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"Mr. Wallace [the NTP lawyer] maintained that Mr. Goodfellow was retained because he had been mentioned in news articles from the early 1990's "regarding a product called RadioMail" -- his effort to commercialize the wireless e-mail idea -- but that Mr. Goodfellow "could not locate any documentation beyond these articles regarding the product.""

Wow, it's a good thing google wasn't around at the time to help.

Sheesh, I knew that RIM was getting some of their own medicine, so I was only partially sympathetic (both companies deserve a good legal slapping for pursuing such ridiculously obvious patents), but I had no idea NTP was THAT scummy. They knew about prior art. They hired the guy that was practically the embodiment of that prior art -- a guy that didn't merely have something on paper, but actually once ran a business on the principles NTP claimed to be a novel invention at the time of its patents. And they paid him to sign a contract to shut up.

Can this Mr. Wallace be disbarred for such unethical behaviour?

Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch & Company. Before anyone confuses me with a conspiracy theorist, they really do censor what you can write via Myspace. Article text is here: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200601/msg00095.html .

I tried to post the above article on my Myspace message board, but it never actually gets posted (gets filtered out). I ran it through a l33tsp34k filter and it will post just fine.

Kind of scary, if only because people probably don't expect the service to do that kind of filtering.

Internet != ARPAnet

And did you read the GP? Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. That's just a strawman attack that Gore critics like to bring up continuously. Al Gore stated that he took the initiative in creating the internet, as he was the first politician to recognize the importance of the internet and did in fact promote and support its development from his seat in Congress in the early days of the net. Even Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn have recognized his initiative as having been vital to the success of the internet as it exists today.

From Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn's joint statement:

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.

As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.

...

So get a clue before you start discrediting other people and perpetuating gross exagerations of their statements.

Please, please, erice if you are going to get involved in this discusssion at least acknowledge what Al Gore actually said. He never used the word invent. So, you are really putting words in his mouth and, thus, misrepresenting what took place. As far as your opinion of his role in the creation of the Internets, the computer scientists and engineers who oversaw the implementation of the Internets say differently. In fact, you can read it for yourself here. Today's Internets, the Internets we all use and enjoy everyday, is a direct result of Al Gore's work in the United States Congress. Or, do you have a memory of making day to day use of the Internets prior to 1988?

Yes, let's. Here is an email from Vint Cerf (who has as good a claim towards "inventing the Internet" as anyone) describing exactly what Al Gore did and did not do regarding the development of the Internet.

The question is not whether it can be made to work (most research says "not", BTW. Hitting a bullet with a bullet just is not a feasible long term solution) but whether a) anyone wants to fire an ICBM at us and b) whether the money could be used more effectively and c) whether there is any real difference between a 99% effective missile shield and no shield at all.

I contend that:
a) basically only North Korea wants to shoot at us
b) give all the money to Bruce Schneier and have him design appropriate security measures based on actual needs and not knee jerk political fear. Or simply give it to the rest of the world! $1000 per person buys a lot of goodwill. FMI, check out http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200408/msg00072.html
c) one multimegaton bomb in the middle of New York or many, it's still a smoking crater. 99% solutions are pretty much the same as 0% solutions here.

In other words, anything this guy says or does is in my mind suspect .... he writes rootkits and other forms of "attacking software", so for all we know this asshole is getting ready to post example code to the net. It wouldn't be the first time.

• 165 Gigs on a disc the size of a CD (many many times more that today's DVDs)
• Data is inscribed on stainless steel, iridium, or similar material that will last
• For binary data, the HD-ROM can describe in a human-readable format the instructions needed to read the data

But on the other hand, it's only a matter of time before americans will ban both childbirth and nursing, as they expose children to breasts and female genitalia.

Here in Texas, a woman was arrested for "child porn" for being photographed breastfeeding her baby.

Granted, the charge was later dropped, but...

Shouldn't it have been Al Gore?

Ted Nelson spreads his message of Project Xanadu.

Mentifex spreads his message of Open-Source Artificial Intelligence.

