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The transcripts (what was actually said including questions & answers) will probably be available in a couple of weeks at the Government Printing Office {check out Orrin Hatch's Judiciary Committee Hearing on Copyrights while you're there}

The submitted statements are available on the Committee's own page.

The hearing was broadcast on CapitolHearings, but they don't seem to offer archives. I ripped the stream & will post an Ogg Vorbis version soon, but the everyone must have woken up today & decided to surf porn 'cause the 16kbps stream over a well-tuned DSL connection was interrupted several times, some of which failed auto-retries (do I hate RealPlayer now?).

If anyone else has a stream rip, please post it. My favorite part is Hollings saying "son of a bitch" a couple minutes before the hearing starts. Yes, that microphone is on sir.

Did anyone else listen? I thought Eisner went off the deep end during the question & answer period. He wants to protect camcorder-at-the-movie -> DivX;-) movies from distribution (not just stuff with DRM). The Intel V.P. (who was very calm despite the verbal LSD flying around) said that wasn't possible, but I don't think he was considering the full totalitarian push. Consider a law requiring ISPs to NAT and dynamic-IP all users so no one can run a server unless registered (like guns) & authorized. All P2P traffic is illegal. The entire US is firewalled off from "rouge" nations. Sure, it sounds unlikely, but that's why Eisner sounded so wacked out. He really sounded like he either wanted the net to become cable TV or just be shut down entirely (Disney isn't making any money from abc.com or disney.com or go.com- what do they need the damned pirate club for anyway?)

You might think Eisner was talking about watermarking, but he wanted 90% of "pirate" traffic catchable. He's MORE concerned about a teenage projectionist inviting over his buddy who's dad has a 3-chip DV camcorder than DRM cracks. A 400x300 divx compress from a camcorder aimed at a screen is not going to preserve watermarks unless they really fuck up the quality. I think he's heading towards the RIAA "we want the right to snoop & crack those pirate sonofabitches" idea.

-M

1201a of the DMCA reads: ''(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that-- ''(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; ''(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or ''(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

It does not take a lawyer to know that bnetd is not a "circumvention device" under the DMCA, and by saying that the "pirates" "spoiled" it for the rest of legitimate users, they are even admitting that there are substantial legal uses and bnetd is not "primarily designed" to circumvent a copy prevention mechanism.

They wouldn't stand a chance if this went to court.

FCC Rules part 15.247 is the reference here. The reason we use DSSS encoding is that FHSS is limited to 0.125 watts in the 2.4 ghz band. 15.246(b)(2). The 5.725 ghz band allows 1 watt in most spread spectrum modes (802.11a/g?)

15.247 (b)(3)(i) allows high-gain directional point-point links. For every 3 db above 6 db gain, you have to reduce your peak output power by 1 db.

Of course, if you get a basic ham license, you can increase this quite a bit. However, you then cannot encrypt your traffic, IIRC.

The Post Office isn't some holy place, it's barely connected with the government, and hasn't received any tax dollars since Nixon. It's basically a private organization.

Sounds like government to me, warts and all.

The Post Office isn't some holy place, it's barely connected with the government, and hasn't received any tax dollars since Nixon. It's basically a private organization.

Sounds like government to me, warts and all.

No, its not refusing to buy exports from Ukraine, its imposing a 100% tariff. Read the actual release.

And the post to which I was replying indicated that we were refusing to allow them to buy goods ("deny a country supplies"), which is also incorrect. They can buy whatever they'd like, we're just imposing a very large tariff on what they export.

From the list of items covered by the sanctions

9903.27.01 Distillate and residual fuel oils 100% (including blended fuel oils) and wastes of distillate and residual fuel oils (whether or not blended) (provided for in subheading 2710.19.05, 2710.19.10,2710.99.05 or 2710.99.10)......

So not crude oil, like I implied, but oil nonetheless.

A little karma whoring going on:

Here is the junk fax law (47 USC 227). As jsmtng said, you could get at least $500 for each junk fax sent to you.

You do NOT have a right to take my work and plaster it all over the fucking internet.

True. Very true.

And that's what they're trying to stop. If stopping that means you can't make copies whenever you want, then that's just too bad...

Wrong. Very wrong. As a US citizen I'm subject to it's laws which grant me the right to make copies of legally obtained works whenever I want for limited purposes. See Title 17 of the US Code for more information. It's not "just too bad" if I can't, it's a violation of my civil liberties.

I've just finished college where I had a friend who insisted on photocopying the textbooks for all of his classes to avoid paying the (sometime outrageous) prices at the campus store. Is that legal? No. Could just about everyone at the university have done it? Yes. But of the 6000+ students at the school, I'm aware of very few (actually, only the one) that do this. If loads of college students, many of whom are living on tight budgets, don't try to cheat the system now despite how easy it is, then I doubt that many more people will try to cheat the system just because they can with ebooks.

Lack of DRM in ebooks most likely won't lead to a noticeable increase in the piracy of books. However, DRM that infringes on my rights as a US citizen (to make legal copies of a work for certain purposes or to resell the work) will stop me from purchasing a particular book. The inconveniences of DRM are likely to be more harmful to publishers than piracy of ebooks.

Copyright © 2001 Michael D. Crawford. Permission is granted to reproduce this document provided it is copied verbatim, in its entirety and that this copyright statement is preserved.

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.

I am not proud to be an American today. I understand well why people in many other countries hate America. I love America, but I despise what it is rapidly becoming.

Something must be done about this.

There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds.

Nancy Oden, one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, was traveling to a Green Party national meeting from her hometown airport in Bangor, Maine. She had published a statement that calls for Universal Health Care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to the bombing of Afghanistan.

When she got to the American Airlines ticket counter she was told that there was a record in AA's computer indicating that she should be searched anytime she tried to fly.

During the search, she tried to help the security agent with a stuck zipper. The agent grabbed her arm and she pulled it away. The National Guard instructed the airline not to let her fly. The airline told all the other airlines not to let her fly. She was unable to attend the Green Party meeting.

So an official of a registered political party in the supposedly democratic United States was prevented from participating in the political process because her name had been recorded in a computer as someone who should be treated with suspicion.

I fear what America has become.

Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.

From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft approved the eavesdropping rule on an emergency basis last week, without the usual waiting period for public comment. It went into effect immediately, permitting the government to monitor conversations and intercept mail between people in custody and their attorneys for up to a year at a time.

The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change. You can read about the guarantee of legal representation in our Constitution:

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

I don't have a URL to link you to ( mail me one), but I read that among the hundreds of "suspects" and "material witnesses" rounded up in the days after September 11, many were held without charge and some were beaten by their jailers. Also some were held without being given access to attorneys or their families. I thought that could not happen here...

The recently signed USA PATRIOT act is an assault on our civil liberties the likes of which have not been seen in decades.

Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act, which largely discusses the law's impact on online activities - did you know that the government can now spy on the key words you search for at search engines like Google and AltaVista? Because computer cracking is now considered terrorism, searching for exploitz can result in your lengthy imprisonment.

The truth is the first victim of war.

Shortly after the September 11th attacks, President Bush said something to the effect that the reason the U.S. was attacked was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and that we must fight the terrorists in order to preserve it.

But Osama bin Laden does not care either way about our freedom. He has made it very clear why he hates the U.S., and none of this has been acknowledged by any official statements that I have heard. What bin Laden objects to are the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy city of Mecca, U.S. support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians, and the continued U.S. bombing of Iraq. More than anything, he feels that the presence of U.S. troops in the Islamic Holy Land is a sacrilege.

