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You're right-- it isn't always bad. And most of it is insignificant. But if you think the government, insurance companies, and so on are paying lots of omney to see what kind of milk you buy, you're dead wrong.

What kind of data are they buying? How about medical records? Or complete, comprehensive financial data? Why would they want those?

You say, "Face it -- to the rest of the world, the big evil government, and the big evil corporations, YOU ARE BORING.". That's incorrect. To corporations, you are a consumer. You are a potential revenue stream. And I stress potential. If you're trying to buy health insurance, they'll want to scan your entire medical history, and possibly your genetic makeup. If you're signing up for a subscription service, they might check not just your credit history, but a history of every dispute you've ever had with a company-- to see how easily you're bullied into paying up any debt claimed by the corporation, legitimate or not. If you're applying for a job, they might want to dig around to see if they can find any information on whether you're planning on having kids in the next few years.

Is a lot of this illegal now? Sure it is. Do they still get lots of this information? Sure they do. With so many partnerships, mergers, and huge tangles of which corp owns who, it's easy to illegally share data without any real risk of prosecution.

Why would the feds want your information? Again, it's not what brand of milk you buy (although, if you buy non-growth-hormone milk, maybe you're a communist). You're not a potential revenue stream, but you are a potential threat to the people in power. Because of McCarthyism, and things like the Freedom of Information Act, we've found that the government can and does keep close tabs on any citizens who might be considered subversive. And because of things like genetic testing, we've found that a lot of people have been jailed for crimes they didn't commit. Put those two together-- don't you think there's a bit of risk there?

Oh, but wait, I should trust the government. I will, just as soon as top figures can look the cameras straight on and say, sincerely, "I am not a crook.". Yeah, that seems like a reliable test.

Why? Because the FBI would never spy on American citizens without a warrant! Just ask that Mr. Silly Pants J. Edgar Hoover!

My vote has to go to Pixelon. This company was created by a vagrant bum that lived out of his car. He managed to convince everyone, including several venture capatalists, that he had created a video streaming technology that would work well across the slow modem connections that prevailed at the time.

All they had done in reality is apply a custom skin to the windows media player.

They blew most of their venture capital in this crazy party (hehe the PR is still readily available), featuring Hosts David Spade and Cindy Margolis; The Who (they got back together for this!?!?!), KISS, Faith Hill, Dixie Chicks, Tony Bennett, LeAnn Rimes, The Brian Setzer Orchestra. They were going to broadcast this event on their new "technology". In the end, they folded and jerky boy is in jail.

You can read more about it here or if you're that type, here.

Looks like the dumb dot-com moments keep on coming.

Also of note: Of all the services offered by NBCi, what generated the most buzz was their pretty spokesmodel (reminiscent of the sock puppet spokesman for pets.com, which became their hottest seller).

Hey, now there's a model for bailing out NBCi.com... nude movies of the "pick a word, click it, get information" girl.

That's the short-term fix. In the long-term, 5 to 10 years, you will find that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers will team up to create an audio standard which requires you to know a secret key to put data to your computer's speakers. If you don't apply to Microsoft for a special license, your program will be unable to make noise -- without going through Microsoft's API, of course, which will make only noises guaranteed not to infringe copyright, like boops, beeps, or files stored in whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use.

Even after Napster's toast (and it's clearly toast) the adoption of MP3 as a standard won't slow down. Users will keep sharing via tools like Gnutella; people will keep rip-mix-burning onto CDs. WMA won't let you do this, so it won't be as useful, and people won't use it.

Well, at least I won't, and I would bet there are about 20 million others like me who are pretty damn satisfied with MP3 and, in the words of an old cigarette ad, would rather fight than switch.

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is a fanatical Libertarian so extreme that he managed to have a chapter of a book using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues If you think I'm just flaming, this aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farber to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf he finally grudgingly retracted

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Still, I agree with Gibson's assesment of London's odd Japan-compatibility. The density has something to do with it, I think, In addition to those places he described, I recommend a visit to the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park (Kensington), which started off in 1990 as a traditional Japanese garden, but has gradually mutated into something less austere, and now looks like the Teletubbies would be at home there (complete with bunny-rabbits)!

