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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new study has sifted through some of the largest online data sets of personality quizzes and identified four distinct "types" therein. The new methodology used for this study -- described in detail in a new paper in Nature Human Behavior -- is rigorous and replicable, which could help move personality typing analysis out of the dubious self-help section in your local bookstore and into serious scientific journals. What's new here is the identification of four dominant clusters in the overall distribution of traits. [Paper co-author William Revelle (Northwestern University)] prefers to think of them as "lumps in the batter" and suggests that a good analogy would be how people tend to concentrate in cities in the United States. The Northwestern researchers used publicly available data from online quizzes taken by 1.5 million people around the world. That data was then plotted in accordance with the so-called Big Five basic personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The Big Five is currently the professional standard for social psychologists who study personality. (Here's a good summary of what each of those traits means to psychologists.) They then applied their algorithms to the resulting dataset. Here are the four distinct personality clusters that the researchers ended up with:

Average: These people score high in neuroticism and extraversion, but score low in openness. It is the most typical category, with women being more likely than men to fit into it.
Reserved: This type of person is stable emotionally without being especially open or neurotic. They tend to score lower on extraversion but tend to be somewhat agreeable and conscientious.
Role Models: These people score high in every trait except neuroticism, and the likelihood that someone fits into this category increases dramatically as they age. "These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas," says Amaral. "These are good people to be in charge of things." Women are more likely than men to be role models.
Self-Centered: These people score very high in extraversion, but score low in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Most teenage boys would fall into this category, according to Revelle, before (hopefully) maturing out of it. The number of people who fall into this category decreases dramatically with age.

qirtaiba writes: When the FOSTA-SESTA online sex trafficking bill passed last month, it sailed through Congress because there were no child protection organizations that stood against it, and because no member of Congress (with the brave exceptions of Ron Wyden and Rand Paul) wanted to face re-election having opposed a bill against sex trafficking, despite its manifest flaws. In the wake of the law's passage, its real targets -- not child sex traffickers, but adult sex workers and the internet platforms used by them -- have borne the brunt of its effects. Websites like the Erotic Review and Craigslist's personals section have either shut down entirely or for U.S. users, while Backpage.com has been seized, leaving many adult sex workers in physical and financial peril.

A new child protection organization, Prostasia Foundation, has just been announced, with the aim of taking a more sex-positive approach that would allow it to push back against laws that really target porn or sex work under the guise of being child protection laws. Instead, the organization promotes a research-based approach to the prevention of child sexual abuse before it happens. From the organization's press release: "Prostasia Director Jaylen MacLaren is a former child prostitute who used a website like this to screen her clients. She now recognizes those clients as abusers, but she does not blame the website for her suffering. 'I am committed to preventing child sexual abuse, but I don't believe that this should come at the cost of civil liberties and sexual freedom,' Jaylen said. 'I have found ways to express my sexuality in consensual and cathartic ways.'" Nerea Vega Lucio, a member of the group's Advisory Council, said, 'Child protection laws need to be informed by accurate and impartial research, and ensuring that policy makers have access to such research will be a top priority for Prostasia.'"

Casino dealers and fishermen are both likely to be replaced by machines in coming years. So which city will lose more of its human workforce -- Las Vegas, the country's gambling capital, or Boston, a major fishing hub? From a research: People tend to assume that automation will affect every locale in the same, homogeneous way, says Hyejin Youn, an assistant professor of management and organization at Kellogg. "They have never thought of how this is unequally distributed across cities, across regions in the U.S." It is a high-stakes question. The knowledge that certain places will lose more jobs could allow workers and industries to better prepare for the change and could help city leaders ensure their local economies are poised to rebound. In new research, Youn and colleagues seek to understand how machines will disrupt the economies of individual cities. By carefully analyzing the workforces of American metropolitan areas, the team calculated what portion of jobs in each area is likely to be automated in coming decades. You can run your city's name, and also the job position you're curious about here.