"There is still a finite set of bandwidth available." Clarification: saying that there is a shortage of radio spectrum is like saying there is a shortage of colors. Both are infinite. Colors become finite only when you restrict yourself to a discrete color-space, like a box of Crayola crayons. Radio spectrum becomes finite only when you chop it into big discrete chunks, like radio stations. Reference, for example, http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/199507/msg00023.html, as well as numerous other discussions along the same lines. Radio bands are as big as they are only because early 20th century vacuum tube technology required them to be. Modern microlectronics could allow modern radio bands to be however "skinny" we like.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200310/msg00221.html

"...the cards are encoded at check-in with a very large, randomly generated code that is associated on the main database with the guest record and the room(s) to which they are assigned. No information about the customer is placed on the card."

"From a design standpoint, there is no reason to encode personal data on a card like this. Such data is useless to the purpose of the card-- the card is simply a key that expires once the guest has checked out. All of the systems with which we have associated keep personal guest information in the database. This gives the hotel chain the benefit of not worrying about the
card when it's not under their control."

The Netherlands also holds the record in the highest telephone tap rate of most western countries.

It becomes practically impossible to find out which one of the thousands (or millions if it's a nudie group :-) of receivers are the enemy agent, even if the sender and/or the message themselves get compromised.

How could I not mention this story in my first post. It was your posting that reminded me of it:
A couple of years ago a Dutch blackmailer hid the ransom payment by steganography on an extremely busy public website. Of course police checked all the weblogs, and traced the one entry that had gone through an anonymizer service (which in the end coughed up the user real name and address). Had the poor sod just used a public terminal, no one would have been able to trace him down.

Indeed Iit would have been smartest to use an usenet group, for there is no central logging of downloaded messages then.

They did try before back in 1994, remember the "The Microsoft Network" ?
You might know MSN in today's guise but back in 1994 it wasn't delivered via HTTP. MS didn't even have a web browser until late 1995.

The Top Ten digital media events of 1994

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/199412/msg00070.html

THE MICROSOFT NETWORK IS NO MARVEL

The crux of Microsoft's aspirations is its online network, once
code-named Marvel, now known as the Microsoft Network (for legal
reasons). Gates and Co., including new partner Tele-Communications
Inc., which forked out $125 million for 20 percent of the network,
think they have the key to online software and retail sales. But,
with the delay of Windows 95 -- which provides some critical hooks
for the Microsoft Network services -- competitors have a year to
prepare for this formidable competition. We believe the Microsoft
Network will appeal most to newbies, as old-time online folk have
already settled into their virtual neighborhoods.

The real point is surely that a patent for a device invented by someone with a basic knowledge of physics is used to protect the *invention* not the *knowledge*. They are not used to prevent anyone else inventing another device using the same basic knowledge of physics.

Even if it is perfectly just for the RSA (or any other) patent "taken as a whole" to be used to protect "not merely a disembodied mathematical concept but rather a specific machine"; that *doesn''t* mean it is neccessarily just to use the patent to protect that "disembodied mathematical concept" when it is used in some other "specific machine". But software patents *are* used to try to stop people employing the same algorithms in other inventions. So, despite the ingenuous ruling of the court they *are* being used to try to control "disembodied mathematical concepts" - in other words ideas.

I have no idea if Watt had a patent on the steam governor. But I bet he didn't try to take one out on Boyle's Law. -- An exchange on the RSA PKC Patent

No, there was never any undisclosed prior art. Here's one person's report.

As for math based patents, they are valid in a particular application context. If you argue otherwise, you might as well throw out all mechanical patents for being derivatives of the laws of physics.

Again, I argue software is not a specialized field.

Anm

No, you are wrong. What we are seeing are bad patents that are neither unique nor novel and companies abusing the patent system here in the US.

So we end up with patents like Amazon's assinine "one-click" patent, to Kodak pulling out their Wang patents against Java.

I could post links to bad software patents all day long that pretty much 'eclipse' your idea of "really good arguments".

Personally, I take a more balanced view

But the problem is that the system is so abused that it is dishonest, if not immoral. You would think that EU representatives/legal committees would recognize this, hence my parent post.

Also, I find your comment about little software companies really offensive, as many of us work for such companies and it's how we put food on the table.