Still, I agree with Gibson's assesment of London's odd Japan-compatibility. The density has something to do with it, I think, In addition to those places he described, I recommend a visit to the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park (Kensington), which started off in 1990 as a traditional Japanese garden, but has gradually mutated into something less austere, and now looks like the Teletubbies would be at home there (complete with bunny-rabbits)!

Still, I agree with Gibson's assesment of London's odd Japan-compatibility. The density has something to do with it, I think, In addition to those places he described, I recommend a visit to the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park (Kensington), which started off in 1990 as a traditional Japanese garden, but has gradually mutated into something less austere, and now looks like the Teletubbies would be at home there (complete with bunny-rabbits)!

Then where does the Helium (under Epilogue) come from?

Go here for a quick rundown of how, true, Fleischmann and Pons were idiots, but that doesn't make the field idiots. I'm discouraged by the amount of FUD that's in the responses to the article today. :(

Links Used:
http://www.room103.com/archive/q_coldfusion.htm
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion .html?pg=10

This sounds reminiscent of the pro-life zealots who posted the addresses of abortion doctors on the web and cheered when they were assassinated. I don't know how you can condone this just because it is speech.

TACOMA, Washington -- A federal judge has threatened media outlets with contempt charges if they quote from public documents on a court website, prompting outcries from journalist groups.

U.S. District Judge Jack Tanner warned Thursday that anyone who published the name of a juror in the criminal trial of U.S. v. James Dalton Bell would go to jail. The list of jurors is available on the Pacer website provided by the federal court system. (read on)

Meyer told a fascinated jury that the device -- "high quality, something that military and law enforcement uses" -- continually transmitted Bell's exact location using a radio signal to receivers operated by law enforcement. Federal agents used graphical mapping software on a PC to plot Bell's movements in real time.

Political essayist Bell is on trial here this week in a case that involves his alleged use of legally obtained CD-ROMs to compile information about Treasury Department agents.

He is not accused of directly threatening them, but the government says that by collecting information about agents by driving to their suspected residences and by refusing to renounce his writings about how to assassinate unethical federal employees, Bell is guilty of violating stalking laws.

Meyer told a fascinated jury that the device -- "high quality, something that military and law enforcement uses" -- continually transmitted Bell's exact location using a radio signal to receivers operated by law enforcement. Federal agents used graphical mapping software on a PC to plot Bell's movements in real time.

Political essayist Bell is on trial here this week in a case that involves his alleged use of legally obtained CD-ROMs to compile information about Treasury Department agents.

He is not accused of directly threatening them, but the government says that by collecting information about agents by driving to their suspected residences and by refusing to renounce his writings about how to assassinate unethical federal employees, Bell is guilty of violating stalking laws.

I agree. People are asking him to sign body parts now. Just like a rock star, but with a killer wheelchair.

I promise... its a wired.com link, no goatsex :P

How is that relelvant? Weren't those two distinct cases? So it's an all or nothing thing. You have to agree with ALL U.S. judicial rulings or NONE of them. I'm guessing that your point is that you shouldn't just take with the U.S. government decides in a court as the absolute best judegement. Even so, I don't see how you can say that the courts are wrong about Mircrosoft because they are wrong about Napster.

Did anyone read any of the testimony in the Microsoft case? Based on what I read, it wasn't even close. Economists who had previously testified on behalf of Microsoft in other cases testified against them in this case. The testimony by Gates and other Microsoft execs was at times laughable. I'm paraphrasing here, but...

DOJ attorney: "Did you write this email Mr. Gates"
BG: "No."
DOJ attorney: "Then who did?"
BG: "A computer."

I had always thought that the case against Microsoft was iffy at best. Then I read more about it. Read the November Wired article (among other things): The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth

You would think there would be some limit to the number of times a single company could develop a really cool technology, only to waste it. If Xerox had played their cards right, every scanner, fax, copier, and printer manufacturer would be paying them royalties by now. DataGlyphs would be everywhere.

I first heard about DataGlyphs in this Wired story.

All your base are belong to Slash!!!

Check out the TOS from the Open Source Development Network, the Slashdot parent owned by VA Linux. The TOS is available at http://www.osdn.com/terms.shtml.

Of particular interest would be the clause in Section 4 of the OSDN Terms of Service: "the submitting user grants OSDN the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed"!