Casino dealers and fishermen are both likely to be replaced by machines in coming years. So which city will lose more of its human workforce -- Las Vegas, the country's gambling capital, or Boston, a major fishing hub? From a research: People tend to assume that automation will affect every locale in the same, homogeneous way, says Hyejin Youn, an assistant professor of management and organization at Kellogg. "They have never thought of how this is unequally distributed across cities, across regions in the U.S." It is a high-stakes question. The knowledge that certain places will lose more jobs could allow workers and industries to better prepare for the change and could help city leaders ensure their local economies are poised to rebound. In new research, Youn and colleagues seek to understand how machines will disrupt the economies of individual cities. By carefully analyzing the workforces of American metropolitan areas, the team calculated what portion of jobs in each area is likely to be automated in coming decades. You can run your city's name, and also the job position you're curious about here.

schwit1 shared an article from the New York Post: No reviews, no revenue. That's the key takeaway from a new study published in Psychological Science, which finds that if two similar products have the same rating, online shoppers will buy the one with more reviews... "[When] faced with a choice between two low-scoring products, one with many reviews and one with few, the statistics say we should actually go for the product with few reviews, since there's more of a chance it's not really so bad," wrote researcher Derek Powell of Stanford University, lead author of the report. In other words, when there's only a handful of reviews, a few bad ones break the curve and bring down the overall rating. "But participants in our studies did just the opposite: They went for the more popular product, despite the fact that they should've been even more certain it was of low quality," he wrote.

Matt Moog, CEO of PowerReviews, previously conducted a study with Northwestern University [PDF] that drew from an even larger data pool of 400 million consumers, which also found that the more reviews there are of a product, the more likely it is that a customer will purchase that product... He has also found that customers who read reviews often click the bad ones first. "They want to read what's the worst thing people have to say about this," he said... Most online shoppers (97 percent to be exact) say reviews influence their buying decisions, according to Fan & Fuel Digital Marketing Group, which also found that 92 percent of consumers will hesitate to buy something if it has no customer reviews at all.

An anonymous reader writes: Sam Barnett "has been strapping electrode caps on focus group participants and showing them primary season debates," reports CNN, and there's one clear conclusion. "Seeing Trumps face, hearing Trump's voice, lights up the brain." His data captured big surges in neural activity for hot-button topics like immigration, and revealed that while Marco Rubio actually triggered slightly more brain activity among men, Trump clearly produced the highest reactions among women and overall. "The focus group participants might have been excited by Trump. Or they might have been repulsed," reports CNN. "But one thing was for sure: they weren't bored." Barnett has also used electroencephalography (or EEG) to study advertising, and in the future he hopes to also apply it to other complex forms of brain stimulation like movies and even hedge-fund investing.

HughPickens.com writes: Is there such a thing as being too safe? Jeff Kaufman writes that buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 but buses are not very popular and one of the main reasons is that if you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor. According to Kauffman, we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous. Kauffman presents some ideas, roughly in order from "we should definitely do this" to "this is crazy, but it would probably still reduce deaths overall when you take into account that more people would ride the bus": Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings, allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying, allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph, and leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk. "If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars," concludes Kauffman, "they would still be more than twice as safe as cars."

Internet access in Cuba has gotten far better in the last year, thanks in large part to thawing relations between Cuba's government and the U.S. In the case of a censorship-heavy, technology-impaired regime, though, "better" doesn't necessarily mean good. Northwestern engineering professor Fabián E. Bustamante and graduate student Zachary Bischof decided to quantify the performance of Cuban internet connections, and found them "perhaps even worse than they expected," with regards to routing in particular. Reader TheSync writes with this excerpt: During their study, Bustamante and Bischof found that when a person in Havana searched for a topic on Google, for example, the request traveled through the marine cable to Venezuela, then through another marine cable to the United States, and finally landed at a Google server in Dallas, Texas. When the search results traveled back, it went to Miami, Florida, up to the satellite, and then back to Cuba. While the information out of Cuba took 60-70 milliseconds, it took a whopping 270 milliseconds to travel back.

jones_supa (887896) writes "A new Northwestern Medicine study reports the timing, intensity and duration of your light exposure during the day is linked to your weight — the first time this has been shown. People who had most of their daily exposure to even moderately bright light in the morning had a significantly lower body mass index (BMI) than those who had most of their light exposure later in the day, the study found. It accounted for about 20 percent of a person's BMI and was independent of an individual's physical activity level, caloric intake, sleep timing, age or season. About 20 to 30 minutes of morning light is enough to affect BMI. The senior author Phyllis C. Zee rationalizes this by saying that light is the most potent agent to synchronize your internal body clock that regulates circadian rhythms, which in turn also regulate energy balance. The study was small and short. It included 54 participants (26 males, 28 females), an average age of 30. They wore a wrist actigraphy monitor that measured their light exposure and sleep parameters for seven days in normal-living conditions. Their caloric intake was determined from seven days of food logs. The study was published April 2 in the journal PLOS ONE. Giovanni Santostasi, a research fellow in neurology at Feinberg, is a co-lead author."