Some mentioned Apple is interested in Intel DRM technology; however, this is not true at all because the whole Intel DRM rumor is not true.

The following is what Don Whiteside, the VP of Technical Policy & Standards in Intel Corporation, responded to the inquiry of Prof. David Wagner in UC Berkeley.

The article grossly misrepresents the discussion that occurred. The rights management technology referred to in the article was not a secret DRM from Intel, but the DTCP-IP technology publicly offered by the 5C Entity; which Intel is a Founder. Intel believes that the DTCP-IP technology is an important element in enabling protected transport of compressed content within the home network, and we continue to promote DTCP-IP for this application which enables greater consumer flexibility & use of premium entertainment content.

Already done. Finegrprints are easily fakeable, another reason to reject biometrics. If someone else uses your fingerprints how can you recall it, change it?

Who's got a list of format's not hacked?
- PSP UMB
- N Gage
- DVD
- Audio CD
- DVD Audio

all have been visited by hackers

>>You can't even say that about Microsoft's production software let alone beta software. Ya right. Their production software was good enough to power thousands and thousands of companies (both big and small) through the largest economic boom in the history of the U.S. Can't say that for Linux, or Apple. Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.

Challenger was definitely preventable, just ask McDonald who was in charge at the Cape, BUT was over-ruled. He has agonized over this for years as he had to carry the Fax down the hall (which he disagreed with) to go ahead with the launch. Also, NASA lacked an administrator then (like now) who could call the shots. Jim Beggs wouldn't have allowed Challenger to be launched, but the DoJ was tying him up with trivial GD legal matters he was later cleared of. But he had to step aside to defend himself from the creww of DoJ attorneys. To some degree you can blame the Challenger disaster on the overly agressive and politically motivated Department of Justice attorneys. William Graham, Beggs temporary fill in, was not an experienced engineer (he was CS), and lacked both the clout and understanding to stop the launch.

Regarding Columbia, it is now clear we should have launched a rescue mission, which (according to O'Keefe) was definitely possible, as Atlantis was at the cape nearing it's launch. The fatal flaw was that taking damage photographs and launching a rescue mission were not pert chart options at Mission Control. In addition, the Crater analysis code (spreadsheet) and supporting Powerpoint slides were seriously flawed, giving the wrong impresssion to those who tried to interpret them. To some degree, Powerpoint was a culprit in Columbia as the Columbia Accident Investigation Report pointed out and why NASA employees were encouraged to take Tufte's course and read his books.

Would you be more convenced if Vint Cerf said it?

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/199307/msg00115.html

When an Internet worm destroys two buildings in New York City and kills thousands of people, THEN maybe you can compare 13 year old boys with too much time on their hands with terrorists.

First, let's define what a terrorist is. Where do you draw the line? 3000 people dead? 300? 30? 3? I say that someone who deliberately sets out to cause havoc, knowing that their actions will cost jobs, induce fear, require cleanup, new security measures, etc.... that person is terrorizing their audience/victims, and is a terrorist. Some are more effective at smashing store windows during witless demonstrations than they are killing people, and some are more effective at burning cash in the economy as businesses, schools, and grandmas fight malware, and some manage to kill thousands of people - but they all, by choice and deed, are causing pain, expense, suffering, and sometimes death. Those are terrorists, varying only in scope and effectiveness.

Now, is the 14 year old kid that's in to model rocketry a terrorist when his latest experiment goes sideways and catches someone's hayfield on fire? An idiot, perhaps, but not arguably someone that set out to terrorize the farmer or cost the township thousands of dollars to put out the blaze. Is the 14 year old kid that's deliberately looking for malware to kiddie-script into his own flavor and set loose in an attempt to be cool or flail against "corporations" (while using corporately made computer parts, listening to his decidedly not made-by-old-world-artisans iPod, wearing his corporately made clothing, and still alive past childbirth and unafflicted by polio and other nasties because of corporately made medical supplies) the same? No. He's intent on damage, and on making the news. He's a terrorist, just a lame one. But he's in the same camp as the guys who would blow up bridges or poison wells: chaos, fear, damage - all in the name of recognition.