Slashdot owns my intellectual property! Oh, the horror!!

Sigh.

So what should we learn from this? We should learn to put our paranoia in check and consult a lawyer before we open our mouths.

This clause is in virtually every TOS for any web service and is designed to protect service providers from litigious jerks who do things like sue service providers because their web page appeared in a marketing brochure for the service provider or (even worse) litigious twits who do dumb things like claim "They've infringed upon my copyright because they're keeping a 'copy' of my work on their servers!!"

These standard clauses are NOT designed (nor would they legally allow) the service provider to claim legal ownership of the content in question.

This same old tired shit hit the fan a year ago when Yahoo bought Geocities and someone noticed a clause in the TOS (that had been probably been there before but just not gotten any press). See the Wired story, the Wired follow-up, and the obligatory Slashdot reference from last year.

Yahoo caved to the PR blitz and rampant public ignorance and slightly modified their TOS to make it more clear. Microsoft probably won't . . . simply because they're Microsoft and they don't need to.

Maybe the angry hordes ought to jump down OSDN/Slashdot's throat now, eh? I bet they could get OSDN to cave and change their TOS, right?

Or maybe they should just take a deep breath, get a grip, and wise up.

All your base are belong to Slash!!!

Check out the TOS from the Open Source Development Network, the Slashdot parent owned by VA Linux. The TOS is available at http://www.osdn.com/terms.shtml.

Of particular interest would be the clause in Section 4 of the OSDN Terms of Service: "the submitting user grants OSDN the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed"!

Slashdot owns my intellectual property! Oh, the horror!!

Sigh.

So what should we learn from this? We should learn to put our paranoia in check and consult a lawyer before we open our mouths.

This clause is in virtually every TOS for any web service and is designed to protect service providers from litigious jerks who do things like sue service providers because their web page appeared in a marketing brochure for the service provider or (even worse) litigious twits who do dumb things like claim "They've infringed upon my copyright because they're keeping a 'copy' of my work on their servers!!"

These standard clauses are NOT designed (nor would they legally allow) the service provider to claim legal ownership of the content in question.

This same old tired shit hit the fan a year ago when Yahoo bought Geocities and someone noticed a clause in the TOS (that had been probably been there before but just not gotten any press). See the Wired story, the Wired follow-up, and the obligatory Slashdot reference from last year.

Yahoo caved to the PR blitz and rampant public ignorance and slightly modified their TOS to make it more clear. Microsoft probably won't . . . simply because they're Microsoft and they don't need to.

Maybe the angry hordes ought to jump down OSDN/Slashdot's throat now, eh? I bet they could get OSDN to cave and change their TOS, right?

Or maybe they should just take a deep breath, get a grip, and wise up.

Billy now runs The Reg and it took me a couple minutes to figured out what was 'wrong' with Wired News

Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) Sentence: one year in jail

Kevin Poulsen (Dark Dante) -Sentence: four years in prison, three-year ban from computer use, fine

Here's an old Wired! story about how phony degrees are a big scam. This may be related to the fact that you see so many PhD's at Microsoft.

"A teenager in a small country town in New Zealand called in the FBI to stop what she worried could have been another school shooting in Pennsylvania"

"We eventually got his real name, his e-mail address, the city he lived in and the name of his high school."

What's the difference between a site that posts the name of abortion clinic doctors, and a site that posts the names of IRS workers? Both sites encourage murder, but one is shutdown by the government while the other is given free speech rights. I believe they both should be considered free speech.

Look at: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40102,00 .html

Do you think the judge would have ruled the same way had his name been on the list?

In a rather twisted mockery of open source spirit, the original virus code is then stored at the end of the ELF executable.

Of course, the next question is whether a virus could fall under the GPL. According to the GPL , it seems to only miss -one- detail:

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.

Since the virus comes with its own source code, and it includes its copyright notice, and it has a notice that refers to the GPL license... I'd say it comes very close to fulfilling the GPL. If it contained a copy of the GPL as part of its payload, in my opinion, it would fully be part of the GPL.

While I was abroad in Germany last spring, the Finnish band HIM came out with a CD that was copy protected. The CD was also clearly labeled that it was not compatible with CD Rom drives.

Story on Wired from over a year ago

According to the article, this test was limited to the German market, but perhaps the band didn't have the popularity for someone to work out a uncopyright scheme, because I haven't seen one relesased.

