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Anonymous Coward writes " New York Times story (free registration required) - the lead paragraph: 'SAN JOSE, Calif. (Reuters) - In the latest chapter in the legal battle between two rival software titans, a federal judge on Tuesday reinstated an order forcing Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) to change software based on the Java programming language created by Sun Microsystems Inc.'" And as long as we're talking about Sun, check this Red Herring Story headlined "IBM wants to kick Sun butt." Whoa, baby! They play rough in the big leagues, don't they?

Randym sends this AP article: McCain Attacks Unlimited Web Access, or you may prefer the same article at the no-login Washington Post. Candidate McCain, proud sponsor of several bills which would censor every public library and school in the U.S., is now emphasizing his convictions as a way to win votes.

Arctic Fox writes "In an article (login needed) in today's NY Times, it is announced that the FCC will be allowing individuals and groups the ability to run low powered FM (yes, FM) radio stations. It seems that many would-be DJs will get 100-watt stations with 7 mile operating radii, but the large markets - NY, Chicago, LA - will only be allowed to use 10-watt (4 mile) stations."

NoNsense wrote to us about the team-up of Millionaire.com and auctions.lycos.com are auctioning a complete T. Rex skeleton. Yes, the opening price of $5.8 million includes shipping of the 25-foot-tall, 40-foot-long skeleton. Cool. I was going to buy a new house soon anyway. *grin*

The New York Times (free reg. req.) is reporting that the Federal Election Commission has heard a clear message from the internet community regarding regulation of political websites. That message: Don't! It seems likely that no new regulations will be passed at least before this year's election. Some thoughtful material urging the hands-off approach is at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Telecommunications coder since the 1960s, outspoken professor, and testifier in the Microsoft trial David J. Farber has been named the chief technologist at the FCC. Currently at U-Penn he is working on high-speed networking and distributed computing. Those on his "Interesting People" mailing list know him to be on the cutting edge of the tech memepool. I'll rest a little easier knowing he's "on the inside."

Yesterday, while the management of eToys was faxing, calling, and emailing the media to get its story out, its legal team had sent a very different message. You probably saw our pointer to the Wired story which claimed the toy company had "given up." No such luck. The story behind the scenes was a little different. Click for more.

It's one thing to drop a lawsuit. It's another to "move away" from it. According to Chris Truax, the lawyer for the Etoy art group, which version the media heard depended on what time they were in touch with the eToys management. The initial version, he claims, was that eToys was dropping the suit. A later version was that they were "backing away" from the suit. A third version reassured the press that a precondition specified in the legal document was never intended to be a demand - only a request.

To see how the coverage changed throughout Wednesday, see the first Wired story, then the NYT/CNET story, the Yahoo/TheStandard story, and then the second Wired story.

The problem was that eToys.legal was not working from the same playbook as eToys.PR. The precondition, clearly a showstopper, also calls into question whether the giant toy firm has a clue about what is really at stake.

That precondition was:

"to give good faith consideration, as our neighbor on the Internet, to concentrating the profanity, nudity and violence that is sometimes part of the etoy corporation message on etoy corporation's other websites."

Asking artists to censor their work, of course, flies like a lead wheelbarrow. At the same time the company spokesman was saying "our intent was never to silence free artistic expression," their legal team was doing precisely that. The entire short letter in which this request was made was focused on finding a resolution to the perceived problem of "profanity, nudity, and violence," and concluded by noting that co-existence was possible if "etoy corporation will respond favorably to this proposal."

The later Wired story quotes eToys management as putting this spin on it:

"This is a simple, straightforward, good-faith effort on our part to resolve this matter. We are asking that they make good-faith efforts to put some of the material that kids and parents might find offensive on another part of the site."

They can repeat the words "good faith" all they like, but that doesn't make this any less censorship. Imagine operating as an artist, knowing that for the rest of your tenure with the Etoy art group you must work very carefully not to put material inappropriate for children too close to your homepage. One use of the F-word already led to this lawsuit; how hair-trigger would the lawyers be the second time around? You'd want to tone down your message, lest you be accused of working in "bad faith."

But maybe this letter was just badly worded; perhaps there was a miscommunication somewhere between the PR and the legal departments.

Or, maybe this whole episode was a cynical attempt to calm down the activist community and get the story out of the public eye.

Think about what eToys is really saying. They have cost the art group a fair amount of money in legal bills and have shut down their website for (to date) a month. Now they say they want to walk away as long as Etoy does the same.

If someone came onto your property, stole your computer - and then a month later, after you'd spent thousands of dollars trying to get it back, offered to return it on the condition that you promised not to sue - would you be inclined to accept that condition?

How would you feel if they asked you to make a "good-faith effort" not to use your computer to write any "profanity"?

Chris Truax stopped short of saying whether Etoy would or would not continue their defensive countersuit if eToys' original suit were dropped, saying only "if the suit is dropped unilaterally, that's a very positive step." In my talks with him, he has seemed committed to finding a way to settle this matter without resorting to a knock-down, drag-out court battle, and he has said he'd like to help eToys management to educate themselves about being good netizens.

But he also pointed out several times that "the devil is in the details." And, of course, he's right. This whole mess won't be over until it's over.

It's a shame that the courts are still seeing issues like these at the end of 1999; those in positions of power should have learned about being good netizens by now. Etoy's story isn't all that unusual. While the art group has been under fire, there have been simultaneous attacks on the scholarly arts organization Leonardo and a computer club which happens to share the same initials as the BBC. Stay tuned.

twitter writes "According to this NYT article , Uncle Sam wants to help his anxious (14.9%), mood swinging (7.1%), and even schizophrenic (1.3%) subjects. Dr. Satcher, the surgeon general of the United States, claims "22 percent of the population has a diagnosable mental disorder," and goes on to say that the US needs more and more freely available shrinks. Young people are a higher priority. Is mega - profiling on the way? Is the future tagged drugged and released under surveillance?" Free reg. req. to read - and twitter, who submitted this, assures us that he's not one of the crazy ones, just so you know. *grin*