Don't think hackers can physically damage things? Right here is someone's copy-and-paste of a recent article about infrastructure threats from hackers. The director of the federal agency tasked with worrying about this stuff "wished he was wearing a diaper" while watching a demo of a guy hacking a SCADA-controlled turbine at a power generating plant. Just a few clicks, turn off the lube oil pump, and you're out millions of dollars of equipment and have a piece of the grid down for weeks or months. Multiply that times several power plants at the peak of a hot August Friday night across, say, most of California, and you're going to get deaths from failed safety equipment, chaos and social damage as often happens in those circumstances, and a huge economic upheaval.

Where do the folks with an axe to grind get the chops for that stuff? From young, net-savvy kids with, as you put it, "too much time on their hands" who are disaffected, susceptible to bent ideolgies because of the feeling of inclusion, and easily intimidated. Whether young people like that are tools, or have it in them to dream up and execute stuff like this on their own, for their own Columbine-like revenge fantasy reasons, don't dismiss it as just kids' stuff. The consequences for millions of lives, jobs, and for history could be huge.

Lastly, if you (as you do seem to) consider the 9/11 attacks as terrorism - what would you have been willing to tolerate, law-enforcement-wise, intelligence-gathering-wise, to prevent them? What should the people in Spain have been willing to put up with at their train stations before 3/11? Would any of us have tolerated the preventative measures before that stuff happened? Will we have the same conversation after a large municipal drinking water supply gets raw sewage pumped into it by a cranky ex-employee who knows that the SCADA system controlling the treatment plant still has the factory default password set? Or, posts that info on some forum where a 13-year-old kid with "too much time on his hands" decides to try his hand at it?

Vinton Cerf thinks he helped

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/inter esting-people/200009/msg00052.html

Or was that an attempt to be funny? Not sure why you're being modded Redundant instead of offtopic... but it drives your comment down either way, huh?

Do you have any credible news sources to back up this claim? If so, please post URLs, otherwise I don't think many people are going to believe a wild unsubstantiated claim like this.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2003/09/28/MN25356.DTL

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200309/msg00128.html

http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/aug04/2494 20.asp

In other words, you seem to have found yourself in one of the few places in the world where Apples were more popular than Commodores. They were outnumbered everywhere else by a 5:1 margin.

You know what? good for Russia. The ol' US of A used to be the biggest IP thief in history around the times of Charles Dickens. Have a read at this.

Having no IP protection to speak off (including patents) was a great way to exploit other countries works of arts and inventions without having to pay for royalties. For a while it helped make the US what it is now: the richest country in the world by far.

For the last 50 years or so the US have turned around and want to make everyone pay through the nose for Hollywood films, pop music, brand-name drugs and sport shoes.

It's only fair that the US and the West in general gets a taste of it's own medicine. I feel for the RIAA but I won't be so sad if it flounders and goes away. Music will not stop. If worse comes to worse you can always make your own or go to a local concert.

We can make fun of all the misspeaking that Dubya does, but we can't mock Gore for saying "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."?

In context, Gore's words were quite accurate. Just as we say that Bush II invaded Iraq even though he's not out there with a rifle, or we say that "Eisenhower created the Interstate system" even though he wasn't out there with a bulldozer.

So, no, you shouldn't distort an accurate statement and then mock the distorted version. Especially where there's so much else about Gore worthy of being mocked. I'm all for mocking politicians, just keep it accurate.

Talking of asymmetric and symmetric key sizes, there have been many discussions on the theoretical cracking of (1024 bits) RSA.
See http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200204/msg00109.html

(Also from this link)

NIST says: "For data that needs to be protected longer [than 2015], the key size should be at least 2048 bits." (Otherwise they recommend that the RSA keysize be at least 1024 bits)

RSA also says: "..high-value organization [RSA] keys should be at least 2048 bits"

So you would think anyone who knows about security would want to know the asymmetric key size as well as the symmetric key size of the secure web site they're visiting.

Not so. In Mozilla/Firefox you can see at a glance the symmetric key size sure, but to find out the asymmetric key size you have to find the actual key and calculate it yourself. In Mozilla you can reject ciphers based on symmetric encryption method and hash method but not whether they have low asymmetric (RSA) keys. It is theoretically possible for a "secure" website to use an obscenely low RSA key, let's say 72 bits but use a 256 bit AES symmetric cipher. Mozilla/Firefox will most likely proudly say that the site uses "high grade" security anyway!