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Read about it in the following links:

http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/1 997/eniac.shtml

(the above link has pictures of the six)

And:

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,3711,00.htm l

If the recent Wired article is correct, there may already be human clones. What about them?
----------------------------

MacOS X Looks like a Champ Red Herring

Re-Engineering the Mac Universe Washington Post

OS X Won't Change the World but is Still a Big Deal ZDNet

MacOS X: Major Into in Minor Key Business Week

It's As Easy as A Mac Wired

And tons more, too many to mention. All from mainstream press, note... will wonders never cease?

Britons are usually quite innovative, the problem is this pre-eminence is not usually matched with businesses prowess, most inventors usually end up dying a porper or having their invention ripped off, and not receiving any recognition... or both of the above.

Such examples include the light bulb, Joseph Swan published his work in a journal and a guy called Edison ripped him a few months later. People today still believe Edison invented the light bulb.

There was Sir Frank Whittle who created the jet engine, he had to fund his research one shoestring because the government turned their back on him for years, then US company also tried to steal his work. Anyway, he finally succeeded, he didn't make any money out of his invention, but he finally achieved the recognition he deserved. (hence the knighthood).

Other calamities include the guys at GCHQ who created public-key crypto years before it was even a twinkle in Diffie's and Hellman's eye. But they didn't see the significance of their invention, mainly because the official secrets act stopped from applying it commercially.

Donald Davies who worked at Middlesex University invented the concept of Packet Switching but couldn't receive funding from the British government at the time, he took his research to ARPA where his technology was integrated into a little known project called "APRANET"... I'm not exactly sure what became of that :)

Fibre optics and the optical amplifier also came out of British Research

Obviously there's also the likes of Alan Turing and the rest of the slightly madcap bunch who were the brains behind Bletchley Park and the WW2 code breaking.

There's countless others too, and obviously some we probably don't even know about. Above all, they failed yet succeeded in a magnificent British way, a lot didn't make much or any money out their work, but they changed things.

There's lots of innovation and pure research in the UK, however not much it carried through to commercialisation, maybe because the British are more risk adverse, there's also a deep stigma attached to failure and bankruptcy in the UK, something which is often admired in the US.

This is changing though.

This is so stupid. Read this comment in the Wired article:

"The existence of the network has become a hot issue in Europe, where it has helped engender anti-American sentiment".

Bullshit. No matter how much American media like to sell that impression, the vast majority of Europeans does not have anything against the US at all. And why the hell should they. I'm sorry America. We don't hate you.

Reminds me of the Levi jeans pages...

Those pages were from Lee Jeans.

Has Hemos been receiving "favors" from Levi's in exchange for advertising?

Wired News did an article on this a while back.

-Christian

...that's known for its (literal) raids on suspect businesses. Hey, I can only be right 99.44% of the time.

You can see it at work in everything from the ``war'' on drugs, through the Business Software Alliance, to vending machines. Try to prevent every single infraction, and you end up with variously a police state, incentive to use Free Software, or a candy machine with dismal sales because it rejects too many authentic-but-worn dollar bills.

That was Stephen King's mistake: trying to enforce a level of ethics on the 'net readership. If he'd simply contented himself with specifying how much cash he was looking for, and not worried about how many people were freeloading, both he and his readers wourld have been better off.

Any airtight e-security system will be too cumbersome to work without government force behind it (read: DMCA). Writers and artists will need to set their own level of tolerance for non-payment, and be happy so long as the rest supply enough cash to keep them happy.

You can see it at work in everything from the ``war'' on drugs, through the Business Software Alliance, to vending machines. Try to prevent every single infraction, and you end up with variously a police state, incentive to use Free Software, or a candy machine with dismal sales because it rejects too many authentic-but-worn dollar bills.

That was Stephen King's mistake: trying to enforce a level of ethics on the 'net readership. If he'd simply contented himself with specifying how much cash he was looking for, and not worried about how many people were freeloading, both he and his readers wourld have been better off.

Any airtight e-security system will be too cumbersome to work without government force behind it (read: DMCA). Writers and artists will need to set their own level of tolerance for non-payment, and be happy so long as the rest supply enough cash to keep them happy.

