably just a case where great nerds think alike. I wrote in Feb 07 that I thought Citizendium should allow authors to put their name next to articles, both for the "name up in lights" incentives factor and to enhance the article's credibility, and now Knol is going to do that (not to mention throwing in money as well). The same month I wrote that someone should build a search engine that groups together user-submitted articles under different topics, and provides a means for newly submitted articles to rise through the ranks as a result of user votes, and it sounds like Knol will attempt that too. Then in April 07 I wrote about the ways that you could prevent cheating in such a system, and even though Knol hasn't talked about what they will do to address that problem, they're almost certainly thinking about it, and have probably come up with some of the same ideas.

So let's do a test to find out if Google is reading these articles. There's one area where Wikipedia would beat Knol, and that is that everything on Wikipedia can be redistributed for free. That's something really special, and it's the one part of the Wikipedia hype that I actually buy into. I don't really care that Wikipedia articles were created as part of a "worldwide collaborative effort" unless that helps to achieve the goal of being useful. But Wikipedia, for all its flaws, represents the first time in human history that we have a compendium of a huge amount of human knowledge that can be copied freely, that literally belongs to the world, and because it's duplicated in so many places, it can literally never be taken away. That part of the hype really is true, and is quite heady when you think about it.

Google Knol has not declared this as one of their goals; a Knol article might not be freely distributable. When a proprietary project is hosted on a private site, there's always the risk that the company will pull the plug on it. They probably won't pull off the content offline, but they might shut the service down to stop new content from being added, the way Google did with Google Answers. Yes, Knol authors will retain ownership of their writings, so they could try to regroup and continue the project somewhere else, but it would be a huge mess to try and contact all of the authors and get their permission to copy all of their articles to the new location. As currently planned, Knol doesn't "belong the world," and Google never promised not to take it away.

So, I think that Google Knol should include a feature whereby authors can flag their articles as being freely distributable under the same terms as Wikipedia articles. (Any author who copied an article from Wikipedia and submitted it, would be required to set this flag, because under the terms of "copyleft", you can't copy something that's freely copyable and then try to stop others from copying it!) Then a user who wanted a copylefted, freely distributable article, could limit their search to articles that have this flag set. This would give Knol the best of both worlds: if the author of the top-ranked article did not wish for it to be freely redistributable, then they wouldn't put it on Wikipedia, but they could make it available on Knol, and users could choose either the top-ranked copylefted article or the top-ranked article overall, depending on what they wanted. If the best article on a given subject also happened to be flagged freely distributable, then so much the better.

Maybe the Knol people have had this idea already. But even so, if they end up implementing it, then I'm starting right away on articles about how Google should implement Google Anti-Censorware, Google Site Hijack Prevention, Google Security Compensation, and Google Sergey And Larry Give Bennett Their Airplane.

duerra writes "A plan to use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law-enforcement missions is moving forward after being delayed for months because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. The plan is in the final stage of completion, according to a department official who requested anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about it. While some internal agencies have had access to spy satellite imagery for purposes such as assisting after a natural disaster, this would be the first time law-enforcement would be able to obtain a warrant and request access to satellite imagery."

lisa 'lisah' h writes "Looking natty in a yellow Tux vest, Linux dignitary John 'maddog' Hall agreed to a rare video interview with Robin 'Roblimo' Miller after speaking at a conference in Jacksonville, FL. The two chatted about the mobile phone project OpenMoko, his volunteer work with Linux International, and beer."

vm writes "NOVA's recent documentary, "Astrospies," was written and co-produced by journalist and NSA expert, James Bamford. It details the U.S. Air Force's orbiting spy station program begun in the 1960s, the Manned Orbital Laboratory. Designed from a heavily modified Gemini 2 capsule and launched from a Titan III booster rocket, MOL was basically intended to be a Hubble telescope pointed at Earth with the sole intention of collecting photo intelligence on the Soviets using an impressive array of optics and gyro balanced cameras operated onboard by specially trained astronauts. The lab was never launched, however, due to the competing Corona unmanned spy satellite program funded by NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office. Partly spurred by the success of the Apollo missions, the Soviets, meanwhile, sent cosmonauts to its own succesfully launched spy platform, the Almaz. In addition to an onboard film lab and a space-to-ground image relay system, it included an alarming first in manned space exploration; a 23mm aircraft cannon — which is rather ironic in light of Russia and China's recent attempts to ban space weaponry. At a time when we're still unearthing details about the post 9/11 domestic spying debacle, it's a fascinating look at the history of technology used to look over our neighbors' fences." There is more to the story but what these sorts of stories always make me wonder, is since this was the 60s, what are they doing NOW!