wiredmikey writes "A group of researchers from Northwestern University and North Carolina State University tested ten of the most popular AV products on Android, and discovered that they were easily fooled by common obfuscation techniques. In a paper (PDF), the researchers said they tested AV software from several well-know security vendors. In order to evaluate the mobile security software, the researchers developed a tool called DroidChameleon, which applies transformation techniques to Android applications. Known malware samples were transformed to generate new variants that contain the exact malicious functions as before. These new variants were then passed to the AV products, and much to the surprise of the paper's authors, they were rarely flagged — if at all. According to the research, 43% of the signatures used by the AV products are based on file names, checksums or information obtained by the PackageManager API. This means that, as mentioned, common transformations will render their protection useless for the most part. For example, the researchers transformed the Android rootkit Droid Dream for their test. DroidDream is a widely-known and highly dangerous application. Yet, when it was transformed, every AV program failed to catch at least two variants."

Zothecula writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a laser the size of a virus particle that can operate at room temperature. The 'nanolaser,' which uses gold nanoparticles instead of mirrors, is claimed to be the first demonstration to make use of a so-called bowtie arrangement of metal nanoparticles, though nano-scale lasers have been previously demonstrated." Original paper (paywalled, unfortunately).

Zothecula writes "Researchers at Northwestern University, Illinois, have broken a world record in the creation of two synthetic materials, named NU-109 and NU-110, which have the greatest amount of surface areas of any material to date (abstract). To put this into perspective: if one were able to take a crystal of NU-110 the size of a grain of salt, and somehow unfold it, the surface area would cover a desktop. Additionally, the internal surface area of just one gram of the new material would cover one-and-a-half football fields."

Zothecula writes "In the quest to develop implantable electronics to monitor the human body from within, flexibility and stretchability have been major hurdles. We've seen numerous developments including stretchable LED arrays, an implantable device for measuring the heart's electrical output, and an electrode array that melts onto the surface of the brain. Now researchers have developed technology that combines a porous polymer and liquid metal that allows electronics to bend and stretch to more than 200 percent their original size (abstract)."

bonch writes "Researches at Northwestern University have developed an inexpensive solar cell intended to solve the problems of current solar cell designs, such as high cost, low efficiency, and toxic production materials (abstract). Based on the Grätzel cell, the new cell uses millions of light-absorbing nanoparticles and delivers the highest conversion efficiency reported for a dye-sensitized solar cell."

Hugh Pickens writes "Representing only 10 percent of the general human population, scientists have long wondered why left-handed people are a rarity. Now a new study suggests lefties are rare because of the balance between cooperation and competition in human evolution and a mathematical model was developed that predicts the percentage of left-handers by sport based on each sport's degree of cooperation versus competition. 'The more social the animal—where cooperation is highly valued—the more the general population will trend toward one side,' says study author Daniel M. Abrams. 'The most important factor for an efficient society is a high degree of cooperation. In humans, this has resulted in a right-handed majority.' If societies were entirely cooperative everyone would be same-handed, but if competition were more important, one could expect the population to be 50-50 because cooperation favors same-handedness—for sharing the same tools, for example while physical competition favors the unusual. In a fight, for example, a left-hander would have the advantage in a right-handed world. The mathematical model accurately predicted the number of elite left-handed athletes in baseball, boxing, hockey, fencing, and table tennis (PDF)—more than 50 percent among top baseball players and well above 10 percent (the general population rate) for the other sports. For other sports like football or hockey where team cooperation is paramount, it is ideal for all individuals to possess the same handedness. For example, in football, blocking schemes are often designed to protect a quarterback's blind side. As a result, it is beneficial for all quarterbacks on the roster to possess the same handedness to minimize variations of the offensive sets. 'The accuracy of our model's predictions when applied to sports data supports the idea that we are seeing the same effect in human society.'"

pinguin-geek writes "Computer science researchers at Northwestern University have developed a way to exert limited control on how people move, pushing them out of their regular travel patterns. The key: tapping into some of their cell phone applications. The findings could elicit a broader range of user-collected data by driving foot traffic to under-utilized areas."

daem0n1x writes "Could this be the breakthrough we've all been expecting that will finally make the electric car a reality? Researchers of Northwestern University USA discovered a new way to build lithium-ion batteries that changes dramatically both the charge time and capacity [original paper, paywalled]. Guess what it involves? That's right, graphene."