Whatever your position is on bin Laden's objections to the U.S., you must agree that it is wrong for our President to lie to us. Get informed, and work to understand the complexities behind the enmity between the Islamic and Western world. It's not as simple as our government would have us believe.

You might be interested to know what the Pentagon is doing to improve the United States' image in the Islamic world. Well, I'll tell you. It has taken out a $400,000 contract with Madison Avenue public relations firm The Rendon Group in an effort to help it "orient to the challenge of communication to a wide range of groups around the world". In addition, former advertising executive Charlotte Beers has been apointed to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, a position she qualifies for because of her previous work promoting such products as Head & Shoulders shampoo.

Read about it in Propaganda Wars.

Well, its comforting to know that we'll be winning friends in Central Asia by showing professionally produced TV commercials depicting friendly Americans in between the news reports of mutilated and starving Afghani children.

If you, like myself, feel that something is wrong with America these days, or with whatever country you find yourself in, speak out about it.

In this troubled times, speaking openly to inform others of injustice or to protest may result in a backlash against you from government officials or others. Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind. Have courage - it is only by having the courage to speak and to work against injustice that we can prevent it from getting a lot worse.

Among the ways you can speak out

• Participate in online communities
• Send email to people you know
• Write web pages like this one and post the URL around
• Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers
• Staple leaflets to bulletin boards in your community
• Pass out leaflets in public places
• Call in to talk radio shows

Secondly, participate in what we have left of the democratic process. Our government has at least the appearance of having been elected, and the easiest way to make a change is to vote out the ones who have brought this upon us.

• Volunteer for political candidates you believe in
• Get a bunch of voter registration cards and stand in a public place to register voters
• Donate money to political candidates and parties who respect civil liberties
• Vote
• Write letters to your elected representatives. While you can send email, Congress gets so much spam that they pretty much ignore email these days. Instead, you can find your Congressperson's postal address at www.congress.org - write them a paper letter.

Use encryption to protect your privacy. Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.

You can get encryption software for free - you can use either Pretty Good Privacy or The GNU Privacy Guard. Both offer excellent, military strength protection of your data, and the source code to each is freely available so that programmers are able to inspect it for security defects and back doors.

Teach the people you correspond with to use encryption.

Teach people who work for political change to use encryption. If you don't think political candidates and their staff need to use encryption, you're too young to remember Nixon's Plumbers getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the Democratic National Committe.

Join organizations that work to protect civil liberties. Among these are:

• The American Civil Liberties Union - Join Here
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation - Join Here - the EFF works to protect our civil liberties in the online world, including working to ensure that the work of computer programmers is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring you access to software that guards your security and privacy.
• The Center for Democracy and Technology - Get Involved - working "to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age"
• The Electronic Privacy Information Center - Donate Here - "established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.

One might think, and one certainly hopes, that the ultimate safeguard against these threats to our civil liberties lies with the Supreme Court of the United States. But I am not so certain myself. The Supreme Court has ruled against the dictates of law and the Constitution during other troubled periods in our nation's history.

And we should remember that the current President received a minority of the popular vote and was only declared to have a majority of the Electoral Vote after an obviously politically motivated ruling by the Supreme Court, a decision that has few pretenses of being based on the rule of law. Even had all the ballots been counted, enough Black Florida citizens were prevented from going to the polls that the election would clearly have gone for Gore had they been allowed to exercise their right to vote.

As said in the dissenting opinion by Justices Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer in Bush v. Gore (note - this is an Adobe Acrobat document):

What must underlie petitioners' (nb. - George W. Bush') entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

We must work together to restore the rule of law in our country - or we shall surely suffer for it. If you do not agree that Fascism can arise in the United States, take heed of the fact that Adolf Hitler was elected as the leader of his country too.

November 12, 2001

Disclaimer: I'm not an RF engineer, but I have worked with several in attempting to obtain an AM broadcast license for our college radio station a few years back. Take it for what you will, and understand that the FCC *probably* won't come after you unless people complain. But, if people complain, you can expect them to triangulate your position, take your equipment, and fine you heavily.

rm3friskerFTN replies: Congress did declare war (grin)... Authorization for Use of Military Force

danheskett wrote: Any action that the US Government takes - to any other nation or any civilian or any citizen must be preceeded and anteceded with due process.

rm3friskerFTN replies: UN Security Council Resolution 1373 authorized this and other measures.

danheskett wrote: Due process is deserved by all.

rm3friskerFTN replies: Funny ... Joe Terrorist is found with a suitcase nuke in his apartment. Ooops ... he can't be sent to jail because it was discovered by the authorities without a search warrant. Joe Terrorist must be set free. IANAL, but I understand that in legal circles there is a Latin expression for this meaning "in war the law is silent regarding liberties"

Public Law 107-40: Authorization for Use of Military Force

Find your local Federal Depository - the 1,350 libraries that they are asking (telling? ordering?) to destroy documents.

Go talk to the librarians, ask their opinions, voice your opinion, read some documents, see how or if they are actually disposing of them, etc.
I wonder how long it is before we can no longer access this list.

Find your local Federal Depository - the 1,350 libraries that they are asking (telling? ordering?) to destroy documents.

Go talk to the librarians, ask their opinions, voice your opinion, read some documents, see how or if they are actually disposing of them, etc.
I wonder how long it is before we can no longer access this list.

It's rough. The US Code is online, but it's a miserable read. Find it here: www.access.gpo.gov/congress/cong013.html.

Laws in progress (and insane shit that thankfully never makes it into law) can be found at thomas.loc.gov.

Too many hours browsing this shit will drive you crazy, make you want to move to Belgium. :-)

You won't see many secure IM clients unless they were written outside the US. I wrote a secure peer2peer instant messaging client, i.e. you connect directly to your buddy instead of going through someone's server. The program Blowfish encrypts all IMs, supports variable bit-length keys between 32 and 448 bits, and allows the conversants to change the key at any time by setting a new password. Good luck eavesdropping!

Now, all that said, have you ever tried to get a program like this approved by the US government? I've spent hours poring over the BXA website, as well as the GPO's archive of EAR regulations, trying to figure out exactly what license exception I should apply for. After all the reading and research I've done, I've gotten nowhere. I sent an inquiry to the BXA's crypto folks and haven't heard back. I looked in Usenet and found twenty different answers. I did see it mentioned that if I release the program as open source I don't even have to get it licensed, but I couldn't verify that at BXA's site.

From what I gather, if I want to distribute the program I'd probably have to set a fixed key, or at the very least cap the key length at 160 bits. Then I'd have to apply under one of several license exception categories, though I don't know which; and if you apply for the wrong one, oops, sorry, you wasted your time documenting how your program meets the EAR requirements. Supposing I managed to apply properly, I may have to wait 30 days before making the program available; meanwhile my spec (and perhaps source code) is in someone else's hands.

$DEITY forbid I want to charge a shareware fee for the program, then I have to figure out whether it's classified as ENC Retail, ENC Non-Retail, etc. Or if I have the arms-trafficking gall to try and distribute the program with 448 bit capability - assuming that was approved, mind you - I'd have to implement some method of checking the IP address of each potential downloader to make sure they're inside the US... And then what happens if someone's using a proxy?