oboreruhito writes "The AP is reporting that the Tolkien Trust and HarperCollins are suing New Line Cinema for $150 million in compensatory damages, unspecified punitive damages, and a court order revoking New Line's rights to produce any more films on Tolkien properties. The Tolkien Trust says that New Line paid them only $62,500 to make 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy of films — instead of the agreed-upon 7.5 percent of gross receipts of all film-related revenue. The suit may set back, if not kill, a film adaptation of Lord of the Rings prequel 'The Hobbit,' which Peter Jackson had recently signed up to make after his own legal row with the studio over payment for the sequels."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "There's a growing revolt among Microsoft TechNet & MSDN subscribers who are frustrated that they can't yet get Vista SP1 and test their software on it. This can't be good news for anyone hoping that SP1 will have better compatibility. While SP1 has been released to manufacturing, and pirate copies are easy to find, Microsoft is withholding it from subscribers until early March. According to the article, some frustrated users are upset enough that they plan to abandon TechNet entirely and turn to piracy." Update: 02/12 17:37 GMT by KD : Sean0michael writes, "Aaccording to the Technet blog, they have pushed up the date to before the end of February, though no exact date is mentioned."

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his latest which starts "If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to "developers") write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the "test case writers") would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the "testers", would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there's too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it's too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the "users") could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with."

The irony is that this is how laws are supposed to work anyway. Laws have been struck down as being "void for vagueness" on the theory that people ought to be able to read them and know what they mean. But what does "vagueness" mean, if not that different people cannot independently agree on what a law means, and even the nine highest-ranked legal experts in the country are split 5-4 on how to read it? Some Supreme Courts, such as under William Howard Taft, tried to reach unanimous verdicts whenever possible on the theory that it would persuade people of the correctness of their decisions. But unanimity doesn't prove anything if it was achieved by agreeing to agree. Only if judges were put in separate rooms and independently agreed on how to apply a law to a given case, would that prove that the clarity came from the text of the law itself. Legislators ought to start at least trying to pass laws that would meet that test.

For some reason we seem to have just accepted the alternative as the status quo, where laws are passed that express a general sentiment ("no spam with a 'misleading' subject line") but nobody thinks that you could put two people in different rooms and expect them to agree on how the law would apply in most cases. The parties involved in the first court cases may have to spend ruinously large amounts of money to get to the point where judges rule on how to interpret the law, only to find that lower court judges disagree with each other. Meanwhile, anybody bringing a case now has to look up not just the law, but reference the lower court rulings that support their side, while their opponent of course references the other rulings. And even if a case does finally get appealed up to the Supreme Court, which issues a ruling binding on all lower courts, future researchers still can't find out the state of "the law" by looking up the statute; they have to look up the statute and read the Supreme Court ruling which states how the statute should be read (which may still be ambiguous as applied to their current situation). All of this costs a lot of money, which results in a huge waste of resources if both sides can afford it, and tilts the playing field if only one of them can.

I wonder if the reason this is so widely tolerated is because people have absorbed the notion that making and interpreting laws has to be hard, like brain surgery. But brain surgery is hard because the brain is naturally complex and not man-made. Lawyers also have to learn a lot of complex procedures, but not as complex as brain surgery; the major difficulty in a court case is guessing how the judge may interpret an ambiguous law (which is not "difficult" so much as a matter of being lucky), and knowing the unwritten rules that govern what actually happens (including which written rules are followed and which ones are ignored). And there's no reason in principle why this guesswork couldn't be reduced by having laws be more clear to begin with, and putting the "unwritten rules" down on paper.

I watched a scaled-down version of this play out in the first few cases that I brought against spammers in Small Claims court in Washington (although it involved only a waste of resources, not money, since Small Claims doesn't allow lawyers). You know the chorus, so all together now: Some judges said you could sue people out-of-state, and some said you couldn't. Some judges said you could sue for statutory damages in Small Claims, and some said you could only sue if you'd lost money. Some judges said that you could represent a corporation that you own, and some said that if you're a non-lawyer, you can't even represent your own corporation. Some said you could sue under a federal law in Small Claims, and some said you could only sue under a federal law in federal court. There are many more examples, and those were just the contradictions about Small Claims court procedure generally, not even counting the specific issues raised by the anti-spam law.

