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The U.S.Gov't is already set to pass a National ID law. And as an added bonus our friends in Canada and Mexico will have free&easy access to it.

http://www.politechbot.com/2005/05/04/real-id-act/
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/04/07/opin ion/op-ed/25oped08plummer.txt

For all those that say Gore didn't claim to invent the net I include the following.

Ok, so you indicate that you're about to show that he claimed to have *invented* the internet. But then you quote Gore as having said:

I took the initiative in creating the Internet

I'd just like to make two points here:
1) If you question Gore's role in CREATING the internet, why don't you read what the guys who INVENTED the internet have to say about the matter.
2) "Invent" is not the same as "create". Last week I created a meatloaf in my kitchen. I did not *invent* meatloaf.

1) "Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet." - Vint Cerf

and

2) the whole thing -- http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html

Unfortunately you're taking a narrow and blind line of reasoning here. Gore's statement in the Blitzer interview was directly referring to Gore's 1990 education bill, which had a huge impact on taking the small government project known as ARPANET into the wider scope we call today's Internet. but then I suppose you're a better authority on the subject than Vint Cerf (who backs Gore's claim and is infinitely more important to the creation of the Internet than you or me).

It sounded like he, like most politicians, was trying to take credit for it.

Maybe so, but it was well-deserved credit. Even Vint Cerf, widely considered one of the Internet's main creators (if not its "father") said so:

http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html/

For instance, I am strongly opposed to this "paper receipts" idea. The reason why current election law prohibits anybody from taking anything away from a polling place that can be used to determine how that person voted is to prevent vote coercion. "Vote for John Smith or I'll break your kneecaps," says the hired goon. When you come out of the polling place he demands to see your receipt. No receipt, no way to coerce voters.

So that's why you use secure receipts. Known problem, known solution, just waiting for will and implementation.

You describe a problem with a simplistic implementation of receipts and then proceed to blast the entire concept. Actually, that's pretty close to how people on the other side of the DRM issue from you feel - the current implementations are poor and onerous - when they're not they'll be OK with it.

Here's an example where Apple did this before. If you're such an expert in this, 99 Bottles, let us know what happened in these cases from Auguest 2000. Was it open and shut in Apple's favor as you so hastily claim? Or does this precedent, actually involving one of the same litigants (Apple), over the same issues, tell us something different about how court's view the First Amendment, Journalism, and lawsuits meant to discourage publication of anonymously-sourced news?

MS must be the god of Scientology

Anyway, the major news is about Wal-Mart. That's intersting to know such thing. Now what really matters is what information they gather and how?

Remember such stories about RFID at Wal-Mart? I remember a story about Wal-Mart illegally using it on test products.

My 2 cents...

he was intimating that he helped foster the environment where the internet could flourish. Unfortunatly, this is probably not true either

Wrong. The two men who, more than anyone else, *can* claim to have invented the internet, back up Al Gore on this one.

This recent post at Politech seems to be on the subject. It has a few alternatives and explains the pros and cons of some of them.

This recent post at Politech seems to be on the subject. It has a few alternatives and explains the pros and cons of some of them.

There was an interesting exchange between the Competitive Enterprise Institute which claims Linux is unsuitable for government, business use and Julian Sanchez from the Cato Institute, who thinks government should consider OSS if it fits their needs.

Comcast, get your damned eyeballs off my broadband connection, it's none of your friking business.

Comcast has been watch you since its inception. The were popped for monitoring all user traffic as far back as 2002. Apparently the trend continues.

From a statement issued by Comcast Cable Communications President Stephen B. Burke, Feb 13, 2002 (as reported on politechbot.com).

Since we launched our own Internet network six weeks ago in the wake of Excite@Home's bankruptcy, IP and URL information has been stored temporarily. This information has never been connected to individual subscribers and has been purged automatically to protect subscriber privacy. Beginning immediately, we will stop storing this individual customer information in order to completely reassure our customers that the privacy of their information is secure.

Makes me glad that Comcast failed (*refused*) to set up my connection last week. I can now terminate their service with prejudice.

A camera tapes you. If one tape-reviewer doesn't know you, he can ask until he finds someone who does. The tape can be matched with other tapes to see where you were and where you're going. The tape will be stored and reviewed by ever better automatic recognition tech, and those results stored in ever larger and cheaper databases.