All in all I don't have the time to deal with this shit. And so I gave up (I get the feeling this is exactly what the whole mess is meant to encourage). I've given the program to some friends whom I can personally vouch for as US residents. Other than those few people, it'll probably never see the light of day. Unfortunate, but I wouldn't say it's the Big IM Players' fault that secure IM clients aren't taking off. They'd be everywhere if it wasn't such a hassle.

(BTW if anyone has had success getting a Blowfish program licensed for export, please reply with your secret!)

Shaun

If your NIH facility processes DOD classified information then you are subject to search upon exiting the facility according to 32CFR159a.39

The Atomic Energy Act of 1939 (I think) applies to those who who work in a facility with DOE classified information.

If there is no such information at your facility, there may be some other justification or it could be that the searches are being done under the guise of good old fashioned paranoia which might not be legal.

5% of the federal budget????

The shuttle's estimated annual cost is 2.98 billion according to nasa (for the year 2000). 1999 total budget outlays were 1.7 Trillion dollars according to government records. So in reality the shuttle program is roughly 1/10th of 1 percent of the entire federal budget. Now if you took the total budget of NASA for 2001 it comes to approximately 14 billion according to NASA.
If you take that number the budget is still a mere 4/5ths of 1 percent of the overall budget.

It's merely a drop in the bucket in the grand schem of things, and frankly we've gained a lot from having it. We've gained amazing advances in materials science, aeronautics, and life sciences. Also, where would be without Tang?!? So if you're gonna try to save money, how about finding something truely useless to cut.

Well, the draft isn't constitutional...

As recently as June, 1981, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the draft and found that "Congress acted well within its constitutional authority to raise and regulate armies and navies" under Article I, Section 8.

In ruling on the draft for World War I, the Supreme Court said: ``As we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement."

The presumption here is that the draft is a noble duty, not servitude. Somewhere in there might be the basis for ID cards: carrying them is a duty like paying taxes, not an invasion of privacy.

Still, the police need probably cause to stop a citizen and demand identification. I can't see how carrying the ID card would give the police any greater powers to demand to see it.

CFR 21:11 , the Code of Federal Regulations, goes through this fully. In order to be "validated" as the real person, you must hold at least two of three key pieces of information:

1. Something you have: A keycard, a physcal key, an iButton
2. Something you know: A password, passphrase, memorized key
3. Something you are: Iris scan, fingerprint, voice, some other biometric.

1. Truly that person to which the biometric belongs, or
2. A conspirator, working with that person, since you cannot have obtained the second piece of information without consent from the holder

This is how our Federal Government looks at it anyway.

Biometrics have come a long way, and contrary to popular belief, this fingerprint-style technology does not compare a "picture" of your finger. It measures datapoints (the FingerChip for example, measures many more datapoints than most biometric scanners, and is a fraction of the size).

The "retraining" you have to do is so that your "personality" is measured as one of the datapoints. If this was a signature capture biometric, it would measure whether or not you dot your "i" before your words are finished, or after. That "personality" is set in the equation as part of the measurement. This is why even if you have someone's signature on paper, and can replicate it perfectly freehand, a good biometric will rule it out, since the "personality" (speed to write, dot i's first/last, etc.) will certainly not match.

Congress has passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (local) against Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and others. A military deployment has begun. Russians think we will have a Sea of Bloodshed and others have said this will be worse than Vietnam. Frankly, I'm scared. This may be highly tacky; but I would like to know what kind of military devices we may have that would be both effective against terrorists and yet accurate (not like the gulf war) enough to avoid innocent casualties. And what about those ten million mines?

I searched in the 2001 Congressional Record for any speeches made by Judd Gregg on Thursday, September 13th. (query was "GREGG AND ENCRYPTION")

Here is the entire speech, selected from the matching page.
I have bolded the snippets used in the Wired article.

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I thank the chairman for yielding to me.
I appreciate his courtesy in my arriving in the Chamber a little late
for the beginning of this work, as a group of us were in a meeting on
how we are going to handle this bill and move it along, I hope.
I congratulate the chairman of the committee for this bill, which is
a soothsayer bill really. Long before the events of the day before
yesterday, which were so horrific and which reflected the threat of
terrorism to our Nation, our committee aggressively pursued the issue
of how to try to prepare for such an act.
We have held innumerable hearings over the last 4 or 5 years. One of
the lines that has flowed through all those hearings has been the fact
that our intelligence community--our communities focused on domestic
intelligence and our communities focused on international
intelligence--had concluded that it was more than likely, it was a
probability, that a terrorist event would occur in the United States
and that it would be of significant proportions. And it has occurred.
How have we tried to ready for this? Well, a lot of the response you
saw in New York--which has been overwhelming and incredibly
professional, and heroic beyond description, which has taken the lives
of many firefighters and police officers and just citizens who went to
help--a lot of that response was coordinated as a result of initiatives
that came out of the hearing process, and the question of first
responder, and how we get the people who are first there up to speed as
to how to handle this type of event. So in that area at least there has
been some solace.
But the real issue remains, How do you deal with an enemy who, as the
chairman just related, is willing to give their life to make their
point and who has, as their source of support, religious fervor, in
most instances--and I suspect this is going to be proved true
in this instance--a religious fervor which gives them a community of
support and praise which causes them to be willing to proceed in the
way that they did, which is to use their life to take other innocent
lives?
First, how do you identify those individuals because they function as
a fairly small-knit group, and it is mostly familial. It involves
families. It involves sects which are very insular and very hard to
penetrate.
But equally important, when you are trying to deal with that type of
a personality and that type of a culture, which basically seeks
martyrdom as its cause, as its purpose for life, and sees martyrdom as
part of its process for getting to an afterlife in terms of their
religious belief--how do you deal with that culture and group of
individuals without creating more problems, without creating more
people who are willing to take up the banner of hatred and willing to
pursue and use their life in a way to aggravate the situation?
I think we as a committee have concluded that the first thing you
have to do is have a huge new commitment to intelligence. And we have
made this point. We have dramatically expanded the overseas efforts of
the FBI as an outreach of this effort. But it involves more than that.
We have to set aside our natural inclination as a democracy to limit
the type of people we deal with in the area of human intelligence.
Unfortunately, the CIA in the 1990s was essentially limited and
defanged, for all intents and purposes, in the area of human
intelligence gathering because the directives and the policies did not
allow us, as a nation, to direct our key intelligence community to
basically go out and employ and use people who were individuals who
could give us the information we needed. Because of our reticence as a
democracy to use people who themselves may be violent and criminal, we
found ourselves basically sightless when it came to individual
intelligence.
So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what I
think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is, we are, as
a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive in the use
of human intelligence, and we are going to have to allow our agencies
in the international community to be more aggressive.
Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural
inclination and our very legitimate rules relative to search and
seizure and invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our
intelligence communities the technical capability necessary to address
specifically encoding mechanisms.
The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming. I
asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of the FBI--
and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect this
response at all--what was the most significant problem the FBI faced as
they went forward. He pretty much said it was the encryption capability
of the people who have an intention to hurt America, whether it
happened to be the drug lords or whether it happened to be terrorist
activity.
It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes because
of our sophistication. This has always been something in which we, as a
nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies that are dedicated to
it. But the quantum leap that has occurred in the past to encrypt
information--just from telephone conversation to telephone
conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten to a point where even
our most sophisticated capability runs into very serious limitations.