But as much as I've complained about that in the past, I don't blame the judges for that part. If the law is unclear, then judges have to come down one way or the other. (What I've complained about is when judges say that their interpretation is "the law", and that if you don't get it, you have to do more research. Lawyers know to take this kind of comment with a grain of salt, but a non-lawyer who takes it at face value, could end up wasting dozens of hours or hundreds of dollars in lawyer's fees before realizing that the judge's interpretation was not actually the law, and a different judge might have said the opposite. The judge should just be honest and say, "Well, I'm the ref and this is how I'm calling it. On another day with another judge you might get something else." I've had cases heard by some judges who basically said as much.) Often both interpretations are reasonable, but that's the point -- if both interpretations are reasonable, then there's something wrong with the way the law is written!

For example, there was the judge who said that you couldn't sue in Small Claims unless you'd lost money, because Small Claims jurisdiction is limited to "cases for the recovery of money only if the amount claimed does not exceed four thousand dollars". Most judges interpreted "recovery of money only" to mean that Small Claims courts can only award money damages, and not, for example, order someone to return property. Two judges, however, said that "recovery of money" implied that you could only literally "recover" money that you used to have and then lost (relying on the common English meaning of the word "recover"). In legal jargon, however, "recover" often simply means taking something from another party, and I won one such case on appeal after I submitted three Supreme Court rulings as evidence that used the phrase "recover statutory damages" or "recover punitive damages" in that sense, since statutory damages and punitive damages refer to money over and above what the plaintiff actually lost. (The original judges did not change their minds, but one of them later recused herself from any future spam cases filed by me, a move that I thought was questionable.)

Here's another example where there's no excuse for the law not to be completely clear, since it's specifying a number. To appeal a Small Claims ruling in Washington, you have to post a bond for "twice the amount of the judgment and costs, or twice the amount in controversy, whichever is greater". Presumably the "amount in controversy" means the amount that the plaintiff was suing for. But hang on -- in Small Claims you can't possibly be awarded more than you sued for. And that means the "the amount of the judgment and costs" will always be less than or equal to "the amount in controversy"! So why not just say "twice the amount in controversy"?

Or perhaps the "amount in controversy" only means the amount that the plaintiff and defendant disagree on. So if you sue someone for $2000, and the defendant agrees on the first $500 but not the remaining $1,500, and the judge's interpretation falls in between and she awards you $1,200, how much of a bond do you post if you want to appeal? $3,000, literally twice the "amount in controversy" between you and the defendant? $2,400, twice the amount of the judgment? $1,600, twice the difference between what you sought and what the judge awarded you? $4,000, twice the amount you sued for?

Beats me. When I first started out, I'd drive myself and my lawyer friends crazy asking, "Well, what's the rule? What's the answer?" Well, now I know: There is no rule, it just depends on what the judge says. Actually in this case, it depends on what the clerk says -- because it's the clerk at the courtroom's front office, not the judge, who handles the paperwork for an appeal and checks that you posted a bond for the right amount, so you have clerks effectively deciding how to interpret the law. (Just last week, after I sued a telemarketer for $1,500 and won a judgment for $565, the telemarketer appealed by posting a bond for twice that amount, or $1,130. This doesn't seem correct under any interpretation of the law, since the "amount in controversy", however you define it, was greater than the "amount of the judgment" of $565.)

Sometimes, courts have settled on how to interpret a rule, but the interpretation is still different from what the rule actually says. The Small Claims form that you serve on defendants says, "You are further notified that, in case you do not appear, judgment will be rendered against you for the amount of the claim as stated herein below..." This is not true -- you can lose even if the other party does not appear (if the judge thinks, for example, that a spam's subject line was not misleading enough). I understand that having that line on the form serves a useful purpose by getting people to show up. But it's still wrong, and everybody knows that it's wrong, and it's on the form anyway.

A more serious example: When I first started suing spammers, if I thought they would show up in court, I'd sometimes try to go to the trouble of catching them in a lie, like the guy who showed up and claimed he didn't know anything about any spam, before I showed that I had recorded a phone call where he admitted that he could send out 5 million e-mails from Chinese servers for $500. (Yes, taping the call was legal -- follow the link for more info.) The written rule is that if you lie under oath in court, you can be arrested for committing a felony, even if the case is only a civil trial. But it turns out the unwritten rule is that perjury in a civil case is almost never prosecuted, and in most of my cases where I had proof that the defendant lied, the best that would happen was that I'd just win the civil case anyway, and sometimes not even that. It's not just Small Claims, either -- in one currently ongoing case, the defendant's lawyer just filed an answer to our complaint stating "Plaintiff subscribed to receive our e-mails". There's absolutely no way their attorney believes that to be true (with the spam in question being sent by mortgages spammers from forged domains, it's hard to see how anyone could "subscribe" to receive those mails even if they wanted to), but attorneys are required to submit such briefs with good faith in their veracity. So why isn't he on the hook for that? Because of the unwritten rule that courts just don't make a big deal out of it.