I think this is a quantitative change in the "expectation of privacy" one has in public.

We are getting very close to "P-day" (coined by Brad Templeton): the last day of privacy, because from then on all our actions will be tracked retroactively if not currently. Or, as he puts it: "So you're already being watched. The computer that is watching you just hasn't been born quite yet."

Two good essays on why this type of surveillance hurts society and violates our rights:

• From the Best Essay Ever on why privacy is a fundamental right: [Its not too long- just go read it]

  "[Talking about Canada...] If these measures are allowed to go forward and the privacy-invasive principles they represent are accepted [then before long] our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed through proliferating police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these cameras will likely be linked to biometric face-recognition technologies ... [indentifying] us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding business in the streets... I am well aware that these scenarios are likely to sound, to most people, like alarmist exaggeration. Certainly, the society I am describing bears no relation to the Canada we know. But anyone who is inclined to dismiss the risks out of hand should pause first to consider that the privacy-invasive measures already being implemented or developed right now would have been considered unthinkable in our country just a short year ago."

  The place to stop unjustified intrusions on a fundamental human right such as privacy is right at the outset, at the very first attempt to enter where the state has no business treading. Otherwise, the terrain will have been conceded, and the battle lost...

  Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do...

  If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl...Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.

• A Watched Populace Never Boils "People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom. ... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety. But the truth is that invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is.

  When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselve

You are a Canadian living in Fremont California; I dont know what Canadians believe about their rights, but you are definetly wrong about driving being a priveledge in the USA.

If the government can take away your right to drive a car, they can take away your right to drive a bicycle, and in any case, try telling a mother of three to BICYCLE ten miles to get her groceries, with her children, and then get them home.

Im not even going to comment on the absurd suggestion that people walk instead of drive.

Choosing your mode of transport is a right, not a priveledge; you might want to look up the definition of the words "priveledge" and "right" so that you might understand the difference.

And, in case you were not following, the us government is now making flying on airplanes internally a priveledge; one that is handed out by them and them alone. That is wrong.

Of course when it comes to your own activities, you think that you have the right to run whatever software you want on your machines (LFS), and that this is not a priveledge. Your kind of thinking makes it easier to remove your rights to program whatever you want - use your head!

Your existing songs won't become useless, you just won't be able to buy any new ones.

Not true. It's illegal under Apple's licence and if you need to reinstall your software you're toast.

From Politech.

"I've recently moved to Canada and just this week had a problem with my PowerBook that called for me undertaking a reinstall. After firing up iTunes and attempting to play purchased songs, I was asked to reauthorize those songs, using the Apple ID associated with the purchase. No problem, I
thought. This is the Apple Music Store, not PressPlay or MusicNet. I paid for these songs and they're mine. Silly me. Apparently, if you change your contact address and/or have your US credit card address changed, as I did, you are no longer able to play the songs you paid for while on US soil.

After going back and forth with AMS customer support, they pointed me to the terms of sale policy, and there it is in the very first paragraph:
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/musicstore/policies .html

So, shame on me for not reading the fine print. But if you're spending money with Apple and plan a departure from the States any time soon, your money would be better spent on little round platters."

I don't see what the bitching is about. Is it "that" wrong to brand the homeless like cattle, use orphans for lab rats, during these times? During these times when al Qaeda... WHOA! THERE IS A TERRORIST ALERT. Sorry false post. Again, is there anything wrong with Big Brother coming for their fair share? Sheesh there is no conspiracy here, big brother only wants your share of the pie. Run along now, go play with Orkut. Everything is fine, there is nothing to fear.

Full GPS receivers in each phone are very expensive, require lots of power and only work with a good view of the sky. 50 m accuracy requires at least 3 good SVs in view. While many customers would really like this feature, I do not know of any phones in which it has been implemented.

AGPS uses a reference GPS receiver in each tower that sends SV data to the mobile handset. The handset does not have a full GPS installed; instead it uses the SV data to receive the time pulses from a single SV and sends the time delta to the tower. The tower is then able to compute the position of the phone via a differential calculation and log it for E991 compliance. It is typically accurate to 100 m indoors and 15 m outdoors.