Equus writes "The NY Times (free registration required to read the article) has an article about a court ruling that says linking to a website can be illegal. Ouch. Two critics of the Mormon church had links to sites with text from a church publication. The church sued saying it was a copyright violation. The court agreed." Obviously its a scary ruling seeings how it would, well, destroy the web and all. I can't understand how linking can be a copyright violation... I mean, it seems like all those term papers I wrote in college with bibliographies would have got me in trouble by now if referencing copyrighted material was illegal.

wunderhorn1 writes "Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, have agreed to do "39 short cartoons" for Macromedia, Inc.'s Shockwave.com. According the the New York Times article, Parker and Stone will "receive equity of less than 10 percent in Shockwave.com," which will apparently be run as a subsidiary of Macromedia. "

wunderhorn1 writes "Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, have agreed to do "39 short cartoons" for Macromedia, Inc.'s Shockwave.com. According the the New York Times article, Parker and Stone will "receive equity of less than 10 percent in Shockwave.com," which will apparently be run as a subsidiary of Macromedia. "

Lawrence Lessig - the name may be familiar from the Microsoft trial - has written an excellent book, which I've taken my time reviewing because I felt I had to read it twice to grasp the full import. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace covers the real future of your liberties on the internet, and it is not a happy book. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace author Lawrence Lessig pages 297 publisher Basic Books rating 10/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 0-465-03912-X summary A gloomy look at the forces which shape the internet.

Slashdot isn't the first to review this book. Declan McCullagh (Wired), Andy Oram, and Carl Kaplan (NY Times) have all taken a look at it, he's been interviewed, there's an audio debate (mp3 format) between Lessig and McCullagh, and at least a couple of other places have all mentioned it and it is, at this writing, 134 on Amazon.com's best-seller list. I was privileged enough to receive a review copy of the book some time ago, but my review has been delayed because the book is too deep to easily sum up. It's a book about law, and about policy, and about the internet, which doesn't require any grounding in any of the above, but it seems like it would be appropriate for people at almost any level of knowledge - if you know more, you'll get deeper insights, and if you know less, you'll get the basics. A fractal book, in other words. An almost philosophical work, disguised as a law book.

To start with, Lessig's book is a counter to John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow had a good idea, a good goal, but he was totally and completely wrong about how to achieve it, and his declaration and the mindset it embodies has and will do great harm to the future of civil liberties on the internet.

Cyberspace is not and has never been independent of real life, or of government. What it has been is a place where the rules of real life were hard to enforce. That doesn't mean that the rules don't exist - just that it has been hard to make people obey them. The problem for people, like me, who like this state of affairs, this lack of enforcement, is that there's no reason cyberspace has to remain in its current state.

Cyberspace wasn't designed to enforce real-world rules. Such enforcement wasn't built in to the code that runs the internet, was consciously avoided in the early internet designs, and therefore regulators have been working in an environment unfriendly to them. Copying of digital works is easy. Transmitting and receiving content, even forbidden content, is easy. Etc.

But just because it was designed that way once, does not mean that it need be that way in the future. There are tremendous forces (business and government) that would prefer an internet which is friendly and cooperative to regulators. The people building the internet of tomorrow are not professors and geeks, they're CEO's and to a lesser extent, bureaucrats. If the architecture of the internet is "adjusted" to favor regulation instead of disfavor it - and the current internet builders all have reasons to favor regulability - regulating behavior on the internet is not impossible, it's trivial. Lessig has a short chapter on "is-ism", the belief that just because something is, so must it always be. Applied to the internet, this is "We are free, and will always be so." Wrong, wrong! The internet is totally man-made, and what man has made, man can change.

It is hard for me (or Lessig) to emphasize this point too much: the people who claim that we should keep our hands off the internet are completely playing into the hands of government and business. While the net-libertarians have buried their heads in the sand, the net is being changed, constantly, to favor regulation by business and by government.

Lessig takes a look at the infrastructure of the internet and how it is changing for the worse. There's another terrible flaw in thinking about the internet, which runs roughly: "whatever restrictions are placed, someone of technical competence can get around them". This is not true, not if the architecture is designed to support those restrictions rather than oppose them.

The internet, says Lessig, is about to "flip" from "unregulable" to "totally regulable". When that occurs (neither Lessig nor I think there's an "If" involved), who will be regulating the place? Currently corporations, with guidance from government - guidance coming in the form of regulations like CALEA, which make demands not on individuals, but on the code. Once the code is altered to be conducive to regulation, regulation follows naturally.

Lessig makes a great point about open source software. Closed source code which incorporates regulation (censorware is the easiest example, but there are many others) means that the people who are regulated can't even tell exactly what regulation is occuring. When the source code is available, you can at least tell exactly what you can and cannot do, or exactly how your privacy is being infringed. Open source code is inherently less suited to enforcing regulation on users.

I can't do justice to the book without rewriting it. Lessig is deeply skeptical about the ability of the U.S. government to initiate policies which promote, rather than denigrate, the civil liberties we have come to take for granted in cyberspace. Government is busy selling off our freedom to corporations through mechanisms such as ICANN. But no one else is going to do it - and with a government actively hostile to liberties or even one that adopts a hands-off approach, freedom in cyberspace is headed downhill at a tremendous pace.

I recommend this book to almost anyone who cares about the future of the internet. It's well-written - he's a good teacher. It's got some awesome examples - like how Communist Vietnam is more effectively libertarian than the U.S., because it doesn't have the infrastructure of control that we do. It is a scholarly work, but the footnotes are pushed off to the end - they alone are worth the price of the book to a serious student, but someone looking to just read can skip them without problems. It's a deep and thus far unmatched view of what will shape the net of tomorrow, the most inspiring book I've read this year.

Some of Lessig's other papers and articles are available on his home page. The book has a promotional website as well, available at code-is-law.org or what-declan-doesnt-get.com.

Pick this book up at fatbrain.com.