The point is that none of these issues is hard to grasp. The difficulty lies not in understanding the problems, but in the impossibility of guessing how a judge will interpret an ambiguous rule -- or, in the case of an unwritten rule which contradicts the written ones, the difficulty of knowing the unwritten rule if you don't have a lawyer's experience.

So, ambiguous laws could be divided into three categories:

1. Laws and rules where there ought to be no ambiguity at all -- for example, rules about who can be sued where, and for how much, and what size bond you have to post if you want to appeal. The fact that these laws are not clear enough to be universally agreed up on, is just silly. (Again, if judges have a conference or an e-mail discussion and decide on an interpretation, that doesn't mean the law as written was clear -- in fact, the fact that they had to have that discussion, proves that it wasn't.)

2. "Unwritten rules" that are generally agreed upon by lawyers and judges, but which are not actually written down or may even contradict the rules codified into law. Are trials and proceedings actually conducted according to written rules? The acid test for this would be: Hire a physics professor or somebody (so the legal establishment can't use the excuse of calling him a dumbass) and have him look at the history of events and documents in a typical civil case, from the vantage point of one side's lawyer. At each stage in the proceeding, before the professor sees what the lawyer actually did next, have the prof try to figure out what they would have done, based on the written rules. (The question is not whether the prof would have come up with the same strategy as the lawyer, but whether they would have done something that was procedurally correct at all.) If there are too many cases where the professor does something that technically conforms to the written rules, but where the lawyer says it would have been rejected by the court as procedurally invalid -- and if the same thing keeps happening with more and more smart non-lawyers trying the same experiment -- then this suggests that either the procedures need to be changed to conform with the written rules, or the written rules should conform with the procedures. (Because actually changing laws and rules is so hard, a better idea would be to publish an "annotated version" of the court rules which describes the procedures the way they are actually followed.)

3. Laws governing situations where ambiguity is hard to get rid of -- for example, the part of the Washington anti-spam law prohibiting "misleading subject lines". Here the question is whether a mushy category like that could ever be clearly defined so that people would independently agree on what it meant.

For the first two categories, bringing some clarity to those laws ought to be a no-brainer. Some candidate like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich who can say whatever they want because they're not going to win anyway, should make an issue out of it. They wouldn't have to fix the problem all at once. They could just promote it as a core American value that has been overlooked: Laws and court rules should be clear, and they can't be called clear unless people can independently agree on how to read them. The Left could get behind it because it would bring more equality between the rich and poor in the legal system. The Right could get behind it because they style themselves as the party backing judges who are "strict constructionists" that apply the law as literally as possible. (Although at the risk of alienating potential right-wing supporters, I don't think that "strict constructionism" would have much meaning until laws are clarified using something like this process. To say that this or that judge is a "strict constructionist" under our current laws, often sounds to me like a bunch of hooey, when the laws are too ambiguous for anybody to strictly construct anything out of them. Clarence Thomas, who is often held out as an example of a "strict constructionist" judge, has said that Tinker vs. Des Moines, the Supreme Court case that extended First Amendment rights to high school students, is "without basis in the Constitution". But there's nothing in the First Amendment to say that it's limited to individuals over 18, although ironically most "strict constructionist" judges and their supporters, read it as if it is.)

The third category of ambiguous laws would be more interesting to try to fix. Would it be possible to come up with a standard for a "misleading" subject line that everyone could agree on? Probably not. But I think you could measure the ambiguity of a law by using testers and test case writers in the kind of procedure I suggested in the first paragraph, and you could get to the point where there was less disagreement among the testers on how to interpret the law as applied to typical subject lines.

If lawmakers knew in advance that their laws would be subject to that kind of test, they would write them more clearly the first time around. Why couldn't laws be written to include a list of hypothetical situations, for example, specifying which situations the law covered and which ones it didn't? For example, a list of sample spam e-mails to illustrate what the law means by a "misleading subject line". Of course, the trouble with picking examples to illustrate your own points, is that people tend to pick examples that fall squarely in the middle of the categories they're illustrating ("your refund has been processed" is misleading, "printer cartridges for sale" is not). If the lawmaker included illustrative cases like this that were too-obvious examples of what they were describing, then the "test case writers" would be able to shoot down the proposed law by picking hypothetical cases that were closer to the borderline (so that in the third phase, when the testers tried to apply the law to those borderline cases, different testers would classify the borderline cases differently, and the law would fail the vagueness test). To mitigate this, the author of the law should pick illustrative examples that would be at or near the borderline, thus providing clearer guidance as to where the boundary lies between a misleading and non-misleading subject line. Which is what they should be doing in the first place.