starzia writes "Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan have developed a technique which aims to extend the reach of mobile phone location tracking. Their free iPhone app, Batphone, extracts a location 'fingerprint' from a short recording of ambient sound. This software-only approach allows the device to determine its location with high accuracy using its built-in microphone. Unlike prior indoor tracking techniques, Batphone does not rely on the presence of Wi-Fi access points to serve as landmarks, although these can be used to assist the system when available. They also posted a web game which allows you to test your own ability to recognize rooms by listening. Technical details are in a paper which was presented at the MobiSys conference on Thursday. This is from the same people who brought you laptop sonar."

pdragon04 writes "After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common. Laptops experienced precipitous price drops during the past decade. Digital cameras, personal computers, and computer chips all followed similar steep declines in price. Has the price of broadband Internet followed the same model? Shane Greenstein decided to look into it. "

Hugh Pickens writes "Peter Kirwan has an interesting article in Wired UK on the emergence of software that automates the collection, evaluation, and even reporting of news events. Thomson Reuters, the world's largest news agency, has started moving down this path, courtesy of an intriguing product with the nondescript name NewsScope, a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven trading. The latest iteration of NewsScope 'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment. At Northwestern University, a group of computer science and journalism students have developed a program called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball games. Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated 'narrative arcs' to describe the action in a format recognizable as a news story. 'No doubt Kurt Cagle, editor of XMLToday.org, was engaging in a bit of provocation when he recently suggested that an intelligent agent might win a Pulitzer Prize by 2030,' writes Kirwin. 'Of course, it won't be the software that takes home the prize: it'll be the programmers who wrote the code in the first place, something that Joseph Pultizer could never have anticipated.'"

Steve Tarzia writes "A research group at Northwestern University and University of Michigan has released open-source display power-management software that uses a new user presence detection technique. The goal is to shut off the display immediately when the user leaves the computer rather than using slow and error-prone mouse/keyboard activity timeouts. Surprisingly, the mic and speakers of many laptop computers are sensitive to ultrasonic frequencies. Those frequencies can be used to silently probe the laptop's physical environment. This software is based on research published at the UbiComp2009 conference. A Windows binary and source code for Windows and Linux are available for download."

An anonymous reader writes "The Empathic Systems Project a Northwestern University demonstrate up to 50% power savings by controlling CPU frequency scaling based upon the end user. They measure the user with eye trackers, galvanic skin response, and force sensors to find a CPU frequency that the user is satisfied with. They are currently studying user activity and system performance on mobile architectures, specifically the Android G1 phone."

An anonymous reader writes "The Empathic Systems Project a Northwestern University demonstrate up to 50% power savings by controlling CPU frequency scaling based upon the end user. They measure the user with eye trackers, galvanic skin response, and force sensors to find a CPU frequency that the user is satisfied with. They are currently studying user activity and system performance on mobile architectures, specifically the Android G1 phone."

pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new 'guilt-by-association' threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification."

pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new 'guilt-by-association' threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification."

alphadogg writes "Northwestern University researchers have developed a system that gives a heads up about traffic problems on the Internet, where there is no central management system. Their Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which latches on to a popular BitTorrent client, is designed to spot problems by encouraging feedback from end users who are experiencing problems. 'You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring,' said associate professor Fabián Bustamante. He has a track record with BitTorrent users, having developed the popular Ono plug-in for speeding up P2P interactions."

Noksagt writes "Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia's George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU's Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format."

penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."

penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."

penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."

penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in with a story about the DMCA. He starts "On January 16, a man named Guntram Graef who invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to ask YouTube to remove a video of giant penises attacking his wife's avatar/character in the virtual community "Second Life", retracted the claim and stated that he now believes the video was not a copyright violation. (He had sent similar notices to BoingBoing and the Sydney Morning Herald just for posting screen shots of the video.) His statements in a C-Net interview suggest that he didn't mean to alienate the anti-censorship community and was probably angry over what he saw as a sexually explicit attack on his wife. But the event sparked renewed debate over the DMCA and what constitutes abuse of it. I sympathize with Graef and I admire him for admitting an error, but I still think the incident shows why the DMCA is a bad law." Hit that link below to read the rest of his story.

The DMCA is known mainly for its two most controversial provisions: the ban on technology to circumvent copyright restrictions, and the procedures by which ISPs must respond to "take down" notices if a third party claims that one of the ISP's users is violating their copyright. The first of these, I am opposed to in principle; the second, I am not opposed to in principle but I think is too easy to abuse in practice -- because I think incidents like the Graef case and my own limited court experience in related areas has suggested that the protections against DMCA-type abuses are very weak.