Narf Narf writes "From the New York Times, an article a five-year, $100 million program to build a supercomputer whose purpose is to simulate protein folding and acheive one petaflop. Free registration required. "

Narf Narf writes "From the New York Times, an article a five-year, $100 million program to build a supercomputer whose purpose is to simulate protein folding and acheive one petaflop. Free registration required. "

mattorb writes "The New York Times [free reg.req.] has an interesting article about a recent cosmological experiment whose results rather strongly imply a flat (omega equals 1) universe. Basically, the authors measured the scale of small variations in the cosmic microwave background, which yields strong constraints on allowed cosmologies. The abstract from the preprint (off LANL astro-ph) is here. Caveats: this is a preprint -- meaning that it hasn't been refereed yet. Also, questions are always raised about the precision of such "angular power spectrum" measurements -- who knows if this result will hold up. But it's an interesting thing to talk about."

mattorb writes "The New York Times [free reg.req.] has an interesting article about a recent cosmological experiment whose results rather strongly imply a flat (omega equals 1) universe. Basically, the authors measured the scale of small variations in the cosmic microwave background, which yields strong constraints on allowed cosmologies. The abstract from the preprint (off LANL astro-ph) is here. Caveats: this is a preprint -- meaning that it hasn't been refereed yet. Also, questions are always raised about the precision of such "angular power spectrum" measurements -- who knows if this result will hold up. But it's an interesting thing to talk about."

daghlian writes "Here's a New York Times article (insert free registration comment here) about what to do patentwise when intelligent systems come up with patentable ideas. Interesting quote, in the context of the recent (and justified, IMO) kvetching here, is this: 'A patent is denied when an invention is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art....'" But what if the 'person' to whom an invention is obvious is silicon-based? Things at the USPTO could get even screwier than they are today.

gregstoll writes "Hacker Eric Burns (alias Zyklon) faces prison, according to this New York Times article (free registration required, of course...)" Meanwhile, according to an Excite News story sent in by lots of people, the DoD is thinking about removing JavaScript and ActiveX from its sites to make them harder for crackers to penetrate.

mochaone writes "The NY Times has an article [free reg. req.] about some lawyers in California who plan on filing a suit Monday - that's today - on behalf of some victims of Microsoft's monopoly power. Can you say, 'Open the floodgates?'"

mochaone writes "The NY Times has an article [free reg. req.] about some lawyers in California who plan on filing a suit Monday - that's today - on behalf of some victims of Microsoft's monopoly power. Can you say, 'Open the floodgates?'"

Two separate articles on violent games today. The Toad pointed out a New York Times AP story on how AOL will start rating games; conflicting signals on whether "adults-only" games will be kept. And atomJack mentioned a metamute article which "compares how 1st person shooters have taken a lot of flak, yet sim games seem to be fine with everyone. The article argues that the sims are so realistic they are basically training kids for war and in fact some are used by the military for reference." Personally, I think the Mortal Kombat-style games are worst of all - but maybe that's because I don't play them.

The New York Times has a story on the ACLU and EPIC filing suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals to block the wiretapping provisions in CALEA. Go get 'em.

"Earlier this year, a freshman at a Catholic high school in the suburbs of New York City was expelled because of the contents of a personal Web site he created at home." The New York Times is running a good story (free reg. required) on the latest "discipline issue": students daring to express themselves on websites and saying things their schools might not approve of. Includes a link to the Student Press Law Center which looks like a great resource for students in a jam.

pq writes "CNET, via The NYTimes has this coverage of Linus and his remarks at Comdex. iMacs, Transmeta, Open Source, the 2.4 kernel, Mindcraft, Mozilla, Linux Everywhere(tm) - this has it all. " Also following the keynote, Transmeta's webpage announced Crusoe (we mentioned that last night).

This week, for your questioning pleasure, we have assembled a four-member panel of antitrust experts who are willing to speculate on what might happen to Microsoft next - if anything. But before you start posting questions, please hit some of the links we've provided to several other stories about the potential results of Judge Jackson's Nov. 5 Findings of Fact. (more below)

First, let's introduce our guests:

Don Weightman was the gentleman who did our Instant Legal Analysis immediately after the Findings of Fact announcement. We had many requests for him as an interview guest. So here he is.

Richard Hawkins engaged in the general practice of law for five years prior to obtaining his Ph.D. in Economics and Statistics. He is currently a visiting assistant professor of economics at the University of Northern Iowa, and practices only in antitrust and other economic issues in the law. His past includes both hardware and software development, including the mail-merge patch for LyX.

John Lederer is a retired lawyer in Oregon, Wisconsin. He is currently active in technology and intellectual property issues. He practiced in the antitrust and transportation areas and argued three U.S., Supreme Court cases.

David Niemi is a system engineer with a background in economics as well as software. He has been administering and developing for UNIX and Linux since 1987, and has been following Microsoft's antitrust adventures closely since 1993.

Next, a few selected stories about the Microsoft Saga that you may not have read:

• Findings of Fact, A Two-Themed Opus (from The Linux Show.)
• Jerry's Take On The Microsoft Decision: Wrong! (Jerry Pournelle in Byte.)
• Microsoft willing to settle antitrust case (from the Boston Globe.)
• Now bust Microsoft's trust (from The Economist.)
• Militant Microsofties Bunker mentality... (from SF Gate.)
• Don't You Sass Me, Mr. Micro-Smartypants! is a humor piece we couldn't resist including that talks about how things might go if Judge Judy was in charge of the Microsoft trial. It's from - believe it or not - The New York Times. (Free registration required to read.)

Necessary Legal Disclaimer: Although three out of our four panelists are attorneys, all they are providing here is speculation. While our panelists are smart and well-read, no one can predict the future accurately, so you should not base business or personal decisions on their answers to Slashdot readers' questions. For legal or investment advice, please arrange a personal consultation with a qualified professional.

Now Let's Get Down to Business

As usual, moderators will select the most interesting questions, and Tuesday afternoon Slashdot editors will do the final "cut" and forward 10 - 15 chosen questions to the panelists - who are all Slashdot readers, just so you know. Answers will appear Friday. So ask away!

This week, for your questioning pleasure, we have assembled a four-member panel of antitrust experts who are willing to speculate on what might happen to Microsoft next - if anything. But before you start posting questions, please hit some of the links we've provided to several other stories about the potential results of Judge Jackson's Nov. 5 Findings of Fact. (more below)

First, let's introduce our guests:

Don Weightman was the gentleman who did our Instant Legal Analysis immediately after the Findings of Fact announcement. We had many requests for him as an interview guest. So here he is.