So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need to have
the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the inventive
community in the Western World and in Asia in the area of electronics.
These are folks who have as much risk as we have as a nation, and they
should understand, as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation
to allow us to have, under the scrutiny of the search and seizure
clauses, which still require that you have an adequate probable cause
and that you have court oversight--under that scrutiny, to have our
people have the technical capability to get the keys to the basic
encryption activity.
This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The
manufacturing sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has
been for a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact
is, this is something on which we need international cooperation and on
which we need to have movement in order to get the information that
allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred in New York
and Washington.
The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is to have
the information beforehand as to who is committing the act and their
targets. And there are two key ways you do that. One is through people
on the ground, on which we need to substantially increase the effort--
and this bill attempts to do that in many ways through the FBI--and the
other way is through having the technical capability to intercept the
communications activities and to track the various funding activities
of the organizations. That requires the cooperation of the commercial
world and the people who are active in the commercial world. That call
must go forth, in my opinion.

Another thing this bill does, which is extremely positive and which,
again, regrettably anticipated the event, is to say that within our own
Federal Government we are not doing a very good job of coordinating our
exercise.
There are 42 different agencies that are responsible for intelligence
activity and for counterterrorism activity. They overlap in
responsibility. In many instances, they compete in responsibility.
Turf is the most significant inhibitor of effective Federal action
between agencies. Although there is a sincere effort to avoid turf, and
in my opinion, in working with a lot of these agencies, I have been
incredibly impressed by a willingness of the various leaders of these
agencies, both under the Clinton administration and under the Bush
administration, to set aside this endemic problem of protection of
one's prerogatives and allow parties to communicate across agency lines
and to put aside the stovepipes. Even though there is that commitment,
the systems do not allow it to occur in many instances.
This bill, under the leadership of the chairman, includes language
which has attempted to bring more focus and structure into the cross-
agency activities. One of the specific proposals in the bill, which may
not be the last approach taken and probably won't be but is an attempt
to move the issue down the field, is to set up a Deputy Attorney
General whose purpose is to oversee counterterrorism activity and
coordinate it across agencies and who is the repository of the
authority to do that. There is no such person today in the Federal
Government. Of these 42 agencies, everybody reports to their own agency
head. Nobody reports across agency lines. There is virtually no one who
can stand up and say, other than the President, ``get this done.''
The purpose of the Deputy Attorney General is to accomplish that, at
least within the law enforcement area and within much of the
consequence manager's area, especially the crime area, although it is
understood that this individual will work in concert with the head of
FEMA, the purpose of which is to actually manage the disaster relief
efforts that occur as a result of an event such as New York or where
you have these huge efforts committed.
That type of coordination is so critical. Would it have abated the
New York and Washington situation? No, it wouldn't have. But can it, in
anticipation of the next event, because this is not an isolated event.
Regrettably, whether we like it or not, we are in a continuum of
confrontation here.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not one or two people but rather a
culture that sees this as an expression of the way they deliver their
message for life, or after life for that matter. Regrettably, we have
to be ready for the potential of another event.
I do believe this type of centralizing of decision, centralizing
authority, centralizing the budget responsibility is absolutely
critical to getting the Federal Government into an orderly set of
activities or orderly set of approaches.
Just take a single example. If you happen to be a police officer in
Epping, NH, and you have a sense that you notice something that isn't
right, you know it isn't necessarily criminal but you think there is
something wrong, something that might just, because of your intuition
as an officer or your
knowledge as an officer, might need to be reported, you can call your
State police or you can call the FBI or you can call the U.S. attorney,
but there really is no central clearinghouse for knowledge. There is no
one-stop shopping. If you as a fire chief want to get ready in Epping,
NH, for an event, you don't have a place to go for that one-stop
shopping where you can find out how you train your people, where they
go for training, what your support capabilities are going to be, who is
going to support you. This should exist within the Federal Government.
It does not. This is an attempt to try to get some of that into a form
that will be effective and responsive to people.

Of course, when you get to the end of the line--we have talked about
all the technical things we can do as a government and all the
important things we can do to try to restructure ourselves and commit
the resources in order to improve our capacity to address this, but in
the end it comes down to a commitment of our people, understanding that
we are confronting a fundamental evil, an evil of proportions equal to
any that we have confronted as a nation, and that we as a nation cannot
allow those who are behind this evil to undermine our way of life and
our commitment to democracy.
We must make every effort, leave no stone unturned--regrettably,
these people live under stones to a large degree--to find these people
who are responsible and to bring them to justice. But we also must make
every effort to recognize that in doing that, we cannot allow them to
win by losing our basic rights and the commitment to openness as a
society and a democracy. Then they would be successful, if we were to
do that.
So as we rededicate ourselves, as we all continue to see the image of
those buildings collapsing and the horror that followed--and we all
obviously want retribution and we are all angered by it--we have to
react in the context of a democracy. We have to pursue this in the
context of what has made us great, which is that we are a people who
unite when we confront such a threat. We unite and we focus our
energies on defeating that threat. But we don't allow that threat to
win by undermining our basic rights and our openness as a society.
In summary, I appreciate all the efforts of the chairman of the
committee to bring forward a bill which, regrettably, understood that
this type of event could occur and attempted to address it even before
it did. Now I think it is important we pass this legislation. It does
empower key agencies within the Government who have a responsibility to
address the issue of counterterrorism not only with the dollars but
with the policies they need in order to be more successful in their
efforts.
There is still a great deal to do. There is still a lot of changes we
need to make, a lot of changes in the law we should make in order to
empower these agencies to be even more effective. Certainly there is
going to be a great deal more funds that have to be committed than what
are in this bill in order to give these agencies--the FBI and the State
Department--the resources they need to be strong and be successful in
pursuing the people who committed this horrific act and in protecting
Americans around the world and especially protecting our freedoms and
liberties here in the United States.
This bill is clearly a step in the right direction. I congratulate
the chairman for bringing it forward.

I searched in the 2001 Congressional Record for any speeches made by Judd Gregg on Thursday, September 13th. (query was "GREGG AND ENCRYPTION")

Here is the entire speech, selected from the matching page.
I have bolded the snippets used in the Wired article.