First, I'm against the anti-circumvention provision in principle because I agree with the position espoused by the EFF that computer code is protected under the First Amendment, even if some uses of that computer code may be illegal. After all, at one point a U.S. court even ruled that a manual for carrying out murders as a hit man was protected speech! That ruling was overturned on appeal, and the case was settled out of court before a final decision was ever reached, but still -- given that a handbook for killing people was considered free speech by at least one court, it's a bit of a stretch to think that a DVD-copying program should be given less protection. Just because X is illegal does not mean that tools or instructions for doing X should also be illegal.

With regard to the second provision, I'm not against requiring ISPs to take down infringing material on receipt of a notice from the copyright holder. But in practice there are two avenues for abuse here: (a) the party sending the take down notice can make statements that are not technically false, but which have the effect of persuading the ISP to take the material down, or (b) the party sending the take down notice can simply lie -- because the truth is that in too many cases, false statements made "under penalty of perjury" are not prosecuted, or even noticed, by the courts.

The EFF has already done a good job documenting abuses under the DMCA, and I'm not going to repeat all of that here. My argument is that these are not just temporary problems with a relatively new law, but rather that the abuses are the result of realities that won't change any time soon: ISPs being too busy to look closely at every complaint, and courts being too busy to go after everyone who violates court rules to get what they want. And thus it does no good to say that the DMCA would be fine if only enforcement actually got done properly instead of the ham-handed way it's been carried out so far, because that's not going to happen.

As I said, I think that if you have a bona fide case against a party, there's nothing wrong with taking action against them that would otherwise be considered a violation of their privacy and other rights. I've never sent a DMCA take down notice myself, but I've been involved in court cases in which I asked the judge to sign an order requiring a third party to turn over information about someone that was pertinent to the case. I don't consider that an abuse of the system, if the information you're after is relevant.

I realize this may separate me from some fellow privacy advocates, and some of the things I've done may make them uncomfortable. In one case, I had invited a girl to a charity luncheon where the tickets were $100 apiece, and when she showed up she had "forgotten her checkbook" and needed to borrow the money... Now, don't get ahead of me... Later, in what will not come as a huge spoiler to my fellow male Seattle residents, she apparently decided that, being a non-overweight, non-single-Mom, non-sexually-repressed girl in a city full of rich single guys, she was under no obligation to pay me back, and said, "Go ahead and sue me". Anyone who knows about my sideline taking spammers to court would tell you, it is not a terrifically smart move to say to me, "Go ahead and sue me". So, since I was going to be at the courthouse for an upcoming case against a spammer, I figured, why not, and filled out a Small Claims form with the defendant's address listed as "to be determined", since all I had was her cell phone number. Then I asked the judge to sign an order asking T-Mobile to give me the rest of her information so I could serve the papers on her. The judge signed it, I mailed it off to T-Mobile, and three weeks later T-Mobile sent me a letter containing her address, where I had the papers served. Most people don't know it's possible to do this just in a case where someone owes you $100 and all you have is a phone number, but that's just because a lawyer would never bother with such a small case, and most non-lawyers don't know the option exists -- and of course, it also depends on the judge, who may or may not sign the order.

(In that vein, people always ask me, is that sort of thing really worth the time? In this case, since I was going to be at the courthouse anyway, the extra time to write the motion, get it signed, and mail it off, was less than 30 minutes. But I was mainly curious about whether or not it could be done, and how much privacy protection there really is under the law, and knowing that was worth more to me than the $100 anyway.)

So I don't think it's unethical to request such information if you have a genuine case against a party. But while I don't think that what I did constitutes abuse of the system, I think it clearly shows how the system could be abused. Nobody checked my ID when I filed the case or asked the judge to sign the subpoena; I could have been anybody, and I could have disappeared once I had the information. (I had T-Mobile mail it to my address, but I could have just as easily had them mail it to the court, and then gone down and asked to look at the court file.) DMCA opponents should be aware that even without the DMCA, privacy protections are not as great as most people probably think they are.