Most new phones that are E911 capable or offer "Location Based Services" are built with AGPS. So they don't have a real GPS receiver that you could use, but the network can determine your position. It is a shame that this data is not made available to the phone or the end user -- I would love to be able to write applications for my Treo that know where it is without having to add a clusmy external GPS.

In this article, posted by the same author on the same site as the RFID article , the author clearly state: "Just to be clear, the HHS RFID article was an April Fool's day joke. I certainly hope this one is as well! --Declan ".

<non-sarcasm>
Come on, why will Bush administration spend money on homeless anyway, they don't vote?

That's the further I can go without being impolite with to corrupted government.
</non-sarcasm>

In this article, posted by the same author on the same site as the RFID article , the author clearly state: "Just to be clear, the HHS RFID article was an April Fool's day joke. I certainly hope this one is as well! --Declan ".

<non-sarcasm>
Come on, why will Bush administration spend money on homeless anyway, they don't vote?

That's the further I can go without being impolite with to corrupted government.
</non-sarcasm>

I saw something about this on the Politech mailing list. You can see the post Here I do wonder when the RIAA will get Canadian Law changed, thats what a "Free Trade Agreement" is really about.

According to this politech posting by bernieS, it appears that the feds are going to be doing a little bit of double backing.

It raises an important question, I think: are keyloggers wiretapping devices? They don't involve telecommunications lines directly, so can they be considered in the same class?

Some food for thought.

The problem isn't a lack of trained and educated people as recent reports from the IEEE showing increased unemployment demonstrate.

The problem is a lack of trained and educated people willing to work for minimum wage.

Your repeating industry propaganda uncritically serves nobody except your advertisers. We expect better from Wired News.

When I tried to send this to Wired News via their contact form, the above is part of 1 of the 12 bounce messages I sent. Perhaps Wired News needs some trained and educated people to run their own computer systems. Before people start asking questions about the competence of Wired News to address technological issues. Of course, one doesn't have to have competent reporters willing to do research if their news source is recycled corporate press releases.

The article itself is just pro-outsourcing spin control. The essential industry complaint is that nobody in the USA is stupid enough to put 4 years into getting a degree that will entitle its owner to a minimum wage gig. If US companies actually want kids to study high tech, they will provide a reasonable assurance that middle-class jobs will be available for kids who study technology when they graduate from college. That's all they have to do. Instead, they are pushing college kids out of technology fields by doing the opposite. The kind of bullshit reassurances they're getting from people like Bill Gates, whose encouraging words can be translated to "Go to school and get your degree, we'll cherry-pick the best 5% of you and the rest of you have wasted tens of thousands of dollars and hours in vain pursuit of a degree which will entitle you to flip burgers" are not going to be bought by anyone smart enough to get a tech degree to begin with.

However, the best attack on outsourcing is that it is indeed a high-risk strategy. All we generally hear about from the mass media and business magazines are the "good news" stories about how wonderful it is and how it's a competitive necessity. Here are some stories about outsourcing gone bad. Some of the companies discussed in the collection of articles this links to. . . are no longer with us and there's no question that their decision to outsource was responsible. It is apparent that outsourcing is being pushed without due diligence and often without regard for long-term consequences even to the companies whose investors are supposed to profit from this.

Not likely.

He DID vote for the Patriot Act too, you know.

www.lp.org

Hey, look at that, I made Slashdot!

I'm Peter Sahlstrom, the Georgia Tech student who took the photos. I thought there were a few things I should mention.

1) A friend of mine pointed the conspicuous pile of voting machines out to me, and although I took the photos, he made the phone calls. We contacted the voting people, the press, and campus security; we received almost no response. The voting people told us the machines were locked (apparently they were...but not to anything. The mainstream press ignored us. And Campus Security said that, although they had complained to the voting people previously, they kept leaving the machines out like that.

2) The thing that finally drew attention was an article I posted to Dave Farber's "Interesting People List", (here) and to Declan McCullough's Politech (here).

3) I've made the best photos available to anyone interested. The Associated Press has two; I've got about 13 more of the highest quality (or most relevant) photos available, if someone wants to throw some bandwidth at me.