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I thank the chairman for yielding to me.
I appreciate his courtesy in my arriving in the Chamber a little late
for the beginning of this work, as a group of us were in a meeting on
how we are going to handle this bill and move it along, I hope.
I congratulate the chairman of the committee for this bill, which is
a soothsayer bill really. Long before the events of the day before
yesterday, which were so horrific and which reflected the threat of
terrorism to our Nation, our committee aggressively pursued the issue
of how to try to prepare for such an act.
We have held innumerable hearings over the last 4 or 5 years. One of
the lines that has flowed through all those hearings has been the fact
that our intelligence community--our communities focused on domestic
intelligence and our communities focused on international
intelligence--had concluded that it was more than likely, it was a
probability, that a terrorist event would occur in the United States
and that it would be of significant proportions. And it has occurred.
How have we tried to ready for this? Well, a lot of the response you
saw in New York--which has been overwhelming and incredibly
professional, and heroic beyond description, which has taken the lives
of many firefighters and police officers and just citizens who went to
help--a lot of that response was coordinated as a result of initiatives
that came out of the hearing process, and the question of first
responder, and how we get the people who are first there up to speed as
to how to handle this type of event. So in that area at least there has
been some solace.
But the real issue remains, How do you deal with an enemy who, as the
chairman just related, is willing to give their life to make their
point and who has, as their source of support, religious fervor, in
most instances--and I suspect this is going to be proved true
in this instance--a religious fervor which gives them a community of
support and praise which causes them to be willing to proceed in the
way that they did, which is to use their life to take other innocent
lives?
First, how do you identify those individuals because they function as
a fairly small-knit group, and it is mostly familial. It involves
families. It involves sects which are very insular and very hard to
penetrate.
But equally important, when you are trying to deal with that type of
a personality and that type of a culture, which basically seeks
martyrdom as its cause, as its purpose for life, and sees martyrdom as
part of its process for getting to an afterlife in terms of their
religious belief--how do you deal with that culture and group of
individuals without creating more problems, without creating more
people who are willing to take up the banner of hatred and willing to
pursue and use their life in a way to aggravate the situation?
I think we as a committee have concluded that the first thing you
have to do is have a huge new commitment to intelligence. And we have
made this point. We have dramatically expanded the overseas efforts of
the FBI as an outreach of this effort. But it involves more than that.
We have to set aside our natural inclination as a democracy to limit
the type of people we deal with in the area of human intelligence.
Unfortunately, the CIA in the 1990s was essentially limited and
defanged, for all intents and purposes, in the area of human
intelligence gathering because the directives and the policies did not
allow us, as a nation, to direct our key intelligence community to
basically go out and employ and use people who were individuals who
could give us the information we needed. Because of our reticence as a
democracy to use people who themselves may be violent and criminal, we
found ourselves basically sightless when it came to individual
intelligence.
So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what I
think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is, we are, as
a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive in the use
of human intelligence, and we are going to have to allow our agencies
in the international community to be more aggressive.
Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural
inclination and our very legitimate rules relative to search and
seizure and invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our
intelligence communities the technical capability necessary to address
specifically encoding mechanisms.
The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming. I
asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of the FBI--
and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect this
response at all--what was the most significant problem the FBI faced as
they went forward. He pretty much said it was the encryption capability
of the people who have an intention to hurt America, whether it
happened to be the drug lords or whether it happened to be terrorist
activity.
It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes because
of our sophistication. This has always been something in which we, as a
nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies that are dedicated to
it. But the quantum leap that has occurred in the past to encrypt
information--just from telephone conversation to telephone
conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten to a point where even
our most sophisticated capability runs into very serious limitations.

So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need to have
the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the inventive
community in the Western World and in Asia in the area of electronics.
These are folks who have as much risk as we have as a nation, and they
should understand, as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation
to allow us to have, under the scrutiny of the search and seizure
clauses, which still require that you have an adequate probable cause
and that you have court oversight--under that scrutiny, to have our
people have the technical capability to get the keys to the basic
encryption activity.
This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The
manufacturing sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has
been for a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact
is, this is something on which we need international cooperation and on
which we need to have movement in order to get the information that
allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred in New York
and Washington.
The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is to have
the information beforehand as to who is committing the act and their
targets. And there are two key ways you do that. One is through people
on the ground, on which we need to substantially increase the effort--
and this bill attempts to do that in many ways through the FBI--and the
other way is through having the technical capability to intercept the
communications activities and to track the various funding activities
of the organizations. That requires the cooperation of the commercial
world and the people who are active in the commercial world. That call
must go forth, in my opinion.

Another thing this bill does, which is extremely positive and which,
again, regrettably anticipated the event, is to say that within our own
Federal Government we are not doing a very good job of coordinating our
exercise.
There are 42 different agencies that are responsible for intelligence
activity and for counterterrorism activity. They overlap in
responsibility. In many instances, they compete in responsibility.
Turf is the most significant inhibitor of effective Federal action
between agencies. Although there is a sincere effort to avoid turf, and
in my opinion, in working with a lot of these agencies, I have been
incredibly impressed by a willingness of the various leaders of these
agencies, both under the Clinton administration and under the Bush
administration, to set aside this endemic problem of protection of
one's prerogatives and allow parties to communicate across agency lines
and to put aside the stovepipes. Even though there is that commitment,
the systems do not allow it to occur in many instances.
This bill, under the leadership of the chairman, includes language
which has attempted to bring more focus and structure into the cross-
agency activities. One of the specific proposals in the bill, which may
not be the last approach taken and probably won't be but is an attempt
to move the issue down the field, is to set up a Deputy Attorney
General whose purpose is to oversee counterterrorism activity and
coordinate it across agencies and who is the repository of the
authority to do that. There is no such person today in the Federal
Government. Of these 42 agencies, everybody reports to their own agency
head. Nobody reports across agency lines. There is virtually no one who
can stand up and say, other than the President, ``get this done.''
The purpose of the Deputy Attorney General is to accomplish that, at
least within the law enforcement area and within much of the
consequence manager's area, especially the crime area, although it is
understood that this individual will work in concert with the head of
FEMA, the purpose of which is to actually manage the disaster relief
efforts that occur as a result of an event such as New York or where
you have these huge efforts committed.
That type of coordination is so critical. Would it have abated the
New York and Washington situation? No, it wouldn't have. But can it, in
anticipation of the next event, because this is not an isolated event.
Regrettably, whether we like it or not, we are in a continuum of
confrontation here.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not one or two people but rather a
culture that sees this as an expression of the way they deliver their
message for life, or after life for that matter. Regrettably, we have
to be ready for the potential of another event.
I do believe this type of centralizing of decision, centralizing
authority, centralizing the budget responsibility is absolutely
critical to getting the Federal Government into an orderly set of
activities or orderly set of approaches.
Just take a single example. If you happen to be a police officer in
Epping, NH, and you have a sense that you notice something that isn't
right, you know it isn't necessarily criminal but you think there is
something wrong, something that might just, because of your intuition
as an officer or your
knowledge as an officer, might need to be reported, you can call your
State police or you can call the FBI or you can call the U.S. attorney,
but there really is no central clearinghouse for knowledge. There is no
one-stop shopping. If you as a fire chief want to get ready in Epping,
NH, for an event, you don't have a place to go for that one-stop
shopping where you can find out how you train your people, where they
go for training, what your support capabilities are going to be, who is
going to support you. This should exist within the Federal Government.
It does not. This is an attempt to try to get some of that into a form
that will be effective and responsive to people.

Of course, when you get to the end of the line--we have talked about
all the technical things we can do as a government and all the
important things we can do to try to restructure ourselves and commit
the resources in order to improve our capacity to address this, but in
the end it comes down to a commitment of our people, understanding that
we are confronting a fundamental evil, an evil of proportions equal to
any that we have confronted as a nation, and that we as a nation cannot
allow those who are behind this evil to undermine our way of life and
our commitment to democracy.
We must make every effort, leave no stone unturned--regrettably,
these people live under stones to a large degree--to find these people
who are responsible and to bring them to justice. But we also must make
every effort to recognize that in doing that, we cannot allow them to
win by losing our basic rights and the commitment to openness as a
society and a democracy. Then they would be successful, if we were to
do that.
So as we rededicate ourselves, as we all continue to see the image of
those buildings collapsing and the horror that followed--and we all
obviously want retribution and we are all angered by it--we have to
react in the context of a democracy. We have to pursue this in the
context of what has made us great, which is that we are a people who
unite when we confront such a threat. We unite and we focus our
energies on defeating that threat. But we don't allow that threat to
win by undermining our basic rights and our openness as a society.
In summary, I appreciate all the efforts of the chairman of the
committee to bring forward a bill which, regrettably, understood that
this type of event could occur and attempted to address it even before
it did. Now I think it is important we pass this legislation. It does
empower key agencies within the Government who have a responsibility to
address the issue of counterterrorism not only with the dollars but
with the policies they need in order to be more successful in their
efforts.
There is still a great deal to do. There is still a lot of changes we
need to make, a lot of changes in the law we should make in order to
empower these agencies to be even more effective. Certainly there is
going to be a great deal more funds that have to be committed than what
are in this bill in order to give these agencies--the FBI and the State
Department--the resources they need to be strong and be successful in
pursuing the people who committed this horrific act and in protecting
Americans around the world and especially protecting our freedoms and
liberties here in the United States.
This bill is clearly a step in the right direction. I congratulate
the chairman for bringing it forward.