Richard Hawkins engaged in the general practice of law for five years prior to obtaining his Ph.D. in Economics and Statistics. He is currently a visiting assistant professor of economics at the University of Northern Iowa, and practices only in antitrust and other economic issues in the law. His past includes both hardware and software development, including the mail-merge patch for LyX.

John Lederer is a retired lawyer in Oregon, Wisconsin. He is currently active in technology and intellectual property issues. He practiced in the antitrust and transportation areas and argued three U.S., Supreme Court cases.

David Niemi is a system engineer with a background in economics as well as software. He has been administering and developing for UNIX and Linux since 1987, and has been following Microsoft's antitrust adventures closely since 1993.

Next, a few selected stories about the Microsoft Saga that you may not have read:

• Findings of Fact, A Two-Themed Opus (from The Linux Show.)
• Jerry's Take On The Microsoft Decision: Wrong! (Jerry Pournelle in Byte.)
• Microsoft willing to settle antitrust case (from the Boston Globe.)
• Now bust Microsoft's trust (from The Economist.)
• Militant Microsofties Bunker mentality... (from SF Gate.)
• Don't You Sass Me, Mr. Micro-Smartypants! is a humor piece we couldn't resist including that talks about how things might go if Judge Judy was in charge of the Microsoft trial. It's from - believe it or not - The New York Times. (Free registration required to read.)

Necessary Legal Disclaimer: Although three out of our four panelists are attorneys, all they are providing here is speculation. While our panelists are smart and well-read, no one can predict the future accurately, so you should not base business or personal decisions on their answers to Slashdot readers' questions. For legal or investment advice, please arrange a personal consultation with a qualified professional.

Now Let's Get Down to Business

As usual, moderators will select the most interesting questions, and Tuesday afternoon Slashdot editors will do the final "cut" and forward 10 - 15 chosen questions to the panelists - who are all Slashdot readers, just so you know. Answers will appear Friday. So ask away!

As you might expect, the whole freakin' internet is abuzz with news about Microsoft. Now personally I'm pretty sick of reading about it, so I've decided to combine a bunch of relevant stories and post 'em quickie style now: Yahoo is running a story about the Wave of Lawsuits following Jacksons ruling. The Drudge Report is saying the prosecution won't settle unless Microsoft is broken up. Byte has Jerry Pournelle's take (he's against it). The NY Times has story talking about a breakup, as well as a forced source code release.

Mephistopholies sent /. a link to an AP article about this Washington hearing, but I prefer the more complete NY Times story about it. The Federal Trade Commission is being asked to examine web profiling and tracking technology as used by the likes of Doubleclick to track users across multiple sites. The article also notes that it is likely some sort of bill to facilitate taking away individuals' domain names (you may have heard this spun as an "anti-cybersquatting" bill) will pass this year.

A side note: slashdot readers who like YRO stories should realize that we will posting an increasing number of them in the YRO section only - they won't ever appear on the main page of slashdot.org, but will be accessible via the Sections link on the left side of the page, and there's a YRO slashbox now, too, so you can see the headlines for YRO on the home page if you so desire (and are minimally competent at setting your user preferences).

davie writes " A patent has just been issued for what amounts to a disposable cell phone. No LCD, limited battery life, outgoing calls only. The inventor envisions these devices being sold with a limited block of air time, about 60 minutes, at a cost of about $20. Once you use up the air time, toss it. " And, hey, if it means it can be thrown in a bucket of water and you can just get a new one, that's even better!

Can you say "controversial figure," boys and girls? Within the hacker/cracker crowd, nobody stirs up as much noise as John "JP" Vranesevich, founder and owner of the computer security site AntiOnline.com. This is your chance to go straight to the source and ask John himself what's up with all the sound and fury that always seems to surrounds him. (Punch the "Read More" link to continue.)

Before you start posting questions for John, you may want to learn a little more about him. First check his Web site, AntiOnline. Then take a look at this story about him in The New York Times (free registration required). And, for a sample of the kind of animosity John has stirred up among some members of the "inner circle "hacker/cracker and computer security crowd, you might want to check this site, too.

We expect this interview to be full of fire. Fine. We have our flameshields set to "high." But realize that the questions we forward to to JP Tuesday afternoon are subject to our usual screening process; we're only going to send him the 10 - 15 questions deemed most interesting and/or relevant by Slashdot moderators and editors, so please try to be as level-headed as possible.

John's answers will appear Friday.

Can you say "controversial figure," boys and girls? Within the hacker/cracker crowd, nobody stirs up as much noise as John "JP" Vranesevich, founder and owner of the computer security site AntiOnline.com. This is your chance to go straight to the source and ask John himself what's up with all the sound and fury that always seems to surrounds him. (Punch the "Read More" link to continue.)

Before you start posting questions for John, you may want to learn a little more about him. First check his Web site, AntiOnline. Then take a look at this story about him in The New York Times (free registration required). And, for a sample of the kind of animosity John has stirred up among some members of the "inner circle "hacker/cracker and computer security crowd, you might want to check this site, too.

We expect this interview to be full of fire. Fine. We have our flameshields set to "high." But realize that the questions we forward to to JP Tuesday afternoon are subject to our usual screening process; we're only going to send him the 10 - 15 questions deemed most interesting and/or relevant by Slashdot moderators and editors, so please try to be as level-headed as possible.

John's answers will appear Friday.

TRUSTe, the steward of the most visible symbol on the internet, is making a tough decision today. Today, it reveals what it intends to do about its client Real Networks. At stake is whatever's left of its credibility. (Update: 11/08 02:55: Real got off on a technicality: "because the transmission of user data ... did not involve collection of data on the RealNetworks Web site, the privacy incident was outside of the scope of TRUSTe's current privacy seal program.")

Unquestionably TRUSTe is the leader in third-party privacy assurance. Its only alternative is BBBOnline, which can boast only 100 members to TRUSTe's 750. But it's having a hard time living up to its motto, "Building a web you can believe in": sometimes it's hard to know what to believe.