If anyone else has questions about things, let me know.

Yeah, there'll be an option to turn it off, just like there is in Macromedia Fontographer to save fonts with embedding allowed (there isn't).

2001-2002
The top industries supporting Howard L. Berman are:
1 TV/Movies/Music $222,791
2 Lawyers/Law Firms $117,450


Lamar Smith also gets mondo payola from MPAA/RIAA.

Berman was one of the shills who drafted a nutty bill last session that would have allowed movie and music companies to hack into people's personal computers and networks to erase or destroy "copyrighted" material. Most notably, it indemnifies corporations against personal torts resulting from their error for damages under $250. So even if you've almost finished the greatest novel ever written but failed to find a buyer yet, if they erase it, you get nothing. If they destroy your hard drives but show the replacement value is below $250, you lose. And so on.

There is nothing Berman would not do to keep sucking at the media industry tit. Even to the degree of drafting such nonsensical law that clearly violates the "equal treament" under privilege or immunity of the 14th Amendment by immunizing corporations against felonious activities conducted by them against citizens without considering due process.

THis latest bit of nonsense is just more of the same. Obviously Smith smells some extra cash within reach and is now also busy pandering to the media conglomerates.

MATRIX is the product of the drug-running covert actors who brought us the Iran-Contra connection. Seisint is the data warehouse in Florida for these Matrix apps, started by Hank Asher. He also founded DataBase Technologies, which purged the 2000 Presidential election rolls of 57,000 voters, 95% in error, the majority of them Democrats. Prior to that, Asher flew drugs off Florida through the Bahamas for Iran-Contra. His boss was John Poindexter, director of the "doomed" federal TIA, the mother of all Matrices. A French webpage has the Seisint/DBT (translated to English) connection: Hank Asher. For extra points, Diebold's eVoting division has been run by another convicted Iran-Contra cocaine dealer.

Now the Matrix, after being rejected by Georgia for its unwarranted invasions of privacy, is making the rounds of the rest of the states which owe Bush Jr favors. Idaho governor Leavitt succeeds Governor Kempthorne, just named the previous Idaho governor, to head the EPA, as it abandons the penalty financing of SuperFund. Check your own state government for the favors it owes Bush Corp., before they sell you to the Bush cronies. Drug dealers, vote fixers, Big Brothers: these are the people we have given the power of the US government. Take a stand now, before you have nothing left to defend.

As mentioned in my rejected story sub from last week, several other states are already participating in MATRIX.

For more information, you can look at the MATRIX homepage, listen to an NPR program, read some newspaper columns, a findlaw article, and a politechbot writup.

The list of participating states can be found here.

Not three hours after this comment, someone mailed this to Declan's Politech list, a cheat sheet for computer illeterate journalists angling for something to stay more relevant than the typewriters they still swear by. And then the very next day, we see three different articles with variations on this very topic. Five bucks says the next issue of eWeek borrows in their next issue as well.

Yes, as always, none of the stories credited Politech, though the names of the authors who borrow liberally are always the same. And Politech didn't credit Slashdot, where the Politech submitters borrow a full half of their stories with equal disregard for journalistic integrity. Indeed, the only time Politech credits Slashdot is when they believe Slash has said something stupid. These reporters are hooked on the easy source of stories, yet trash it publicly for fear others will find the tool that's kept them from having to do actual reporting anymore.

I may be here to take Linux away from you, but you can't argue that I don't give something back. You hate me. But you love me too, and you hate that as well. Think of it, you see me just the way others see Slashdot.

If you'd like to track Politech's ongoing plagiarism of Slashdot, jump on their free mailing list and have a laugh. Watch the submissions. Watch each story jump from Slash to Politech (search the comments after each new Politech post and you'll find the original +4 or +5 comment 4 times in 5), then check the NY Times, Barron's, and Ziff Davis Publishing for the same authors publishing borrowed stories the very next issue. They do it like clockwork, because these "tech" journalists don't realize that we're on the internet too.