Now, there are some problems that even the double-blind test for unambiguous laws, would not solve:

• Judges could be systematically biased against a particular law (and even proud of it), in which case they can make things difficult for you even if the law is unambiguous. Or, they might be so biased in favor of a law that they carry it further than the clearly proscribed boundaries, as in the case of a judge who upheld the conviction of a man for sending sexually explicit instant messages, even though the law in question was clearly limited to e-mails.

• Judges may not take cases seriously from non-lawyers. In one series of cases that I brought, I filed written motions with two of the pages stuck together by a tiny thread of paper, so that after the judge ruled, I could examine the motions in the court file to see if the thread was still intact. I found that about half the time, the judge had rejected the motion without reading it.

  This is a hard obstacle to overcome, especially after the Commission on Judicial Conduct ruled that it was not a violation of the Code of Conduct for a judge to reject a motion without even turning the pages. It wouldn't do any good to show that judges ruled against pro se (self-representing) plaintiffs more often than against lawyers, because judges could claim it was because pro se plaintiffs just made more errors (although it would be hard to use this excuse to explain why judges rejected briefs without reading them at all). One way to test this would be to have judges conduct the trials "blind" so that they would see the briefs presented by each side, but they wouldn't know whether the brief was submitted by a lawyer or a non-lawyer representing themselves. However, this would require difficult changes to the way legal procedures are conducted

  A simpler way might be: Once the "unwritten rule book" has been authored, such that your typical non-lawyer in the above experiment knows what kind of briefs to submit at each stage of a trial, have a legally trained third party look at briefs written by the lawyer and briefs written by an average lawyer, and see if they can tell which is which. If the third party can't tell, then that indicates the non-lawyer is writing the briefs almost indistinguishably from a lawyer -- and then if a judge in a real trial keeps hammering them for "procedural violations", it would be because of the judge's knowledge that the party was a non-lawyer, and not because of what the party actually did. On the other hand, if the judge ruled against the person in the same proportion that that person's briefs were being flagged as "obviously written by a non-lawyer" in the double-blind experiment, then that would indicate the judge was being fair.

• Even if a law is perfectly unambiguous, judges may disagree on whether it is constitutional under the First Amendment, for example. Making these situations unambiguous would involve tampering with the First Amendment, probably not a good idea in this or any other political climate.

• It wouldn't do anything about the corrupt process by which laws are often passed in the first place, in exchange for campaign contributions. (As one scholarly analysis says, "It's exactly like buying a hamburger, except that under our laws, everybody must pretend that nobody is buying anything, and nobody is selling anything.")

But notwithstanding these problems, I think any law that could pass the double-blind interpretation test, would be an improvement over one that can't. First, because it appeals to our sense of fairness to have rules clearly laid out. Second, if we really followed the void for vagueness doctrine, laws would be able to pass that test anyway. Third, economists have documented that there are economic benefits to having stability and predictability in the law. Economist Thomas Sowell wrote in Race and Culture that in some historical periods, even when groups given second-class status under the law (such as Jews in Eastern Europe or the Chinese in Southeast Asia), they were able to prosper better than they did elsewhere, as long as their basic property rights were protected, and the laws, even the discriminatory ones, were consistent and predictable!

This isn't something that would require a wholesale change in a state's constitution or lawmaking procedure. Any legislator could voluntarily try this process out to see if it resulted in laws that were easier for constituents to understand, and had a greater chance of being interpreted by judges to give the result that the legislator wanted. Imagine having an anti-spam law, for example, which said:

Misleading subject lines are prohibited. This includes not only subject lines which contain false advertising, such as:

• 'lotion that cures baldness'
• 'legal copies of Windows for $20'

but also subject line that mislead the user into wasting time on a message. This is because a large part of the harm done by spam is not due to the falsity of the advertisements, but due to the time that users waste on each message before realizing that it's an advertisement. As such, misleading subject lines include those that mislead the user into thinking that the message is from a personal acquaintance, such as:

• 'Congratulations!'
• 'Touching base'

or a subject that misleads the user into thinking that the message is a 1-on-1 communication, such as:

• 'Re: Question about your website'
• 'Shareholder request'
• 'urgent cancer call'
• 'Reminder: link to your website http://slashdot.org/'

[Except for the first group, all of these are subject lines from real spams that I received, which Small Claims judges ruled were not misleading. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think they are applying the standard of whether a spam constitutes fraudulent or deceptive advertising, not whether it tricks you into opening it. But the original author of the anti-spam law, when talking about other proposed measures, stated that the point of anti-spam laws is that "Computer users should be able to know instantly what's spam and what isn't."]