TRUSTe's original idea was to allow a website to display one of three icons, indicating whether its privacy policy was good, ok, or bad. There turned out to be problems with this - strangely enough, no site wanted to post an icon saying that their privacy sucked - and the icons looked too similar anyway. So they went with one icon, a "badge" that every member site posts.

All the badge means is that the site has a privacy policy, and that, as far as TRUSTe knows, they haven't violated it.

If you think this is a questionable basis for a consumer advocacy group, you're right. But the real question is how it plays out in practice. Let's take a look at TRUSTe's track record.

Round I: TRUSTe and GeoCities. In June 1998, the FTC announced - to everyone's surprise - that it and GeoCities had come to a settlement regarding violations of consumer privacy.

Everyone was surprised because this was the first anyone had heard of it. Where was TRUSTe?

Caught flat-footed, TRUSTe scrambled for a few days, then made its own announcement. It pointed out that GeoCities had begun the alleged privacy violations before applying to become a member (in April) and being accepted (in May). Therefore, TRUSTe claimed, the violations were technically not under the scope of their investigation.

But turn that around and put it another way - it was able to become a TRUSTe member even while under investigation by the FTC, and TRUSTe said nothing.

It gets worse. The FTC and GeoCities issued conflicting releases about what the settlement actually meant. The FTC said that GeoCities had "misrepresented the purposes for which it was collecting personal identifying information" (including children's). GeoCities denied the charges.

So who was right? We still don't know. Despite this being precisely the issue that TRUSTe was set up to resolve, TRUSTe refused to confirm or deny the FTC's allegations.

In a 1998 open letter, I asked whether TRUSTe's initial review of GeoCities had included any really tough questions such as "are you currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission?" No answer. In fact, mention of the GeoCities incident seems to have been removed from TRUSTe's website.

The organization that wanted to make the FTC obsolete was not off to a good start.

Round II: TRUSTe and Microsoft. March 1999. This was the "Global User ID" case. It turned out Microsoft had been embedding a user ID into every document you created with their software. Since they put that ID on file when you registered their software, they have been capable for years of tracking authorship of even supposedly-anonymous documents.

And don't think it's just a theoretical concern. Just weeks later, the Melissa macro virus was unleashed, and its author was tracked down using this same ID. Any technology that can lead the cops to your door is potentially dangerous technology.

TRUSTe announced that this "compromises consumer trust and privacy" (duh), but said that since the Global User ID does not, strictly speaking, involve the Microsoft.com website, it had no jurisdiction. Their conclusion: "TRUSTe has determined that Microsoft.com was in compliance with all TRUSTe principles."

In reality, Microsoft's privacy page (prominently labeled with the TRUSTe seal) also discusses online registration of software products, and notes that the "personal profile" from their software registration appears on the website and is editable from the website. And that page claims that registration is covered by the TRUSTe guidelines. For TRUSTe to claim it's not requires some Clintonesque redefinitions.

CNET's headline was exactly right: "TRUSTe Clears Microsoft on Technicality."

Round III: TRUSTe and Deja News. April 1999. Again TRUSTe is taken by surprise when a computer sleuth discovers that Deja News has been collecting data on email sent by its users. When a reader clicked on an email link in a discussion posting, the destination email address was recorded, along with the presumable topic of discussion, the sender's IP number, and if registered, the sender's personal data.

This is not what one expects when sending private email! And this clearly involved Deja's website, so there was no question of another technicality.

TRUSTe's analysis of this situation was only two paragraphs long; here's all that happened:

"TRUSTe specified certain clarifying language to be included in the privacy statement. Deja News, independent of TRUSTe, then decided to discontinue the practice of tracking IP addresses in conjunction with the mail-to feature."

In fact, the situation was resolved long before TRUSTe even bothered to issue that statement. TRUSTe's suggestion of "clarifying language" had been obviated long before by Deja's indepedent action. See ZDNet's story of May 4th, which hopes that TRUSTe "will likely issue some sort of statement...this week." But TRUSTe stayed silent for four weeks.

Round IV: TRUSTe and Microsoft (again). A wide-open security hole in Microsoft's Hotmail is breached, and for a few hours everyone's inboxes are public domain. (If you don't think this is a serious privacy violation, read the stunning anonymous tale of cracking into an enemy's email, published on Salon.com the next day.)

TRUSTe's response is to call in an independent accounting firm to talk with Hotmail's programmers and security people, look over the source code, and generally try to make sure such a problem won't happen again. This isn't a bad idea - it just wasn't much of anything that Microsoft wouldn't have done on its own. Locking the barn door after the horse is gone doesn't help the people whose privacy has been lost. Microsoft is out of pocket a few bucks for the audit, and gets more than its money's worth by being able to say that TRUSTe still gives them a clean bill of health.

How can all these incidents have passed by without punishment of any kind? It's because of what TRUSTe is actually guaranteeing. Not that any company will actually keep its data private - but that the company is not lying in its privacy assurance.

That's right. You know those privacy promises you never read, the ones that are different on every website and all seem ten pages long? What TRUSTe does is promise you that, if you had read them, you'd know your rights.

If it wanted, a company could have its lawyers dress up "we will spam your email every day and sell your name and address to anyone who asks for them" in legalese, and get a TRUSTe badge on their homepage. Would you know you were being screwed? Not unless you speak fluent lawyer.

Is the FTC such a bogeyman that we really need to sell our privacy so cheap?

When Ralph Nader was pressing the government to impose strict safety standards on the auto industry, Henry Ford II complained that they were "unreasonable, arbitrary and technically unfeasible." After the laws were enacted anyway, a decade later he conceded: "We wouldn't have [these] kinds of safety ... unless there had been a federal law."

Imagine if our only automotive safety regulations were that Detroit must abide by its lawyers' fine print!

The usual argument is that requiring an actual guarantee of privacy would stifle business. The purpose in forming TRUSTe was to keep the internet corporation-friendly, by keeping the government out. TRUSTe was well-intentioned, no question. It was a noble experiment.

But, according to some influential people and groups, it has failed.

Forrester Research studies topics related to the internet and made privacy its concern in its September 1999 report, "Privacy Wake-Up Call." Its conclusions should not be surprising:

"Most privacy policies are a joke." Forrester says corporate privacy policies are legalese set up mostly to protect the corporations.