As a result, I'm especially nervous about laws that enable abuse based on copyright assertions, because almost all of the legal threats we've ever received at Peacefire were based on what I considered to be bogus "copyright" claims. In 1997 we published a program that you could run on any computer with CYBERsitter blocking software installed, and it would decrypt the file that stored CYBERsitter's "secret" blocked-site list, and print it out in plain text. The CEO of CYBERsitter claimed that we were "violating every intellectual property law ever written" and sent threatening notices to our ISP demanding that they remove the program. I argued that every byte of the decryption program was our original work, so it didn't violate their copyright. In fact, it didn't even enable violations of their copyright, because it didn't make it any easier for someone to distribute illegal copies of their program, and I also said the decryption program served a worthwhile purpose by allowing customers or potential customers to see what the program really blocked. (Although to me, the enabling issue and the "worthwhile purpose" issue were secondary to the primary point, that original works of computer code should be protected by the First Amendment.) Fortunately our ISP stood their ground, but if the DMCA had existed back then, CYBERsitter could have invoked it, and possibly the extra pressure might have caused our ISP to back down. (Blocked-site-decryption programs were originally exempt from the DMCA as a result of the decision of the Copyright Office, but that exemption was revoked in 2006 because nobody had written a new decryption program in three years.)

So that was an example of how a company could intimidate an ISP into taking down material, without technically lying about the situation, but tacking on the words "copyright violation" and hoping the ISP would capitulate. What about cases where the sender of a DMCA take down notice just lies?

The Dutch activist group Bits Of Freedom conducted an experiment in 2004, in which they signed up with 10 different ISPs and posted a copy of a work that was clearly labeled with a notice that the author had died 100 years ago and the copyright had expired. Then they sent fake "complaints" to all 10 ISPs from an anonymous Hotmail address. 7 of the 10 ISPs removed the content immediately, and one even replied to give the personal details of the account holder, without being asked to do so. So completely fictitious complaints do apparently work. The DMCA does more protection than that because it requires the complainer to make a copyright claim "under penalty of perjury". But how much assurance does that really provide?

No one has yet tried to get our site shut down with a copyright claim or other accusation that was simply made up out of whole cloth. But my experiences in other areas have left me without much confidence in statements that are made "under penalty of perjury". The times I've been to court against spammers, I usually get to watch a few other Small Claims cases being tried. Probably at least once every time that I've been there, it's come to light that some party in a case said something that they almost certainly knew was not true, and I've never seen a judge do anything about it -- and court employees who have been there much longer have said they've never seen it happen either. (Judges are far more likely to get upset about people speaking out of turn. It's OK to lie, as long as you do it while the judge isn't talking!) It's true that Small Claims court is for resolving small matters, but lying under oath in Small Claims court is still a felony, punishable at least in theory by up to 10 years in jail. (And in any case, lawyers have told me that even in higher-level courtrooms, most false statements don't get anyone in big trouble. High-profile cases like Martha Stewart are the exception.) I don't think that everyone who lies under oath should go to the big house for 10 years. But I have no faith in the DMCA just because it requires accusatory statements to be made "under penalty of perjury", when judges usually let false statements under oath go completely unnoticed.

I doubt that a lawyer would risk their career and even their freedom to make up a completely fraudulent DMCA claim against us, such as claiming a page on our site was a ripoff of something originally produced by their client. But I don't think it's out of the realm if possibility that a lawyer would claim that, for example, a parody of one of their logos that appeared on our site, was a "copyright violation" -- even though the company would almost certainly be advised by their lawyer that such parodies are protected speech, which means their statement would constitute perjury, but it would probably never be punished.

The low point of my own confidence in the enforcement of anti-perjury laws, came when I sued a spammer who appeared in court and claimed that he had absolutely no knowledge of the spam being sent, and had never accepted any orders for spamming of any kind, while the judge, who appeared to hate anti-spam cases even more than most judges did, kept haranguing me for suing a clearly "innocent" person. I then played a recording of a conversation that I had with the spammer over the phone, pretending to be an interested customer (with a disclaimer played at the beginning of the call saying that it could be recorded, in order to make the taping legal), in which he said, among other things:

"I mean, we have all their information to back up any email we send them. If we have their ISP information, we can prove that they've given it out, because you can't get someone's ISP unless they've given it to somebody." [sic -- he meant "get someone's e-mail address", although the statement is still wrong]

"Do you already have your creatives and everything? So I've just got to upload what you have and just blast it out?" [note: "creatives" are copies of ads that sent out for you by advertisers and spammers]

"It's a United-States-based company but they pump everything through China and then it comes back to the United States."

The judge appeared very flustered at that point and started accusing me of "entrapment" (which was backwards -- I'd never heard of the spammer until he spammed me first, and then I called him afterwards, just to get evidence that he was in the spamming business in case he showed up in court and denied it). Since she claimed it was entrapment, I still lost and the spammer walked out home-free, without the judge ever even commenting on the questionable veracity of the statements he had made at the beginning. And that is all the protection that exists in the real world against people making false statements "under penalty of perjury".