If you were reading a series of legal statutes and came across one written like this, it would be jarring, like reading a Wikipedia article about cell division and then getting to the part where someone wrote "And Bennett is gaytarded". But that's because we're accustomed to laws being ambiguous, not spelling out how they should be interpreted using reasons and examples. I would like to see some lawmaker, somewhere, insert a law into their state's legal code that looked and sounded something like this. The idea is so radical that maybe it could only be done by an eccentric, like the congressman who had Elmo testify before a Congressional committee before he was arrested for bribery (the Congressman, not Elmo), or the guy who passed a House Resolution commending Napoleon Dynamite ("any members who choose to vote 'Nay' on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!"). Or maybe it would be up to a regular lawmaker who thinks, what the hell, let's write a law so that people can agree on what it means, and see if it starts a trend.

As for taking the rules that ought to be clear once and for all, like who can be sued where and for how much, some 3%-getting-candidate should start talking about it. When I read an article about how some lawsuit was stalled because a lawyer complained that it was filed in the wrong district, I can barely keep reading because I get sidetracked thinking this is such a pathetic reflection on our legal system. If the rule about where the suit can be filed is unambiguous, why aren't the lawyers sanctioned for raising it as a false issue? If the rule really is ambiguous, why hasn't it been made clear a long time ago? If you support (or are) a politician or candidate who wants to ask these questions, the field is wide open.

Many outlets are echoing a subscribers-only report in the Wall Street Journal that Yahoo's board has decided to reject Microsoft's takeover offer. The NYTimes offers the only other independent reporting so far confirming this claim. The report says that Yahoo will formally reject the offer in a letter on Monday, since they believe it "massively undervalues" the company. Microsoft offered $31 per share, a 62% premium on the stock price at the time, for Yahoo; but the latter believes that no offer below $40 per share is tenable. The AP has some background on Yahoo's options in responding to the bid.

Tech.Luver notes an AP story on tainted pills that have arrived in the US from — not China this time — Puerto Rico. The article details a disturbing number of incidents of contamination investigated by the FDA over the last few years. "The first warning sign came when a sharp-eyed worker sorting pills noticed that the odd blue flecks dotting the finished drug capsules matched the paint on the factory doors. After the flecks were spotted again on the capsules, a blood-pressure medication called Diltiazem, the plant began placing covers over drugs in carts in its manufacturing areas. But the factory owner, Canadian drug maker Biovail Corp., never tried to find out whether past shipments of the drug were contaminated — or prevent future contamination, according to US regulators... FDA officials say the problems in Puerto Rico are proportionate with the large number of pharmaceutical plants here and generally no worse than those on the US mainland."

Tech.Luver sends in word of Yahoo's decision to exit the subscription music business. Yahoo's current subscribers — the company doesn't disclose how many it has — will be switched over to Real's Rhapsody service, and Yahoo will promote Real on its site. Yahoo had priced its subscription service significantly below Real's: $5.99 a month (if users pay a year in advance), vs. Rhapsody memberships at $12.99 a month and up. The Mercury News wonders how the Yahoo-Real deal would fare if Microsoft takes over — not well, the betting goes.

An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.

theodp writes "From 1977's lovable Xeroxing Monk to 2007's smug-and-rich SalesGenie pitch man, Valleywag has rounded up videos for its Top 10 most memorable tech-oriented Super Bowl commercials. The commercials are: Apple (1984), Monster (1999), CareerBuilder (2005), GoDaddy (2005), Xerox (1977), E*Trade (1999), Pets.com (2000), Computer.com (2000), SalesGenie.com (2007) and OurBeginning (2000). This year's ads are coming soon." I've always been a fan of the Outpost.com gerbil cannon spot.