"Few companies meet key privacy protection principles." About 10%.

"Third-party programs show little traction." Hundreds of TRUSTe licensees don't amount to much on the billion-page net.

And, "third-party privacy firms...like TRUSTe...become more of a privacy advocate for industry rather than for consumers."

(Slashdot has more on this study.)

Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after years of straddling the fence on the issue, has finally recognized that self-policing just doesn't work. The EFF is not just the best-recognized internet rights advocacy group; it created TRUSTe.

Yet, in an October letter to the FTC, the EFF laid down its cards:

"Creation of TRUSTe and its seal program was one such early innovation of EFF. TRUSTe was successful in several areas. ... We now must move out of this awareness-raising mode and into an action mode where real protection can be achieved. Legislation is needed in order to achieve that goal. ... we think it is time to move away from a strict self-regulation approach to protecting privacy online."

The latest nail in the coffin came on November 1, when EFF Program Director Stanton McCandlish laid out the facts on the fight-censorship mailing list:

"Our stance has basically been that industry self-reg would be worth trying, but might or might not be enough. We did the 'proof of concept' ourselves, by launching and spinning off TRUSTe. But TRUSTe was intended to be and is a separate, independent entity, and was created as an experiment. The experiment is in many ways a failure..."

(McCandlish's personal opinion is even more scathing. Follow the link to read it.)

You wouldn't know this if you read the TRUSTe website. Their homepage proudly tells you about the six-month-old Georgetown study, but makes no mention of the Forrester Research report. It tells you that the FTC supports self-regulation (based on Georgetown), but won't tell you that its own parent, the EFF, thinks the ride is over.

If TRUSTe is a consumer rights and advocacy group, why are they only feeding us the feel-good stories? Aren't consumer groups supposed to be the ones that dig up dirt and tell us about potential problems?

The money trail leads to the answer. TRUSTe isn't a consumer advocacy group. TRUSTe doesn't get its money from consumers. Its money comes from corporate sponsors, and nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them. Besides, those corporations want the message to be one of constant calm. Concerned customers are not good for sales.

Remember the GeoCities FTC findings that TRUSTe wouldn't comment on? GeoCities had just done an IPO and millions of dollars were at stake. GeoCities' sister corporation Engage Technologies (they are both subsidiaries of CMG Industries) was a Contributing Corporate Sponsor of TRUSTe. That conflict of interest was never mentioned.

(GeoCities has since been purchased by Yahoo.)

Remember the Microsoft incidents that TRUSTe waffled on? Microsoft is not just a member, but also a Premier Corporate Sponsor of TRUSTe. That conflict of interest totals $100,000 per year.

Round V. By now you've guessed that this is leading up to the current furor over Real Networks. Real is a TRUSTe member. Do I need to mention that it's also a Contributing Corporate Sponsor?

TRUSTe said that it would render judgement on Real Networks by the end of last week. Now it's saying today.

And it's making noises like they're actually going to do something this time:

"We could take the company to court for breach of contract, since they do have an agreement with us. Or, we can forward the case to the FTC... I guarantee that the damage to the reputation of the first company that we do that to will be big."

For its own sake, it had better. We're talking about a company whose product is a Trojan Horse that secretly scans your hard drive for valuable personal data. If TRUSTe doesn't unload with both barrels, its credibility will be negative zero.

Anything TRUSTe does may have a negligable effect in any case. Corporations only understand the bottom line, and RealNetworks stock shot up 25% in the five days following the privacy debacle. With the company's market cap $1.9 billion higher than it was a week ago, how much are they really going to care about some nonprofit gnat?

We can hope. Real.com today unveiled its new website, a music portal, which investors will be watching carefully. Also happening today is a conference held by the FTC and Commerce Department for data-profilers to announce what they're going to do to protect privacy. So if TRUSTe were trying to maximize the effect of their announcement, today would be the day they'd pick. It could be that the gnat will have a nasty bite that surprises everyone.

Still - you can dress an organization up in not-for-profit clothes, but that doesn't change that it's beholden to its revenue stream. TRUSTe says we can trust them to be objective, on the theory that their revenue stream will dry up if they don't do right by consumers. So far, there doesn't seem to be much truth to that. They haven't been doing us right, but their number of contributors and members just keeps growing.

I enjoy reading about the future envisioned by people like Gibson and Stephenson, where the net is totally unregulated and a "right to privacy" is a dim memory, or a joke. That doesn't mean I want to live in that future. Europe has consumer protection laws that are, from an American perspective, astonishingly strong. Maybe we should take a look at other countries' solutions, to see if there's something we could learn.

So far, all we've learned is what fails.

- Jamie McCarthy

kcarnold wrote to us with a discussion piece about the digital television standards, covering both what the government is trying, the Sinclair effort as well as some of the technical aspects. Click below to read more or just add your voice to the debate.

I wanted to know what Slashdotters thought about the COFDM vs. 8VSB digital television transmission standard issue. However, I was suprised to find nothing related to this topic in a Slashdot search. This is an important issue, and it's a big one: almost half of the broadcast television stations in the US support the movement, lead by Sinclair Broadcast Group, to change the standard.

Here's the issue (another NY Times article talks about this -- search for DTV). Digital television, or DTV, is projected to replace America's current NTSC transmission system sometime in the earle 21st century. Stations have already begun to move to the new trasmission format. It promises better picture quality, no ghosting, and (here's the big one for "nerds") 19.2 megabits per second of raw binary data. One of the major forseen applications is delivering data like the data on the PointCast Network to mobile devices. Of course, however, the main application is television. Broadcasters have a choice: either they can transmit one channel of amazingly high-resolution, stunningly detailed high-quality video (HDTV), or several channels (4, I think) of standard-quality video, which is better than the video of the current system because there is no ghosting and fading up until a point where it doesn't come in at all. The issue centers over that point.