The word "emissions" refers to RF--specifically electromagnetic interference (EMI) only...not to ESD. See CFR Title 47, part 15, section 3: Radio Frequency devices and read the section on class B devices.

ESD is a big problem. The telecom industry has had to struggle with it for years (decades!). It's about time consumer electronics companies (and the circuit and firmware designers that work for them) make better efforts to deal with ESD. This is a wake up call.

Illegal modifications?

By whose definition?

CFR 47, 15.247 defines maximum peak power, among other things (such as the frequency hopping intervals, occupied bandwidth, etc).

FCC rules do NOT specify that you must use the antennas supplied with the system.

Quite specifically, in fact, the rules leave the choice of antenna to the user... within specified limits.

May I suggest that you read the actual rules before making such a general comment? Here's the link:

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/get-cfr.cg i?TITLE=47&PART=15&SECTION=247&YEAR=2000&TYPE=TEXT

I vaugely remember the copyright issue you mentioned. I doubt copyright issues will prevent the government from publishing it's own laws. At least, I really hope that's the case.

If the prosecution could prove that Ferguson was directly involved in the "illegal" attack, thats true. Otherwise, he would probably be protected by the DMCA protections for people performing "encryption research". Even if their success does encourage similar "illegal" attacks, the researcher is (presumably) protected. There are several requirements for the research protection, one being that the researcher notifies the company, another being that they act in good faith. It's reasonable to say that Ferguson has done these things at this point.

PS Here's a pointer to the DMCA text (although a search on Findlaw will probably get you there as well. For those who haven't read it, it's quite a trip. Remember that this document might well be copyrighted as well!)

For those of you who have been elsewhere for the past few months, you can check out the following page on the subject at the EFF. Another page has a link to the act, in PDF.

Voting records as well as the complete text are in the Congressional Record, the full text of which is available over the net...one link is here (check year 1998, subject "copyright") The bottom line is that the votes in both House and Senate were essentially unanimous. There was remarkably little discussion on the obvious conflict of the bills (HR. 2281, S. 2037) with the First Amendment, even from those who normally support individual freedoms over government regulation. In fact, quite a number of speeches implied that the DMCA was somehow a key part of defending the freedom of speech. Now that we've seen it actually implemented, it seems pretty clear that the true intent was quite different.

Perhaps it would be useful to actually read the DMCA. There is a lot of good info in there.

Is there irony in an Adobe PDF version of the DMCA?

What one has to realize is that Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins to be tested and treated. Because it's affiliated with a University, it's a "research hospital," which means that above and beyond the current standard of care, patients should expect that the attendees and physicians also perform research on the side. Now this fact does not condone the conduct of the physician(s) who sent off her cells for culturing without the proper consent (assuming that he or she didn't get consent, because I'm not quite sure if that was the case--this was a research hospital after all). Because the incident occurred in the 1950's, you can be sure that the rules and regulations were not in place and this sort of conduct was probably acceptable. Moreover, the doctor-patient relationship then was nothing like the doctor-patient relationship now. Doctors then were viewed as "doctor knows best," whereas now, patients have the upper hand. I've only merely addressed the issue of patient/subject consent. The whole issue of proper compensation is a whole different subject. At which point can she claim that the cells are her's or is it public domain? Her cancerous cells would have been no use to her unless she had the facilities and the knowledge to keep them cultured and happy.

To learn more about the OHRP and human subject research and consent:

• OHRP

• Current FDA regulations (21 CFR 50)

P.S. The "21 CFR 50" only covers research done using chemical/biological agents that will eventually need FDA approval. Imagine the hundreds and thousands of other types of human research that doesn't involve the use of drugs and these agents--hence the type of research that is not federally regulated!

Anyways, the bill seems meaningless in terms of adding additional protection for school computers. The biggest difference from the original bill is actually a change in language from:

"whoever...intentionally causes damage without authorization" [subsec. (a) paragraph (5.A)] and "whoever...recklessly causes damage" [subsec. (a) paragraph (5.B)] to:

"whoever...intentionally affects or impairs without authorization".

IANAL, but it seems to be there's a big difference between "causes damage" and "affects or impairs", considering ANYTHING one does to a computer affects the computer. And in a way, any program you run on a computer "impairs" the computer's ability to do other things (as quickly, say).

Network Security Tools and Services

Rapid 7, Inc.

Indeed, the proponents of DMCA made precisely this argument: "we can't put a fair use provision into this statute because if we did, it would be treated under the Copyright Clause."

• Title I is called the "WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act of 1998"?
• Title II is called the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act"?
• Title III "creates an exemption for making a copy of a computer program by activating a computer for purposes of maintenance or repair", according to the report and summary of the Office of Copyright in the Library of Congress?
• "Title IV contains six miscellaneous provisions, relating to the functions of the Copyright Office, distance education, the exceptions in the Copyright Act for libraries and for making ephemeral recordings, "webcasting" of sound recordings on the Internet, and the applicability of collective bargaining agreement obligations in the case of transfers of rights in motion pictures."? (same source)

Do you really think any competent, impartial judge is going to buy an argument that the DMCA is not a copyright law and therefore authorized by the Copyright Clause?

I think the protests should continue, but the target should widen.

Instead of focussing on Adobe, protest against the DOJ and the DMCA.

The DMCA. Not the DCMA. Many Slashdotters get the acronym wrong, and it bugs me all to hell... it's the Digital Millennium Copyright, not the Digital Copyright Millennium. Sheesh.

Thing about Adobe, is... if they were to have somebody else arrested, they'd lose the PR boost dropping the complaint against Dmitry has gotten them. IOW, they'd look like a bunch of lying bastards.

German lawyers? Oh, they're just renegades, nothing to do with us.

Sklyarov? Oh, we were just trying to get the cracking software out of the U.S., we didn't really want him to rot in jail.

Then they arrest somebody else. Hacker X? Oh, um... :)

Because it was passed on a voice vote of those present. There is no record of either who was present at the vote (other than "a quorum"), or who voted for it (other than "a majority of the quorum").

Yes, this sucks.

After a little clicking around I did find the following:

The House Journal records the deed thusly:

para.109.22 wpo copyright treaties implementation

[...]

The SPEAKER pro tempore, Mrs. EMERSON, recognized Mr. COBLE and Ms. JACKSON-LEE, each for 20 minutes.

After debate,

The question being put, viva voce,

Will the House suspend the rules and agree to said conference report?