If the web browser was patented, we'd have had to wait 17 years after 1960 for Ted Nelson's patent to expire. As that's only 1977, and the first commercial microcomputer had appeared only two years earlier, we'd not have had browsers in our homes immediately. And if we waited for Ted...well, we're still waiting for transpublishing and Project Xanadu to become popular. It took several more years for reasonable graphics to show up and make graphical web browsing practical. Commodore's Amiga and others had reasonable graphics, but it wasn't until VGA came out that graphics on most personal computers began to approach TV resolutions.

Granted, the comment was a bit blunt, but is a "troll" label necessary?

There was ample evidence to suggest that Microsoft did fake demonstration videos during the DOJ trial. The Washington Post reported in Feb 1999 (sorry, no URL available) that "Microsoft was forced to concede that the demonstrations contained inaccuracies". Wired also reported that Microsoft conveniently "edited" video to that inaccurately suggested that Netscape Communicator was easier to install than it really was. the DOJ submitted their own footage indicating this, which forced MS Vice President Brad Chase to concede.

Newsbytes reported a similar incident (sorry, no URL available), when Boise confronted Allchin with proof that another MS video didn't depict what it was supposed to about the "Felton Program" and its effect on Internet Explorer.

Each time this happens, Microsoft responds with a "Whoops! An unfortunate mistake!" Of course, they only seem to do this when they're caught. I haven't heard of an incident when they've volunteered this information before someone caught them.

Merced hotter, harder slower

5: Intel's Itanium chips: Two years ago Intel said it would have powerful new 64-bit chips for workstations and servers out by the summer of 2000. But delivery of Itanium (also known as IA-64 and Merced) has been pushed back so consistently, the Register is calling it Intel's "Itanic."

from wired's article Vaporware 2000

And when the military uses this cooling tech in the direct neural interfaces for their exoskeletons, this will give a whole new meaning to the phrase, "Stay frosty!"

;-)

Boy, you really know how to copy and paste, don't you? I mean, you must be some sort of elite ctrl+c ctrl+v freak.

--

as drill bits are very expensive, and can wear out in as little as 100 feet of hard rock.

Now, if Thomas Gold's views about oil and petroleum are correct, wecan have as much oil as we coudl ever want!

Of course, we should still conserve and all that.

Why do the rich and powerful deserve more privacy than I have? Our current Gov. knows more about each of its citizens than any repressive 19th century leaders did, but since they are held accountable through representative democracy and the Freedom of Information act, we have the highest degree of freedom of any known society. So make the system fair. If Corporations want to invade our privacy, make them face the same.

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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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Also these guys , the surveillance camera players.

Not quite, the RSA patent is not valid in the UK because their patent office also didn't/doesn't allow algorithms to be patented, since they're not tangible.

Also, public key crypto was actually first developed in the UK by GCHQ before it was even a twinke in Diffie or Hellmann's eye. Secondly, it would have been insulting to expect the Brit's to pay royalties on a invention that actually first originated in the UK, bit like the jet engine debacle all over again.

I've got a good one for you:
The Republic of Ireland and Britain have widely different laws regarding crytography.
So, take it that one country makes it illegal to withold your encryption keys, even providing for jail time and fines if you 'lose' your key and can't prove that the loss genuine. That same country can have a minister or local authority, among others, issue a warrent to police to seize your encryption keys. Also, ISPs are warrented to have systems set up to intercept and decrypt e-mails.
On the other hand, the other country makes it illegal for the police to force you to give them your encryption keys. Warrents are still the realm of the justice system and e-mails are not intercepted by-in-large.
Now guess which country is which: Ireland, which garners a relatively huge amount of IT investment from across the globe, and Britain, which doesn't get as much investment as its skilled workforce, developed infrastructure and cheap(er) overheads would seem to warrent.
As most of you may know, this big difference all came about with the RIP bill in Britain which introduced a lot of these draconian measures. At the same time in Ireland, legality of electronic signatures, privacy of encryption keys etc... were being insured by new legislation.
I amn't suggesting that this difference is the sole cause of the investment in Ireland, but it doesn't hurt the matter at all. Plus it also shows the demand for the legitimate use of cyrptography by big business.
Read this(old) wired story for more.


8)

Remember, for great justice, take out every zig.
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