The current system is known as 8VSB, and it passed advanced laboratory testing and even some basic field testing almost ten years ago. However, last year, when Sinclair did actual, in-home, average-viewer's-setup testing of this system, it didn't work as well as the NTSC system. They could not receive HDTV signals from a station near an NTSC station whose picture came in clear. Then Sinclair did more, and more detailed, tests at home in Baltimore. This time they brought for comparison a sample modulator for the European transmission system called COFDM, and a demodulator / decoder box to receive it. They tried it in streets with tall buildings, parking garages, and apartments, all places where multipath, which causes ghosting, is prevalent. Each time they tested the two systems--European COFDM and American 8VSB, the COFDM receiver picked out its signal without fail--"It was hard to find a place where it didn't work," says my dad, who was part of the testing--but it was hard to find a spot where 8VSB would work. Continued testing convinced Sinclair officials that the current system would not be able to work in the real world, and are pushing for a change to COFDM, a system that has been proven in Europe. They wrote up a petition to the FCC, and almost half of the television stations of the US have signed it.

Aaron M. Renn writes "A group is filing a lawsuit against AOL claiming that site is not accessible to the blind. If successful, this lawsuit could subject almost every website (and certainly every commercial one) to massive government regulation for disability access." The ADA only applies to businesses, so there's no chance you'll have to make your personal site accessible if you don't want to. Rules requiring government agencies to make their websites accessible are now being drafted as well... Good website design generally suggests that it should be accessible to as many people as possible; why can't AOL use ALT tags?

pq writes "The NY Times has a progress report on molecular computers: the results are finally rolling in. This July, HP and UCLA reported molecular logic gates; now Yale and Rice are reporting the ability to cycle those gates on/off and HP is announcing conducting wires less than a dozen atoms across. Interesting review - to quote, `this should scare the pants off anyone working in silicon.' " Mmmm...nano.

kbrown1 was the first one to write to us with the story at the NY Times that RealNetworks' has confirmed that they do monitor some user habits. RealJukeBox is the offending program, and apparently "surreptitiously monitors the listening habits and certain other activities of people who use it and continually reports this information, along with the user's identity, to RealNetworks." RealNetworks' has said that they do gather the information, but "the practice did not violate consumer privacy because the information was not being stored by RealNetworks nor distributed to other companies," according to their VP of consumer products. Other networks are picking up the news - more details should be coming.

male writes "A couple of ambulance chasers found out that Toshiba ignored a minor bug in it's hardware ten years ago, and is now suing them over it. Now Toshiba could be out 2 billion (with a B) dollars! The guys who brought the suit get a couple thousand, and the lawyers get a over 100 million... " You should read this article. It's pretty freaky.

Even though violence among the young is dropping sharply, a federal law enforcement agency and a private threat-evaluation security firm have teamed up to develop a software program that will be tested in 20 schools around the country in December. Mosaic-2000 will look for "troubled" kids. Geek students are sounding the alarm at this mind-boggling over-reaction and unthinking deployment of technology as a safety -- and profit-making --tool in education. The price of being different is going up again.

Within minutes of Sunday's announcement that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is working with a threat-evaluation company to develop a computer program that helps school administrators spot dangerous students near the brink of violence, the e-mail began.

Although the new program was widely described in the mainstream media as a valuable tool for defusing violence, plenty of geeks and nerds -- especially younger ones -- knew better, and saw it in a different, perhaps wiser, context.

"It worries me a great deal, wrote The Hollow Man. "Can you make us heard about this? Voice our concerns? This tool will be making diversity a wrong, [and will be used] for alienating and ostracizing those who are different." Hollow Man described himself as a "very, very worried geek."

But he's also a smart one, and history is on the side of his well-founded fears.

Geek Profiling, the Post-Columbine nationwide American war on the culture and lifestyles of the different, the alienated, and the non-Normal, has climbed to another Orwellian level, thanks to a federal law enforcement agency and a threat-evaluation computer program.

After the Columbine High massacre, American educators, politicians and journalists concluded that guns, values or a twisted educational system weren't the problem. It was, especially, those geeks who were online a lot, who gamed, listened to the wrong music, wore the wrong clothes, rejected sports and other reigning social conventions, engaged in rebellious, defiant or "inappropriate" speech or dress.

Even though violence -- and fear of violence -- among the young has been declining sharply for years, media and political ignorance of kids, technology and culture has only deepened. The only demonstrable links in the recent spate of horrific school shootings - still a very rare occurrence - suggest that trouble arises when emotionally-disturbed adolescent white males gain access to guns. In the months after Columbine, however, there is no federal or nationwide program to help emotionally disturbed kids or to keep them away from lethal weapons.

The answer, most schools seem to have concluded, isn't examining their own structures, values or curriculum, but in enforcing widespread conformity. Stop dressing strangely, behaving individualistically, engaging in non-traditional recreation, or speaking honestly.

Now there is Mosaic-2000, with its promised ability to confidentially (read secretly) vet and rate potentially violent students on a scale of 1 to 10. It is not yet clear where this information will be stored or who, precisely, will have access to it or for how long. But it seems plausible that anonymous complaints, aberrant behavior or teacher hostility could be stored digitally in a student file for the rest of their lives.

Some administrators can't wait to test Mosaic-2000. One Ohio principal whose school is getting Mosaic-2000 told a newspaper that Mosaic's "immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer challenge an administrator's judgement as too subjective." Now parents defending their dangerous kids will have the ATF and Mosaic to contend with as well as school bureaucrats.

Mosaic's programs, according to The New York Times, rely on carefully - worded questions about student behavior based on case histories of people who have turned violent. They're designed by Gavin de Becker Inc., a private security and software company in California (de Becker came to prominence garnering tons of publicity protecting Hollywood celebrities), and are intended to help officials discern a real threat amid varied outbursts, threats and warning signs. For the past 10 years, the company has tailored risk-assessment programs for special law-enforcement programs dealing with problems from domestic violence to terrorism.

This is an astounding elevation of the unthinking deployment of computer technology as a social -- and profit-making tool to make intuitive judgements in educational environments that often confound experts with years of training.

The Mosaic school program promises questions carefully crafted from case histories by 200 experts in law enforcement, psychiatry and other areas. It will include a variety of concerns beyond alarming talk, ranging from the availability of guns to reported abuse of domestic pets.

"I think it's a wonderful tool that has a great deal of potential, and I hope it's properly used by the schools," said Andrew Vita, associate director of field operations for the ATF, which has used the Mosaic approach to investigate abortion-clinic bombings.