~Darl

• Amtrak Helps DEA Hunt Drug Couriers, Albuquerque Journal, April 11, 2001. (Ed.: link broken)
• Amtrak shares passenger info with DEA for drug prosecutions, Declan
  McCullagh's politechbot.com, April 11, 2001.
• Your Rights Online: Keeping DEA In The Loop About Amtrak Travelers, Slashdot, April 15, 2001.
• Amtrak 'Sharing' Information With D.E.A., New York Times, April 15, 2001 (registration required).

Bob [Kahn] and I believe that the vice president [Al Gore] deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet.

The article says that it, and the earlier "No Electronic Theft Act" (who's heard of that one?), make copyright infrigement a felony.

And Gillette did about the same, too.

You seem to like spamcop reports and have entertained the thought of automatically banning people by parsing the spam reports you receive. This should be treated with a great deal of caution unless you want to be responsible for fiascos like this or this.

Relying upon some of the kooks who use spamcop to make the determination as to which of your users should be "killed" is not wise and I think your management has made the right decision. Certainly automating the process of sorting the complaints into wheat or chaff and cross referencing them to user accounts is worthwhile, but this should be an aid to human review and not an end in itself.

Having scripts which automatically hit the kill button is open to abuse - so it will be abused.

No coincidence. The list is up and running just fine, with messages posted to the web site this morning. I just haven't reintalled mhonarc on the new server. See: http://politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/2003-Oct ober/date.html

Also note from Declan's website:

9/24/2003 update: I'm in the middle of moving Politech to Mailman, so the usual archive below is not up-to-date. Instead see the temporary Mailman archives. Thanks, Declan

His last article there was 2003-09-15. He received a letter from the FBI on 2003-09-19. Coincidence?

Since we're all suspected terrorists anyway.

(Also this is a very good follow-up read if you're interested. This has also been posted on /. before (link). And there's also more links.)

I, for one, welcome our new Ashcroft overlords.

Perhaps a more interesting question: The New York Times runs its own mailing list. In the hypothetical case that reporters were allowed to post to it directly, would they enjoy reduced First Amendment protections and be covered by this law? Or, more realistically, lots of reporters operate blogs, and lots of those blogs permit comments and send email when they're updated... Perhaps all journalists will be ISPs in the future. :)

Here's a link from Declan's Politechbot archive.

For those too lazy to RTFL, the FBI is now dropping the threat of obstruction of justice charges and asking reporters to voluntarily hold on to any notes they may have, saying they hope to come to an agreement later on access to their notes.

If I were a journalist my reply would be, "Um, yeah, I may keep them, but you'll be in touch with my organization's First Amendment lawyer, and you'll see my notes over my thrown-in-jail-for-contempt-of-court body."

Here's a link from Declan's Politechbot archive.

For those too lazy to RTFL, the FBI is now dropping the threat of obstruction of justice charges and asking reporters to voluntarily hold on to any notes they may have, saying they hope to come to an agreement later on access to their notes.

If I were a journalist my reply would be, "Um, yeah, I may keep them, but you'll be in touch with my organization's First Amendment lawyer, and you'll see my notes over my thrown-in-jail-for-contempt-of-court body."

I thought the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T act made everyone in the US a suspected terrorist. That should read "300,000,000+ suspected terrorists".

Did you read that article on politechbot.com that they wouldn't let some guy wearing a little button that read "Suspected terrorist" fly on an airplane?

You are confusing Mr Ian Clarke with Mr John Gilmore. I guess you need to read Greplaw more frequently .-)

The Gilmore flight stunt has been extensively debated. Mr John Gilmore and Professor Lawrence Lessig have issued replies to the debate on Mr John Gilmore's flight-stunt. Mr John Gilmore was rejected from a flight because Mr Gilmore wore a badge saying "Suspected Terrorist". Should the flight captain have ejected Mr Gilmore because of the button or not? The discussion has been heated, not least since Mr Seth Finkelstein suggested that Mr Gilmore's behaviour was 'a millionaire's version of trolling.' Mr Gilmore counter-trolled Mr Finkelstein and got an endorsement from Professor Lessig.

Read Mr John Gilmore's reply.

Read Professor Lessig's comment.

Read Mr Seth Finkelstein's comment on the comments above.