The point is that when reading the wording of a proposed law, there's a temptation to think that the scenario described is exactly how the law will play out when it's enforced (see the "Alice, Bob and Charlie" scenario in the Wikipedia entry on the relevant section of the DMCA), and that anyone who deviates from the rules will be punished. But my narrow experience in court, in an area unrelated to the DMCA, taught me some things that several lawyers, with sad smiles, have confirmed to be true throughout the law: (a) judges will do what they want; (b) even if judges do sincerely want to follow the law, they're unlikely to agree on what it says; and (c) courts don't have the will or the time to chase down every person who violates the rules.

Don't judge a law by what it says will happen. Judge it by how it will play out if more than half of the steps in the process get screwed up. Guntram Graef apparently wasn't even trying to do anything dishonest when he got a video removed from YouTube on the basis of copyright claims that turned out not to be valid. Imagine how much abuse is possible when you're gaming the system on purpose.

Noksagt writes, "FreeDOS 1.0 has been released only a little bit later than planned. The 1.0 milestone is considered to be 'a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement' and features long filename support, HIMEM and EMM386 management, and CD-ROM support."

Noksagt writes "The Washington Post is reporting that recently discovered documents indicate serious intelligence violations by the FBI. This comes just months after the U.S. House voted to extend the Patriot Act, EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center) has obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act of thirteen cases of possible misconduct in intelligence investigations. The case numbering suggests that there were at least 153 investigations of misconduct at the FBI in 2003 alone."

blueZhift writes "The Northwestern NewsCenter reports that a team of Northwestern University music students used Internet2 with Access Grid video software to collaborate with students from eight universities in four nations and five states in the creation of a video game designed to teach youngsters about myth and mythical narrative. The game, Descent to the Underworld, recreates a myth common to many cultures. In it, an individual must retrieve a loved one who has been captured and removed to the underworld. The payoff for the player is a narrative film whose construction is based on the actions of the player. Supporters of the project include Apple Computer, EB Games, MAGPI, Argonne National Labs and the Internet2 Consortium. It is being promoted through UNESCO's Digital Media Arts sector."

Noksagt writes "Various outlets report that the OSI may cut down the increasing number of Open Source licenses. Right now there are about 50 approved licenses; incompatible licenses confuse and impede developers and end users alike. The OSDL has been pushing hard for this at LinuxWorld. Sam Greenblatt, a member of the OSDL board, said 'Eventually there should be three licenses: The GPL, a commercial version of the GPL, and, of course, there will be the BSD because you can't rid of it.'"

bshanks writes "Use of a Game Over: Emulation and the Video Game Industry is a paper which examines the business and legal consequences of emulators. The paper makes recommendations to video game companies on how to adapt to and profit from them rather than fight them." From the paper: " A decade ago, video game emulators epitomized the cutting edge of programming technology. Ten years hence, they are the subject of a heated debate over copyrights and the video game industry's future. Emulators, which provide conversion software that enables games to run on personal computers ("PC's") and other systems or platforms for which they were not originally designed, have become a staple among gaming enthusiasts. Several factors have contributed to the robust market for emulation..."

Trillian_1138 writes "I just finished hammering out a quick analyzation of the US 2000 Presidential Election and thought Slashdot might find it interesting. Specifically, what if all states had used a proportional assignment of electoral votes, in stead of the present all-or-nothing assignment most states use? Well, here's what I found. In the end, if every state had assigned their electoral votes in a proportional fashion, Bush would have defeated Gore in 2000, 259.008 to 253.077. The system I used allowed for percentages of votes, which is very unlikely to happen, but I still think the results are interesting. Check it out, and please let me know what you think. I'm not sure if having the electoral college AND proportional assignment of votes defeats the intention of the Electoral College in the first place, and the current Electoral College system does ensure one candidate must win a majority of Electoral votes, which the system I made would fail to meet. Oh well..."

An anonymous reader submits "The Software Sig Page encourages software maintainers to publish verifiable signatures for released software and to build the web of trust among software maintainers and software users. If you're afraid of downloading a trojaned OpenSSH, being 0wned while capturing packets, compiling an MTA as well as a backdoor on your system, not being able to trust tools you use every day, or never having a chance from the moment your OS boots, then you want some level of assurance that the software you use is everything the mainatainers expected you to have and no more. Look and check the MD5 and PGP signatures that come with software you download."