The SPEAKER pro tempore, Mrs. EMERSON, announced that two-thirds of the Members present had voted in the affirmative.

So, two-thirds of the Members present having voted in favor thereof, the rules were suspended and said conference report was agreed to.

A motion to reconsider the vote whereby the rules were suspended and said conference report was agreed to was passed was, by unanimous consent, laid on the table.

Ordered, That the Clerk notify the Senate thereof.

For the Senate I have not even found that much. Thomas (the Library of Congress) simply says, "Senate agreed to conference report by Unanimous Consent".

I guess we have to hold them all responsible for voting it into law since we can't single them out. (This would have been the 105th Congress BTW.)

The sponsor of the bill is listed as Howard Coble. Co-sponsors are Howard L Berman, Sonny Bono, Barney Frank, Bill McCollum, Charles Pickering, Mary Bono, John Conyers Jr., Henry J. Hyde, and Bill Paxton. Needless to say, if any of these are running for office in your jurisdiction I urge you to not vote for them.

As for Win2k being the Benz of the OS world, I don't really think there a Benz of the OS world. For example I own a Radeon and have horendous Win2k gaming performance and it doesn't run all of my legacy programs. Therefore I get my kicks in ME. I would never consider linux the Mercedes of the OS world, it does have its uses like Win and is perfectly suited for the hot rodder type area.

Contrary to what you might believe I think it was beautiful strategy to include Word Pad free with Windows, and it does still have notepad so the text editor arguement is bogus and who says and who says an OS needs to have a word processor anyway, no one. Sure its nice but it sure does make WP a little less attractive to OEMs. MS really shouldn't be the one responsible for placing a Word Proccessor in the hads of new computer buyers, it should be OEMs.

As for WP and SO being able to read doc, of course they can but it is MS's format and I am sure no one does it better than MS.

Not matter what you say there are no real viable alternatives to Windows. If the auto market was solely comprised of Mercedes and I decided to make a car but it couldn't be driven on normal rodes would it really be considered competition? (it sounds pretty stupid but so does an OS without any software for it) No and neither would the notion that you could build your own car. Of course there are other OSes out there. Heck we could all install DrDos tomarrow and be really cool while we looked at the command prompt, but that isn't a viable alternative. So, while you are corrent in saying that even if a product have 95%+ market share (like Windows)it isn't a monopoly if there are alternatives, in the OS market you need more than just availability to truely be an alternative and in this case there is no real alternative. I suggest you read the Finding of Fact in the antitrust case, quite interesting to say the least.

When I said it would cost milions or billions I was speaking of getting a foothold in the OS business and making money, not as a hobby. The cost behind getting an OS up and in the market is not with the developement of the OS itself, although I doubt that is a small investment, it would come in getting applications to run on the OS either by convincing companies to port their software to your OS and then aiding them in getting there existing products on your OS or creating your own applications or porting someone elses. Obviously the first one getting someone else to do the work would be nice but who would. They would enjoy no increased sales in the effort since the new OS would be a replacement for windows (either for existing installs or computers that would otherwise have windows installed) which it already is selling software for. Very few companies would do this.

So top finish off my words on this subject

Making money is the benefit of market share.

Having the fed try to break you apart is the benefit of abusing your market share;P

MS doesn't have a head start in the OS market its got an armed stronghold in front of the finish line.

The cost to gain a foothold in the OS market has everything to do with MS being a Monopoly.

The key to sucessful consulting is to find people with money who have jobs for you to do. For me, the biggest source of leads has been the Small Business Innovation Program (SBIR) and the Commerce Business Daily. If you don't know about these resources, you should.

One of the major cases on this issue is Valentine v. Chrestensen. There is a short version of the relevant points here, the full argument can be found by searching for "commercial speech" here.

Furthermore, the first amendment only applies to the government's actions to restrict speech. "Congress shall make no law..." It has nothing to do with what individual companies or persons do to restrict speech. If an ISP decides they're not going to deliver or relay spam because it costs them money and resources to do so, that is their business and not a violation of the first amendment.

---

Microsoft Breakup Decision Overturned by the Court of Appeals

Judge Jackson had compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers".

by Michael Jennings

(Thursday, June 28, 2001) Today the Court of Appeals handling the Microsoft anti-trust case overturned the lower court's decision to split Microsoft into two or more companies. The breakup would have placed the Microsoft Windows operating system in one company and created a second business for everything else.

This decision of the Court of Appeals has been widely recognized as fair because of the behaviour of the judge of the lower court, in which he had not given the required appearance of impartiality. Judge Jackson had, for example, compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers", and Bill Gates to Napoleon. (See page 111 of the Court's decision [PDF format]).

The Court of Appeals found that Judge Jackson's 206-page Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal conduct, was entirely acceptable. It was his conduct outside the courtroom that was a violation of the code of conduct for United States judges. (For more about this, see pages 111 to 115 of the decision.)

Earlier, many people had praised Judge Jackson's skill in handling the case inside the courtroom. Technically oriented observers considered the Findings of Fact to be very well informed.

However, the penalty that Judge Jackson recommended for Microsoft was voided because of his public misconduct. The Court of Appeals directed that a new district judge examine the case, using the Findings of Fact as a starting point.

The story is very widely reported. For examples, see: ABC, AP, BBC, Washington Post, Seattle Times, CNet, The Industry Standard, Reuters, Guardian, Motley Fool, and MSNBC. The NY Times article requires that you register. Registration is free.

Silicon Valley.com said "[Microsoft] can continue its brutal practices for a while longer..."

There were two parts to the anti-trust case, 1) the Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal activity, and 2) the remedy, which is what would happen as a result of the court finding illegal activity. Judge Jackson had ordered that Microsoft be broken into two companies. It is only this second part, the remedy, that has been voided (vacated) by the Court of Appeals.

The Court of Appeals wrote, "We vacate the judgment on remedies, because the trial judge engaged in impermissible ex parte [outside the court] contacts by holding secret interviews with members of the media and made numerous offensive comments about Microsoft officials in public statements outside of the courtroom, giving rise to an appearance of partiality."

The Court of Appeals added, "Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the District Court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process."

The ruling of the Court of Appeals was unanimous, by a 7-0 vote.

More links:

Open Secrets.org report on Microsoft soft money donations

Common Cause report on Microsoft political contributions

Antitrust Law and Economics Review

Older Articles:

Microsoft Unfazed by Threat of New Antitrust Suits (Thursday, June 21, 2001)

What, me worry? Microsoft's Ballmer stays cool, confident, composed. (PC World, June 17, 1998)

Michael Jennings
Futurepower®
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
U.S.A.

Tel: (503) 233-7820
Fax: (419) 781-4606
E-Mail: jennings_michael @ hotmail.com (remove spaces)

Futurepower is a registered trademark.
Copyright 2001

Microsoft Breakup Decision Overturned by the Court of Appeals

Judge Jackson had compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers".

by Michael Jennings

(Thursday, June 28, 2001) Today the Court of Appeals handling the Microsoft anti-trust case overturned the lower court's decision to split Microsoft into two or more companies. The breakup would have placed the Microsoft Windows operating system in one company and created a second business for everything else.

This decision of the Court of Appeals has been widely recognized as fair because of the behaviour of the judge of the lower court, in which he had not given the required appearance of impartiality. Judge Jackson had, for example, compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers", and Bill Gates to Napoleon. (See page 111 of the Court's decision [PDF format]).