Mosaic is also used by Yale University and federal courthouses to evaluate the potential for violence of individuals who make threats. None of the many media stories about Mosaic in the past few days even raised the question of why such a Draconian security program -- do we really want schools to be run like federal courthouses? -- would be deployed against schoolchildren at a time when violence among the young has dropped to its lowest levels in nearly half a century.

Don't hold your breath about that. Since it's simpler and more expedient to blame the Net and harmless subcultures like the Goths or computer games like "Doom" or TV shows like "South Park" for violence, schools have been granted what amounts to hunting licenses with few restrictions. Kids like Hollow Man have every right to be worried that they'll be punished for what they think, wear, say or do on weekends.

In any other context, a government-sponsored computer program offered by a law enforcement agency and a private security firm to enter school systems and track down certain types of students in schools would trigger howls of protest. As long as we're deploying Mosaic-2000, why stop at "potentially violent" oddballs? Why not get to the really dangerous people loose in schools, maybe programming Mosaic to hunt down and identify religious fanatics such as those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible and reject Darwin and evolution? Aren't they a threat to school science programs?

Will Mosaic be used to identify bullies who exclude, ridicule, beat up and harass kids who choose to be different, driving them into the fringes of school life?

Might it prove helpful in identifying oppressive and unimaginative educators who cling to antiquated curriculums and passive teaching environments, even though many of their brightest students have vastly more creative and stimulating lives online than they do in school?

What about social cliques that believe the most important part of their school year centers around parties where they drink themselves into oblivion and, afterwards, are prone to elevated rates of sexual assault and automobile accidents?

Or school administrators and guidance counselors who know so little about some of their students or the nature of their own schools that they are shocked and uncomprehending when some kids become severely disturbed or enraged, even sometimes to the point of stockpiling and using guns and bombs?

Hollow Man and most geeks and other know better. Mosaic 2000 is out to vet them, and others who dares to define themselves differently from the normal as defined by unknown people working for private firms and government agencies.

Federal law enforcement agencies and private, for profit security companies have no legal mandate or business in schools, deploying computer programs to compile information on kids.

Federal agencies like the ATF and DEA haven't been able to put much of a dent in gun or drug traffic. Why would anybody cede them the duty of sifting through the complex sociocultural world of high school?

Programs like Mosaic-2000 are another nightmare from the Hellmouth that school is for so many kids. They are an abdication of responsibility and a lame excuse for schools to seek out the often creative, individualistic, idiosyncratic and rebellious students with whom they have battled for eons, and who cause them so many problems.

Violence is almost never one of them.

hoppy wrote to us in regards to the recent EE Times article about a tuberculosis detecting biochip. The United States and Russia are teaming up to make the chip, as variant drug-resistant strains are infecting thousands in Russian jails, and making a big comeback in poorer areas in the US. The chip will be used to identify the strain of TB, so that appropriate treatment can be used, rather then the shotgun approach In other news, James Clark, co-founder of SGI and Netscape has given 150 million US to his former school, Stanford. The donation is to be used just for biotech.

rw2 wrote to us with an interview with Clarke in the NY Times. Login, of course, is required, but the interview is worth reading. Talks about space elevators, Kubrick & 2001 amongst other interesting subjects.

A reader writes "The Times is running this story which talks about a pilot program, called Mosiac 2000, for a software program which is supposed to vet how violent a person is. It's being rolled out to high schools around the United States (20 to start) as a test-bed, in anticipation of more schools getting on board. The program will be used to grade a person's potential for violence against others, and hopes to stop any future Columbines. " Stuff like this just gives me the willies - must everyone conform to one set standard? Just because I'm different doesn't mean I'm violent.

Your Mama writes "Just how malleable is the brain? How easily can a person overcome the forces -- genetic and environmental -- that shape a creature from birth? Over the last few weeks, evidence has emerged that throws these questions into a new light. The NY Times has the article" (The usual "free NYT registration required" notice would be here if we weren't so bored with it.)

rde writes "Everyone's favourite free-subscription-needed paper, the New York Times has an interesting piece on Lego's appeal to programmers and inventors, amongst others. " I still have all of mine from childhood. I could construct an industrial park out of all of them.

rde writes "Everyone's favourite free-subscription-needed paper, the New York Times has an interesting piece on Lego's appeal to programmers and inventors, amongst others. " I still have all of mine from childhood. I could construct an industrial park out of all of them.

Weramona writes "The Times is running an article on the possibility of Balkanization of Linux, due to commercialization. To be fair, both sides are presented, and it isn't all that sensationalist. The article is aimed rather low ("Unix was created in 1969 by..."). What's funny to me is, a couple months ago, this was a favorite "Damn the Man" conspiracy theory on /. " Its the times so you need a free account to read the story, but its a pretty good piece so its worth it.

Weramona writes "The Times is running an article on the possibility of Balkanization of Linux, due to commercialization. To be fair, both sides are presented, and it isn't all that sensationalist. The article is aimed rather low ("Unix was created in 1969 by..."). What's funny to me is, a couple months ago, this was a favorite "Damn the Man" conspiracy theory on /. " Its the times so you need a free account to read the story, but its a pretty good piece so its worth it.

Dan Rieder writes "There is an article in the NYTimes about OpenBSD and Cryptography. The article deals with issues surrounding the export of cryptography and the fact that many 3 letter US government agencies are now using OpenBSD. Free subscription required to read."

Dan Rieder writes "There is an article in the NYTimes about OpenBSD and Cryptography. The article deals with issues surrounding the export of cryptography and the fact that many 3 letter US government agencies are now using OpenBSD. Free subscription required to read."

What the world needs a really good webpage explaining the importance of ICANN in plain English. Until someone writes it, we'll just keep bringing you the news. This week, the controversial organization begins replacing its 9-member interim board with an 18-member real board. There are interesting tidbits in both the New York Times story (free reg. required) and the CNET story.

The New York Times today reports that the Easing on Software Exports Has Limits. (Free reg. required.) Turns out the administration's recent change of heart on crypto specifically excludes open-source software. "When it comes to source code ... 'nothing has changed.'"