p1234 writes "Though no direct evidence for wormholes has been observed, this could be because they are disguised as black holes. Now Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, Russia, is suggesting a possible way to tell the two kinds of object apart. His idea assumes the existence of a bizarre substance called "phantom matter", which has been proposed to explain how wormholes might stay open. Phantom matter has negative energy and negative mass, so it creates a repulsive effect that prevents the wormhole closing. 'US expert Dr Lawrence Krauss, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, points out that the idea rests on untested assumptions. He told New Scientist magazine: "It is an interesting attempt to actually think of what a real signature for a wormhole would be, but it is more hypothetical than observational. Without any idea of what phantom matter is and its possible interactions with light, it is not clear one can provide a general argument."'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling by a lower court that Dish Network DVRs infringe upon TiVO's patent on a 'multimedia time warping system'. According to some analysts, this could not only make Dish liable for damages, it could force them to shut down their DVR service, harming their customers. The patent in question has already been reexamined once and the ruling on appeal (PDF) was unanimous."

plainwhitetoast recommends an article in La Repubblica.it — in Italian, Google translation here. According to Italian lawyer Andrea Monti, an expert on copyright and Internet law, the new Italian copyright law would authorize users to publish and freely share copyrighted music (p2p included). The new law, already approved by both legislative houses, indeed says that one is allowed to publish freely, through the Internet, free of charge, images and music at low resolution or "degraded," for scientific or educational use, and only when such use is not for profit. As Monti says in the interview, those who wrote it didn't realize that the word "degraded" is technical, with a very precise meaning, which includes MP3s, which are compressed with an algorithm that ensures a quality loss. The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.

Shipwack writes "Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections. The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online. Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe."

Apu writes in to inform us that the ACLU is trying to block an Ohio county from moving from touchscreen voting machines back to paper ballots. While it may seem like Cuyahoga County — which includes Cleveland — is moving in a good direction from the perspective of ballot security, the system chosen tabulates all votes at a central location. This means that voters don't get notified if their ballot contains errors, and thus they have no chance to correct it. The ACLU of Ohio is asking a federal judge for an injunction against any election in Cuyahoga County it they move to the new system.

An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that in a 2005 study the MPAA conducted through an outfit called LEK, the movie trade association vastly overestimated how much college students engage in illegal movie downloading. Instead of '44 percent of the industry's domestic losses' owing to their piracy, it's 15 percent — and one expert is quoted as saying even that number is way too high. Dan 'Sammy' Glickman's gang admitted to the mishap, blaming 'human error,' and promised 'immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Google has revealed a new project aimed at the scientific community. Called Palimpsest, the site research.google.com will play host to 'terabytes of open-source scientific datasets'. It was originally previewed for scientists last August . 'Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.'"

gattaca writes "A small Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction. The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder. 'If it sells, well, then we can come another day,' Joe Taylor said. 'This is very important to our continuing.'" Meanwhile, the much larger Creation Museum in Kentucky that we discussed and toured when it opened last year seems to be thriving.

Reservoir Hill writes "Pope Benedict XVI canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit to a secular setting by the head of the Catholic Church. Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the university's physics department joined in the call for the pope to stay away protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, seemed to justify the Inquisition's verdict against Galileo in 1633. In the speech, Ratzinger quoted an Austrian philosopher who said the ruling was 'rational and just' and concluded with the remark: 'The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation, and from being rooted in a still greater form of reason.' The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini who wrote the rector complaining of an 'incredible violation" of the university's autonomy. Cini said of Benedict's cancellation: 'By canceling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue.'"

Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn't include cloned sheep in the announcement, claiming a lack of data, though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly.) The article notes that a couple of major food suppliers have already decided not to use any products of cloning, and that the groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning. The FDA noted that their focus groups and other public input indicated that about 1/3 of US citizens do not want food from cloned animals under any circumstances; another 1/3 have no objections; and another 1/3 fall somewhere in between.

Hugh Pickens writes "Columnist Saul Hansell is hosting a debate about copyright issues and technology on his blog at the New York Times . On one side Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, says that anyone who is intellectually honest must 'acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world' and that we should be 'identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.' Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, responds that 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable' adding that locks may form a part of certain successful business models but 'too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire.' Wu and Cotton will respond to each other and to comments by readers today." As for the man on the street, Panaqqa wrote us with word that the Question Copyright site has posted an interesting video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. It's pretty clear that most people don't understand it at all.

The AP has a story on Netflix's move to head off expected competition from Apple: the company will lift limits on streaming its movies for most subscribers. The story reports on rumors of an Apple movie-download service that may be announced by Steve Jobs on Tuesday. In the past Netflix has imposed limits on how long its subscribers could watch streamed movies; for example, those who paid $16.99/mo. could stream up to 17 hours per month. The limits will end on Monday for most subscribers (except for those paying $4.99 for two DVD rentals a month, said to be a small minority). The company has 6,000 movies available for streaming, compared to 90,000 that you can get delivered in the mail.