The Court of Appeals found that Judge Jackson's 206-page Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal conduct, was entirely acceptable. It was his conduct outside the courtroom that was a violation of the code of conduct for United States judges. (For more about this, see pages 111 to 115 of the decision.)

Earlier, many people had praised Judge Jackson's skill in handling the case inside the courtroom. Technically oriented observers considered the Findings of Fact to be very well informed.

However, the penalty that Judge Jackson recommended for Microsoft was voided because of his public misconduct. The Court of Appeals directed that a new district judge examine the case, using the Findings of Fact as a starting point.

The story is very widely reported. For examples, see: ABC, AP, BBC, Washington Post, Seattle Times, CNet, The Industry Standard, Reuters, Guardian, Motley Fool, and MSNBC. The NY Times article requires that you register. Registration is free.

Silicon Valley.com said "[Microsoft] can continue its brutal practices for a while longer..."

There were two parts to the anti-trust case, 1) the Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal activity, and 2) the remedy, which is what would happen as a result of the court finding illegal activity. Judge Jackson had ordered that Microsoft be broken into two companies. It is only this second part, the remedy, that has been voided (vacated) by the Court of Appeals.

The Court of Appeals wrote, "We vacate the judgment on remedies, because the trial judge engaged in impermissible ex parte [outside the court] contacts by holding secret interviews with members of the media and made numerous offensive comments about Microsoft officials in public statements outside of the courtroom, giving rise to an appearance of partiality."

The Court of Appeals added, "Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the District Court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process."

The ruling of the Court of Appeals was unanimous, by a 7-0 vote.

More links:

Open Secrets.org report on Microsoft soft money donations

Common Cause report on Microsoft political contributions

Antitrust Law and Economics Review

Older Articles:

Microsoft Unfazed by Threat of New Antitrust Suits (Thursday, June 21, 2001)

What, me worry? Microsoft's Ballmer stays cool, confident, composed. (PC World, June 17, 1998)

Michael Jennings
Futurepower®
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
U.S.A.

Tel: (503) 233-7820
Fax: (419) 781-4606
E-Mail: jennings_michael @ hotmail.com (remove spaces)

Futurepower is a registered trademark.
Copyright 2001

"... Microsoft has proved untrustworthy in the past."

-- U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson is his order in case No. 98-1232.

http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2000/pdf/budge t.pdf

"In 2000, TVA plans to pay for most of these programs in a new way, using proceeds from the agency's $6.8 billion power program, user fees and sources other than appropriations. The budget proposes appropriations of $7 million for TVA to manage the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area."

http://www.tva.gov/finance/reports/pdf/fy2000ar.pd f

Page 19

Prior to 2000 TVA received Federal appropriations for essential stewardship activities related to its management of the Tennessee River system and TVA properties (nonpower programs). Congress did not provide any appropriations to TVA to fund such activities in 2000. Consequently, TVA paid for essential stewardship activities primarily with power revenues, with the remainder funded through user fees and nonpower fund balances unused in prior years.

So, were you saying something about my tax dollars not being hard at work?

Incidentally, what happens if a representative decides to introduce a copyrighted work into the record in its entirety? Senators have been known to filibuster by reading the Bible or Moby Dick out loud on the floor -- what if they read Who Moved My Cheese? or Rule By Secrecy instead? Does the copyright effectively evaporate? Does the Senator get sued? Does it fall under fair use, while further reproductions of the entire text would not?

Take a look at The United States Code yourself. Specifically, Title 26: Internal Revenue.

Also, while I would like to see the tax code simplified, I have a feeling that doing so would actually open loopholes. Well, maybe there'd be less loopholes, but they'd probably be bigger because the tax code would be less specific.

The right legislative approach is to extend the existing law prohibiting junk faxes to E-mail. That's a successful law, and would work.

Do you have a reference to support your position that libraries serving as Federal Depositories are required to have open electronic access to the Internet?

It's also worth noting that an access-controlled wireless LAN is unlikely to be violation of such laws (if they exist) as long as it exists in parallel with an unrestricted method of access (such as a terminal lab).

--S

Here's the FCC must carry regulation. Note section 76.64, Retransmission Consent:

(b) A commercial broadcast signal may be retransmitted without express authority of the originating station if-- (1) The distributor is a cable system and the signal is that of a commercial television station (including a low-power television station) that is being carried pursuant to the Commission's must-carry rules set forth in Sec. 76.56

and also Sec 76.60 Compensation for Carriage:

A cable operator is prohibited from accepting or requesting monetary payment or other valuable consideration in exchange either for carriage or channel positioning of any broadcast television station carried in fulfillment of the must-carry requirements, except that (a) Any such station may be required to bear the costs associated with delivering a good quality signal or a baseband video signal to the principal headend of the cable system; or (b) A cable operator may accept payments from stations which would be considered distant signals under the cable compulsory copyright license, 17 U.S.C. 111, as indemnification for any increased copyright liability resulting from carriage of such signal.

I failed to find a reference to the FCC decision regarding a station's right to either elect coverage under must carry or receive compensation, but not both, but I did find this interesting tidbit in a VIACOM SEC filing

Commercial stations have the additional right to elect either to require a multichannel distributor to carry the station pursuant to the must carry provisions of the Act or to require that the cable operator secure the station's "retransmission consent" on a negotiated basis before the station can be carried (i.e., retransmitted) on the cable system. All of the Company's television stations are carried on cable systems serving the communities in the stations' markets. Certain of the stations obtained carriage by asserting must carry rights and other stations granted retransmission consent. Failure to be carried on cable systems could be detrimental to the business of a television station. The application of must carry requirements to additional services which a broadcaster might transmit over the digital spectrum is to be decided by the FCC except that the 1996 Telecommunications Act expressly provides that any "ancillary and supplementary" services provided by broadcasters in that spectrum will not be entitled to mandatory cable carriage. The must carry rules have been challenged by cable program services and cable system operators.

Whoa. Someone out there is stepping in the cow dung rather foolishly.
Case study :
http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitu tion/amdt1.html ...Talley v. California,\166\ the Court struck down an ordinance which banned all handbills that did not carry the name and address of the author, printer, and sponsor; conviction for violating the ordinance was set aside on behalf of one distributing leaflets urging boycotts against certain merchants because of their employment discrimination. The basis of the decision is not readily ascertainable. On the one hand, the Court celebrated anonymity. ``Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all . . . . [I]dentification and fear of reprisal might deter perfectly peaceful discussion of public matters of importance.'
Someone should have these people write out 10,000 times the Constitution

Sure there is... if a company violates its privacy policy you have every right to sue them.

Suing someone is a tremendous pain in the ass, and expecting private citizens to mount law suits against obvious lawbreakers is an unreasonable burden. Obviously illegal activities should be pursued by law enforcement agencies.

For example: When I was living in California a couple of years ago, I had a private dedicated fax line to my home. After a month or so, I was receiving several unsolicited faxes per day. Unsolicited faxes are illegal. So after a couple of months of tremendous paper and ink waste, I decided to look into my legal options. The FCC site recommended that I call my district attorney to alert them of the breach of law, which I did. It took a while to get someone actually on the phone, but when I did, they recommended that I go out and hire an attorney! An attorney! Why in the hell should I have to do anything more than report the crime and serve as a witness?

Privacy law should be written in such a way that minimal privacy measures are mandatory, and infractions of privacy policy are felonious offenses.