You would think this would be a priority for Mozilla developers, right? Wrong.

This has been in Bugzilla for years, with numerous duplicates yet no-one is working on it.

See: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78837
Also see: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,11293626~mo de=flat

Nine years? That *might* be appropriate. But when he gets out, he'll still have two houses in my town, paid for with the money he stole from gullible AOL users, and I think that's ridiculous.

Al Gore's contribution to the internet is an absolte joke

While I appreciate your long and thoughtful post, unless you can produce a resume and personal first-hand knowledge that rivals that of Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, I have to take their word for it, and they give credit where they (and I) believe credit is due.

EOF

I strongly disagree.

In an interesting letter written by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf on the topic of Al Gore's contribution to the Internet, they said "Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation.".

In otherwords, even though the internet is a commercial operation now, it did not start that way (and would not have started at all without the governments involvment).

The reason we have one internet globally that interoperates successfully is due to government research and standardization.

If you take away all government involvment, including the funding of research at universitities, I don't think you'd have the internet at all, at least in any way that resembles what we have now in scope and usefulness.

Indeed, we may be 15 or 20 years behind in computer technology in general. It was, afterall, military spending that led to the creation of the first computers, and there to better and faster computers, and all that followed.

We may have gotten there without it, but the end result would have been vastly different, much less "compatible", and much, much later in the coming.

Money which a corporation makes overseas is not taxed if it is kept overseas. They basically say they are investing the overseas profits overseas. Without the loophole the company would need to pay the US tax rate on the money less any local taxes paid.

A WSJ journal article about this is posted here.

Cerf and Kahn, who invented the internet, give Gore a lot of credit for giving it broad funding (which led to you and I having access to the internet instead of just university labs).

They were there. It was their baby. If they give props and thanks to Gore, then so do I.

Gore NEVER claimed to "invent the internet". His exact words were "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.", and while it may have been a poor choice of words, when taken to mean the widespread system that 250 million people enjoy today is pretty accurate. The funding Gore spearheaded took the internet out of university labs and into public usage by millions.

Who is more likely to right on this issue, you or THE PEOPLE WHO DID INVENT THE INTERNET?

Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf both give Al Gore credit for taking the initiative to provide funding that led to the creation of the internet.

I'll side with them, thank you very much.

I agree with you. Although I found some info about Al Gore's support of the Internet and telecommunications in general even dating far back, there does seem to be a disconnect between what he said and what his involvement actualy was. I have to assume he did not understand exactly what he was implying when he spoke.

Lawrence Lessig has been pushing a bounty system for spammers for a long time. See this Interesting People post, for example. He was still pushing the same concept recently at his talk at the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (July 2004). I'm surprised that he isn't mentioned in TFA.

Just like the idea of charging a fractional penny to send an email and collecting a fractional penny when you receive one, so that email costs and revenues are balanced for the average person, but costs are astronomical for the spammer. Interesting idea, now how do you convert the planet over?

Pay for e-mail? You mean like sort of a bit tax? I'd say be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

European governments have been tossing this idea around ever since internet became more than an ubergeek-toy. It's amazing how the legislative branch never seems to understand how internet works, so just tax the entire thing.

Delivered-To: dfarber+@ux13.sp.cs.cmu.edu
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 09:59:40 -0400
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] OUTSIDE THE BOX: Wi-Fi Is Dead, Long Live Wi-Max
X-Sender: mail.reed.com:dpreed@127.0.0.1
To: dave@farber.net, ip@v2.listbox.com

The idea that WiMax replaces WiFi is like thinking that 18 Wheelers replace
private automobiles, or a saw replaces a screwdriver. That such ideas
even pass muster in the "press" is a comment on how little the technology
press understands the technology it covers. (of course the marketers who
tell the press how to think are guilty, too - the idea that the prefix "Wi"
means seems to be "hot new technology that ought to boost the stock price
like -tronics used to").