Best regards,

Mikael

You agree to use the Service and Device only for lawful purposes. This means that you agree not to use them for transmitting or receiving any illegal, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, obscene, sexually explicit, profane, racially or ethnically disparaging remarks or otherwise objectionable material of any kind, including but not limited to any material that encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law.

Okay, preface every sentence of the above post with "In my opinion, ..." and it just begins to make sense. Spoken like a true armchair-quarterback. Your whole point is basically that "eBay should do more!" I ask you, what exactly do you want them to do?

Re: feedback. It's the buyer's responsibility to check, not ebay's. They make that very clear, and if you buy something from someone without reading their feedback and user history, you deserve to get ripped off. If ebay were to automatically take action against accounts with some level of negative feedback, they open themselves up to another vector of abuse. If I don't like merchant X I just make a bunch of accounts, make winning bids on all his auctions, and leave bad feedback -- and now his account is suspended because I'm bitter. And when you change your name, ebay keeps a record of it (and makes the history pretty clear to potential buyers) so they hardly "don't care."

They limit feedback length on purpose. It's supposed to be a short statement about the deal, so that it can be easily and quickly scanned by other users. If they let people leave pages and pages of feedback, you would get long drawn-out stories of how it was raining that day and joe-bob couldn't make it to the post office becuase his spare tire was not inflated, so it took billy an extra day to receive his widget. That doesn't benefit anyone, when "good merchant but slight delay" functions just as well. Feedback is meant to be taken as trends and in aggregate anyway... you're looking for patterns in the feedback, not specific incidents. Again, someone could always leave some long and scathing feedback becuase they're bitter (for no appropriate reason) or just out of spite.

Re: safe harbor. Again, what do you expect them to do? Give everyone that complains their money back? That's real smart, then the crooks will just abuse THAT and cost all the legit merchants money. How is ebay supposed to believe either party? In most cases one is lying and the other is telling the truth -- or worse, both are telling a near-truth but omitting or leaving out critical aspects of the story. I'm sure both sides tell a convincing story in most cases, so what exactly is ebay supposed to do? Have them both come in to a lie detector test? Make them swear on their mothers' graves? THey do the best they can, but most of the time the only thing they can do is nothing, without involving the police...

Which brings me to your whopper of a lie that they "turn a blind eye" or that it's impossible to "involve authorities." Did you not know that ebay allows cops access to almost every aspect of the site just for the asking? It's the kind of big-brother access that any good police state would wet their undies for. If you get ripped it's your responsibility to get the law involved, but once they decide to investigate ebay welcomes them with open arms.

And finally we have the notion that since ebay is paid by sellers that they couldn't give a rat's ass about the buyer. That is about the most illogical thing I've ever heard. OF COURSE they care about the buyer's experiece. If everyone on ebay was continually getting ripped off, people would have abandoned the site long ago, and there would be nothing to sell (and hence no commissions.) If all ebay cared about was the seller (to the detriment of buyers), then buyers would start leaving in droves, and ebay would become a joke. They have to strive to passify both sides equally.

I really don't have a love affair with ebay either, and I admit that it is easy to abuse. But that's more a problem of the "I'm buying something from a stranger" situation that is inherent. Other than being omnipotent, what exactly do you expect ebay to do? People always lie, and people are always greedy. If ebay abuse believed every story they received then anyone could say anything and get what they want, and that would be worse then the current situation. If you'

You don't target the plants. You hit the high-voltage transformers. They step down the power from the high-voltage long-distance power lines to the local transmission lines. There's only ~3000 in the whole United States. They're not made domestically and there's an 18 month lead time on manufacture.

You pick a municipality, e.g. New York. You get ~20 men, armed with automatic weapons and explosives. They start ~1am, and go around taking out HVTs. You have four groups; the first two hits each group makes (maybe more) meet no resistance at all, there's no security on these things beyond a padlocked gate.

By the time people realize that a coordinated attack is going on, and get armed guards capable of fighting off automatic weapons placed around the remaining HVTs, at least 30 of them are down. Restoring power takes weeks, possibly a couple of months. Imagine what that'd do to, e.g., Wall Street.

Now, imagine one of those four groups, instead of targeting HVTs, targets water mains instead. You now have a very large region without power or water. That requires a massive support effort, possibly even refugee camps. Picture the economic impact.

