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woops! yeah i know preview ... that should be policetechbot.com

The Privacy Snatchers (from time.com)

(Too bad I wasn't able to include the LAPD scandal in that piece.)

and here of course we have the RIP bill, Ireland could be doing pretty well though, think they have made it illegal to spy on emails and other privacy invasive things.

For those of us who don't like to cut and paste. http://www.politechbot. com/dvd/intervene.motion.060200.html

Clinton is so right.

*sing* my soma has a first name, it's m-o-n-e-y...

There are many reasons for this, most of which I covered in a Wired article last December.

Eventually digital will catch up, and it is an at-least-theoretically-unnecessary-and-definitely- costly pain to develop and scan in slides and negatives. But digital still isn't there yet.

Some examples, from my personal photo site:

DMCA protest:
analog
digital

Supreme Court:
analog
digital

B&W portraits:
analog
digital

B&W scenes:
analog
digital

Images that would be very difficult to replicate in digital:
portrait
nude

Perhaps this is part of the problem? For these people to criticize the privacy policies of other internet companies seems like a conflict of interest, as these are either their competition or potential customers.

========

Here's a copy of the letter I just emailed to one of my Senators. Use it as a template if you wish:

I want to bring to your attention developments on the WWW concerning Mattel Corporation and its product, CyberPatrol. CyberPatrol is so-called "blocking software" that allows users to prevent their computers from accessing web sites specified in a list that is included with the program. This software is being used not only by parents but also by public libraries.

There are two matters that concern me and which I think should be addressed by the Federal government. First, two young men, who are not Americans, recently "hacked" or broke the program's encryption and published the list of blocked sites. They demonstrated that the program not only blocked pornographic sites and other sites of repugnant material; but that it also was designed to block certain political sites, such as that of the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

These young men are being sued in American court by Mattel. Mattel is presently using this lawsuit to threaten everyone on the WWW who has also made this material public. This is wrong. The public has a right to know when software either (a) does not do what it is supposed to do or (b) behind their backs is doing something they may not have agreed to have it do. Since the Mattel Corporation has chosen to keep this information secret, we must be able to rely on others to verify that its software functions correctly.

As a side note, Mattel is also attempting to force the young men's Internet Service Providers to provide them with logs of everyone who downloaded material from the web site. Again, the public has an inherent "right to know" about the functionality of products they purchase. No corporation should be in a position to threaten someone for wanting to know more about a product they have purchased.

Second, Mattel Corporation has "updated" the software's list of blocked sites to include all sites known to have provided information critical of CyberPatrol. Shades of "Big Brother." This may not be the first time a corporation has used its power to suppress criticism; but it is a significant event in history of the WWW. If you were to make a public statement critical of Mattel's actions, you could expect that your own web site would shortly thereafter become a target of the blocking software.

I believe that this matter, in all its ramifications, should be brought before Congress and discussed. Mattel Corporation and other companies like it should be made to know that their actions in attempting to suppress free speech are not going unnoticed by the Federal government. This is not an issue that is going to go away. We must act to protect citizens' right to know and to prevent the Internet from becoming the playground of international corporations with unregulated and unbridled power.

More information about this controversy is available from Declan McCullagh's politech mailing list web site: politech. I may also mention in passing that Mr. McCullagh has also been threatened by Mattel for writing articles about this issue and Mattel has demanded the names of everyone on his mailing list so that it may attempt to determine who may have accessed the aforementioned documentation about the CyberPatrol product.

Thank you for your time.

mp

Beagle

Doesn't this call up jurisdictional issues again? I mean, is the judge actually clueless enough to try and issue a restraining order against the entire internet? The ruling as posted here seems to make it look that way. This is absurd! -- as someone said of DVD/CSS, "like a class-action lawsuit in reverse."

The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.

My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.

- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)

(begin rant)

I am not in a good mood right now.

I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.

The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.

Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).

Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.

Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.

In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.

To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.

This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.

but I need suggestions for questions, and some other ratings

hehe...

How about charts, and graphs for those who scored. Just like back in the college days to see where I fell under (or outside) the bell curve. Speaking of getting graded in college, remember looking up exam results by social security number? Well, how about a similar invasion of privacy by listing our IP addresses so we can look up our scores as well as others we know.

The meak John Katz wannabee posts anonymously