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamers.com report discussing the bizarre Japanese PlayStation 2 game, Mojib Ribbon, from the creators of Parappa The Rapper and this title's cult prequel, Vib Ribbon. The article says, "Like its predecessor, [Mojib Ribbon] ..is a simple rhythm game, but ..the game takes any text file and converts it into a Parappa-style rap, which players must then follow through stick inputs." Furthermore, the game uses the network adaptor and "..lets players send game data back and forth between each other. Players could e-mail especially inspiring raps to each other, or simply use their morning spam to generate a new game challenge." There's more info available via a preview at The GIA and pictures from this year's GDC.

stuyman writes "After almost three years, Andrew Marlatt, SatireWire's best (and only) employee is leaving the company. Says Marlatt "I all agreed it's time for me to move on...while the decision was certainly difficult, the meeting was actually quite harmonious. I brought doughnuts." He's going to start doing other things, and it has nothing to do with money. Read about it here. Satirewire has landed, please remain seated until we are fully stopped in the terminal area..." I owe Andrew some heavy laughter, and wish him good luck.

Slashback tonight with more on the continuing role of Mitchell Baker with the Mozilla project, flying through comet trails, gaming particulars, and the interesting Microsoft FrontPage EULA forbidding certain types of web pages be made with it.

Because not everything is as simple as who signs your paycheck ... cetan writes: "As a follow up to being laid off by AOL from Netscape, Mitchell Baker posted an article on Mozillazine discussing her role within Mozilla.org."

Can you think of a title to help her replace "Chief Lizard Wrangler"? All that wrangling has been a good thing, though, as recent builds make clear. I'd like to suggest "Reptilian Ambassador."

Sometimes, you just have to play. t0qer writes: "This is an update to this story. Originally I said kaillera was a net enabled version of mame, it's actually a free SDK to enable any emulator to have netplay. It was written by Christophe Thibault, of winamp fame. Contrary to some comments that the code was ripped from netmame, it was actually borged from jnetlib which was written by his boss and buddy Justin Frankel. So far kaillera has been adopted by 10 different emulators.

Speaking of games, iphayd writes: "Graeme Devine updated his plan , and released a version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. While this isn't interesting in itself, he's claiming that he is getting 3x the frame rate on a dual 800 G4 system than his dual P3 800 system."

You shall not convert the news headlines in the MSNBC component into an audio format. MarkedMan writes: "There has been some confusion over Microsoft's Frontpage EULA, with some claiming it prohibited using the software to produce works disparaging Microsoft and some saying it simply prohibited the use of the Frontpage logo on such sites. (The logo restriction actually seemed reasonable to me.) After some searching I found that some versions of the EULA do indeed limit use of the program itself. This from Northwestern University's Microsoft User License: Check out page 2, section 2. http://www.tss.northwestern.edu/select/mspur.pdf"

We have come to terms. bkuhn writes: "The FSF and FSMLabs have an agreement on a GPL-compliant version of the RTLinux Open Patent License. You can read our statement and related press release on the matter."

It's cool to see this sort of conflict work be met and resolved.

Not quite a date with a star. Troodon writes "A brief reminder, JPL and BBCnews report that this Saturday (22/SEP/2001) at 2230 Universal time (3:30 p.m. PDT) Deep Space 1 has a date with the Comet Borrelly"

Scooter asks: "I'm writing a report and I need references on microbiological factors that researchers need to consider as they develop plans for establishing a human colony on the International Space Station and Mars. Any sources such as online journal articles, web sites, newspapers, or whatever will be helpful. "

doggo asks: "Having just won a brand new Handspring Visor from one of those new .com startups, I find myself happily perusing the various Palm software sites looking for good applications & documents, so I wonder what /. readers find to be the most useful things? For me so far, it's CSpotRun, so I can have copies of various *nix faqs & mini-manuals with me, and a couple of SF stories in case I get caught in line or waiting for a plane or whatever. There's a plethora of stuff out there, and rather than waste my time installing and un-installing various apps, I thought I'd poll other readers on their choices. What are yours?"

osm writes: "Using nanoplotter pens dipped into organic molecules, this device has drawn structures with lines 15 nanometers wide. This could be used to produce circuits several orders of magnitude smaller than what is currently possible. Full story is on latimes.com." Understanding the fundamental processes of electron and ion transport and chemical reactions that occur within such films is vital to the development of new molecule-based chemical sensors, opti- cal switches, electrocatalysts, nanofabrication technology, and other electronic and photonic devices," says the Web site of Dr. Chad Mirkin, head of the team involved in this research.