Pick two widely separated regions (e.g. New York and, I dunno, Dallas, Texas (they're even more dependent on water and power for survival there than most)) and you halve the damage to each one but more than double the chaos.

The only weird thing is why something like this hasn't happened yet.

Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 17:43:58 -0400

From: vinton g. cerf (vcerf@MCI.NET)
To: Declan McCullaugh (declan@well.com), farber@cis.upenn.edu
Cc: rkahn@cnri.reston.va.us
Subject: Al Gore and the Internet

Dave and Declan,

I am taking the liberty of sending to you both a brief summary of Al Gore's Internet involvement, prepared by Bob Kahn and me. As you know, there have been a seemingly unending series of jokes chiding the vice president for his assertion that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet.

I thought you might find this short summary of sufficient interest to share it with Politech and the IP lists, respectively.

===================

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

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

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

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

As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an ?Interagency Network.? Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush?s administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communica

In fact, they were mp3's of original a capella music about astronomy. On the same web page, there were references to Prof. Emeritus Peter Usher, an elderly, white, generally unhip astronomer whose recent contributions to the field include an analysis of the astronomical context of Hamlet .

The good folks of the department were kind enough to issue widely-distributed press releases mocking the RIAA, who later apologized for the error.

the textz manifesto

a spectre is haunting the corporate world -- the spectre of organized world-wide file-sharing. mp3, to name the most common synonym for the becoming-distributor of millions of former customers, has clearly shown that the flows of digital data are much more driven by people and formats than they are determined by legislation, ownership or the new global rules of the corporate-political. napster has reverse-engineered the ideology of a whole industry, and it has finally proven its total, complete and absolute obsolescence. the transnational companies that are now trying to break it up have started a war they will never be able to stop. there are going to be thousands of napsters. textz.com is not even zero-point-five of them.

we are not the dot in dot-com, neither are we the minus in e-book. the future of online publishing sits right next to your computer: it's a $50 scanner and a $50 printer, both connected to the internet. we are the & in copy & paste, and plain ascii is still the format of our choice. it shouldn't require a plug-in to read a book on the net, nor should it require a credit card. the text industry is a paper tiger. along with the mass erosion of their proprietary rights goes the vanishing of their digital watermarks. packed today, cracked tomorrow. whatever electronic gadgets they will come up with -- they are all going to be dead media on their very release day. forget about your new kafka dvd. i already got it via sms.

this is not project gutenberg. it is neither about constituting a canonical body of historical texts (by authors so classical that they've all been watching the grass from below for almost a century of posthumous copyright), nor is it about htmlifying freely available books into unreadable sub-chapterized hyper-chunks. texts relate to texts by other means than a href. just go to your local bookstore and find out yourself. the net is not a rhizome, and a digital library should not be an interactive nirvana. the conceptual poverty of today's post-academic, post-corporate public online services -- and we haven't seen dot-museum yet -- is not and has never been a desirable alternative to a future that will be controlled by the super-pervasive data-streams of the upcoming military-entertainment complex. there are still other options. nostalgia is slavery. stay home, read a book.

information does not want to be free. in fact it is absolutely free of will, a constant flow of signs of lives which are permanently being turned into commodities and transformed into commercial content. textz.com is not part of the information business. they say there was a time when content was king, but we have seen his head rolling. our week beats their year. ever since we have been moving from content to discontent, collecting scripts and viruses, writing programs and bots, dealing with textz as warez, as executables -- something that is able to change your life. this is not promotional material. facing the unified principles of information -- the combined horror of global communication and so-called guerilla marketing -- there is no more need for media theory or cultural studies. the resistance against corporate culture can itself no longer remain in the cultural domain. you make a mistake if you see what we do as merely apolitical.

we are studying the coils of the serpent, watching the walk of the penguin, mapping the moves of our wired enemies. intellectual, digital and biological property -- cornerstones of the new regimes of control -- are the direct result of organized corporate piracy. they are not only replacing such obsolete notions as freedom, democracy, human rights and technological progress. all these new forms of ownership are, in the first place, attempts to expropriate people's work, data and bodies -- just as the they begin to acquire, for the first time in history, the technical means to organize them differently. today's global media and communication conglomerates are mafia