Komi writes "Has anyone tackled the Traveling Salesman Problem with Google Maps or any other online mapping tool? I've searched, but can't find anything. To me this seems like such an obviously cool function. I'm not up to date on algorithms, so perhaps this isn't really tractable for large values of n. But for small numbers (maybe up to 5), this could at least be brute-forced. I would love to use this when I have errands to run, and I want an overall optimal route. So if this hasn't been done, someone please do it!"

An anonymous reader writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday that the commission will investigate complaints that Comcast actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data and to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber. While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year, in which reporters tested and verified the data blocking."

Gregor Stipicic writes "Cars that drive themselves — even parking at their destination — could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say. 'This is not science fiction,' Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview. GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said. He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018."

kRemit writes "The German hacker group Chaos Computer Club today sued the German State of Hessen to prevent the use of electronic voting machines (Google translation) in the upcoming elections on January 27. This comes as a follow-up to the Dutch initiative 'We don't trust voting machines,' which succeeded in banning the same type of voting machines in the Netherlands."

martyros writes "Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine are performing clinical trials of a vaccine that teaches the immune system to attack cocaine, preventing it from giving a high. The vaccine is made by attaching inactivated cocaine molecules to the outside of inactivated cholera proteins. When the immune system attacks the cholera proteins, it also 'learns' the cocaine molecules as well. The result is that the immune system 'recognizes the potent naked drug when it's ingested. The antibodies bind to the cocaine and prevent it from reaching the brain, where it normally would generate the highs that are so addictive.'" An earlier story from The Star notes that human trials for vaccines against both cocaine and nicotine are well under way.

Nathan Ramella writes "The ARCwelder project has released a technique dubbed 'Go Fighting Tabby!' which exploits an unquoted system() call through the Archos UI, providing the ability to execute arbitrary code with root access on the Archos 605 WiFi. In doing so, opening the platform up for further hacking. The Archos 605 WiFi runs embedded Linux on an ARM processor, but employs a variety of anti-hack techniques to keep users from modifying its firmware and operating system. Included is a cross-compiled sshd with configuration files to allow for passwordless ssh access to the Archos when it is connected to a WiFi connection. Bricks ahoy!"

An anonymous reader writes "NASA released part of a controversial study about air traffic safety Monday. The space agency spent $11 million on a survey of airline pilots. Agency officials were so disturbed by the findings that they intended to destroy the information rather than release it. But at an October congressional hearing, NASA administrator Michael Griffin changed tack and said the agency would release its findings. The research shows that safety problems occur far more often than previously recognized. NASA has been criticized however for not providing 'documentation on how to use its data, nor did it provide keys to unlock the cryptic codes used in the dataset.'"

Googling Yourself writes "Lifehacker has an interesting blog post on the 'Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About' that includes stalwarts like Google Trends and Google Alerts and a few others that may not be quite so familiar like Google Personals, Google's WYSIWYG web site creation tool, and Flight Simulator for Google Earth."

Googling Yourself writes "Lifehacker has an interesting blog post on the 'Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About' that includes stalwarts like Google Trends and Google Alerts and a few others that may not be quite so familiar like Google Personals, Google's WYSIWYG web site creation tool, and Flight Simulator for Google Earth."

theodp writes "Ready for one-automobile-per-child (OAPC)? India's giant Tata Group is on the verge of launching the world's cheapest car. The People's Car, slated to be unveiled January 10th at a New Delhi auto show, will carry a sticker price of 100,000 rupees ($2,500), which some analysts say could revolutionize automobile costs worldwide. The Tata is a pet project of Cornell-trained architect Ratan Tata, who helped design it. The vehicle is aimed at improving driving safety by getting India's masses off their motorbikes and into cars."

yali writes "The U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has issued new rules limiting travel with lithium batteries. As of January 1, no spare lithium batteries are allowed in checked luggage. Batteries carried in the cabin are subject to limitations on per-battery and total lithium content, and spare batteries must have the terminals covered. If you're returning home from the holidays with new toys, be sure to check out the new restrictions before you pack."

Fohootville, We Hate You writes "According to a new study, Internet advertisements work better than television advertisements. Internet video watchers were reported to be 47 percent more "engaged" by the advertising they watched than were traditional TV viewers. The report does not mention whether pornographic internet advertisements were included in the study."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Frustrated at the FTC's blessing of the Google/Doubleclick merger, Microsoft is complaining to the EU. Its latest filings detail how the merger would give Google a stranglehold on the advertising industry. While these complaints aren't new, the diagram [PDF] Microsoft created gives you an interesting look at the sort of competition Microsoft fears from Google."