What WiMax might replace is coaxial cable or DSL copper, or the fantasy of
FTTH - certainly the companies that leverage themselves by huge junk bond
issues to put infrastructure in the ground are vulnerable to a
high-performance, cheap to deploy, rapidly depreciable alternative. In a
stretch it might compete for 3G's slot in the world (if they change the
underlying physical layer to compensate for 60 mph mobility).

From this article on the ACLU's lawsuit: [of people on the list] "the "no-fly" list has resulted in routine stops of passengers without terrorist ties who "have no meaningful opportunity to clear their names," said the complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union... They are detained, interrogated, delayed, embarrassed, humiliated in front of other passengers."

"Plaintiff David Nelson, 34, a trial attorney in the St. Louis, Missouri, area, said he has been stopped more than 30 times -- every flight he's taken..." Its all the Nelsons everywhere, although evidently the one bad one is from Tennessee. From another article "...this week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon, confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and security checkpoints in the last year or so."

I do not feel safer that all T. Kennedys or all David Nelsons are being searched. They should hire police to follow the one bad David Nelson around and save those 12,000 searches (assuming 1 trip per year) for random searches of everybody. As Bruce Schneier points out:

"Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first one is obvious. Profiling's intent is to divide people into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need to be screened more carefully, and people who are less likely to be evildoers and can be screened less carefully.

But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile... Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal the identity -- and profile -- of an honest person. Profiling can result in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt security.

There's another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile."

I originally read this at IP list -- I did some googling and when ?I saw that there was no entry at Wikipedia I started one -- IPv9. There are other articles google-able out there, but many are the April Fool's RFC -- to remove those you should use IPv9 -historical - of course most of those are in Chinese (gah!!), and few of them play well with Babelfish.

Where's my real time translation so I can read some of those articles?

I have only read about these a few times, but everyone who rants about how you can opt-out or expunge data from public dbs don't realize that any and every kind of restrictive rules are why Police Officers Associations create their own private databases and where do you think all the data comes from that they put in them. It is like if the bank tellers association had a database that their "members" could enter and query data including SSN's, account balances, check payees and amounts taking any and all data they wanted to from their workplace. People would certainly howl if such a thing existed. Yet since people don't know about these and they are kept quiet and out of public view.

Private Police db example

One guy for example found himself stopped and searched because the fact that he had applied for a Concealed Carry Permit and ended up in a private police db.

Talk about the lawless wild West, who is going to control the data is these databases?

But I think that the Internet would not exist without one key technology - the Algorithm, obviously named after Al himself.

He was just trying to sound cool and it backfired on him

The stark contrast between your position on this issue, and the position of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the two guys who really did invent the internet, could not be more clear.

What happens to you if someone else has a similar name? From this article on the ACLU's No Fly List lawsuit:

Administered by airlines since November 2001, the "no-fly" list has resulted in routine stops of passengers without terrorist ties who "have no meaningful opportunity to clear their names," said the complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"They are detained, interrogated, delayed, embarrassed, humiliated in front of other passengers," said plaintiffs' attorney Reggie Shuford, an ACLU senior staff attorney...

Plaintiff David Nelson, 34, a trial attorney in the St. Louis, Missouri, area, said he has been stopped more than 30 times -- every flight he's taken since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which gave rise to the "no-fly" list.

"This week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon, confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and security checkpoints in the last year or so."

"Remember Ozzie and Harriet's son, David Nelson? "I got stopped at the John Wayne Airport" in Orange County, Calif., he said by phone from Los Angeles this week. "Two police officers knew who I was and tried to explain to the guy behind the security desk. It didn't faze him at all." Even as another officer was saying he had once met David's mother, Harriet, David was being instructed to remove his shoes, he says. "I asked, 'Does the guy on the list have a middle name of Ozzie?' He said, 'It just says David Nelson.' "

Interesting People 2004/05:
I know for a FACT they passed 100,000 last November. One thing the Louis calculation may have missed is Google's obsession with low cost. For example read the company's technical white paper on the Google file system. It was designed so that Google could purchase the cheapest disks possible, expecting them to have a high failure rate. What happens when you factor cost obsession into his equation?