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slashdoter writes: "Looks like Intel is giving up the ID number thing on the CPU. They will still have it on the PIII but the Willamette will be like the older PII. " Guess the boycott over the fiasco is at an end. Cool that Intel listens to consumers.

jbork writes: "According to this article on Wired News, Intel has decided to remove the unique processor ID from its chips, starting with the 1.5 GHz Willamette chip. According to Jason Catlett of Junkbusters, 'We can finally call off the boycott.' " Gee, it only took them 1.25 years.

In "one of the most petty and ridiculous issues ever in the history of science" - according to the guilty company's chief scientific officer - federal officials noticed that when Celera uploaded genetic sequences of the fruit fly to a public database, there was some human DNA mixed in. It's now been removed, and everyone seems to think this is not a very significant error. But the harsh exchange and defensive posturing on both sides underscores the edgy rivalry between the government group's slow-and-steady approach and Celera's "shotgun" approach to mapping the human genome. This story is also important because mixing human genes into a fly's genes is freaky cool - someone should make a movie about that.

Slime-dogg writes: "Looks like the feds are trying to pass a law to ban posting of erotica on-line." The law, COPA, isn't really news. What's news is that the ACLU is arguing that censorware is "less restrictive" than simply criminalizing sexual content. Essentially they are telling the court, "You should not allow COPA because, instead of banning sex, the government could install censorware and that would be better." Legal arguments by definition must be practical, so I see where the ACLU is coming from, but many will interpret this as green-lighting government-mandated censorware.

Slime-dogg writes: "Looks like the feds are trying to pass a law to ban posting of erotica on-line." The law, COPA, isn't really news. What's news is that the ACLU is arguing that censorware is "less restrictive" than simply criminalizing sexual content. Essentially they are telling the court, "You should not allow COPA because, instead of banning sex, the government could install censorware and that would be better." Legal arguments by definition must be practical, so I see where the ACLU is coming from, but many will interpret this as green-lighting government-mandated censorware.

adimarco writes: "According to this article at Wired, a San Francisco company started paylars.com in response to Metallica's recent lawsuit against the music industry, their fans, and Napster. Major credit cards are accepted, and donations will be sent to the band. " This cracks me up.

adimarco writes: "According to this article at Wired, a San Francisco company started paylars.com in response to Metallica's recent lawsuit against the music industry, their fans, and Napster. Major credit cards are accepted, and donations will be sent to the band. " This cracks me up.

ContinuousPark writes: "According to this Wired News piece, Microsoft Research is working on a huge Internet database (similar to the TerraServer) that will make the data from a massive survey of the cosmos available to anyone with a Web browser. The project, called SkyServer, is the first in a series of initiatives to bring to the public "virtual telescopes". The data (about 40 terabytes) will come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This means that, with just an Internet connection, I will be able to use the world's best telescopes and do my own research, maybe discover some celestial objects that have always been there but no one's had the (available telescope) time to look at/for them. "

It's been a busy week for Napster and Gnutella... mbell sent us an MSNBC story on Gnutella which gets a lot of stuff right, but spends more time proclaiming that it's all about kiddie porn to really give the point fair time. the geek noted a wired bit about a San Diego ISP banning Napster from their clients: this is because it's a "Server", not because it's controversial software tho, but it's at least nice to know your ISP is watching what you do. The thing that bothers me most is that accounts were threatened even tho they weren't exceeding bandwidth quotas. Seems harsh. And finally NeoMage pointed out that the once amazing (face it, Kill 'm All and Master of Puppets are amazing albums) Metallica has become the first 'big name' band to sue Napster for copyright violations against the artists' music.

When the Electronic Privacy Information Center gets a poor privacy rating, you might think something's wrong. It is. Enonymous.com is apparently giving out weird ratings to many Web sites, including this one - earlier, it claimed Slashdot had no privacy policy and now it wrongly claims we share your data without permission. Other sites were getting different readings though they linked to the same policy. Meanwhile, Enonymous' own privacy policy has been challenged. I'm left wondering - if even experts can't make sense of online privacy policies, what good do they do?

Professor Pollack put a lot of time and thought into answering your questions, and it shows. What follows is a "deeper than we expected" series of comments about Artificial Intelligence and intellectual property distribution from one of the acknowledged leaders in both fields. How do you justify your expectations? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward For the past 40 years, AI has just been 10 years or so away.

It's still just 10 years or so away.

It's not getting any closer.

How do you justify any degree of optimism about the future of AI at this point? What makes now fundamentally different from anytime in the past 40 years?

It is funny, this is the same question I asked Marvin Minsky, the father of AI, at ALife 5 in Japan. He attacked every modern approach, including neural nets, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms, and so on for over an hour, suggesting that his student's (Winston's) thesis should have been the paradigm of the field! I asked, "If AI sucks so much, why are you still in the field after 40 years?"

Hypocrite! Here I am, still in the field after 20 years! As soon as I've convinced myself one approach to AI is too slow, I find another, leaving quietly without attacking the friends I've made. AI is a big wide open field with a lot of smart people trying different things. (Savage attacks by insiders exiting are the worst thing in science, such as Bar Hillel's attack on Machine Translation in the 60's. Forty Years later, MT is "cool" again, in this month's issue of Wired.)

So I can say that, from my perspective as having worked on many different approaches to AI, writing problem space search algorithms for solving puzzles will not result in a general problem solver. Automating predicate logic won't make a computer equivalent to a philosopher. A computer can't do natural language any better than Eliza, without an internal need to communicate to survive and a large blessing of custom hardware. Neural nets are great function approximators with good mathematical results on limited kinds of learning, but we can't set 12 weights to get what we want, let alone 10 billion weights. And even though simple nonlinear systems give off chaos and fractals, Kolmogorov's law tells us simple systems are still simple. Evolution is one path to complexity, but most genetic algorithms simply search a finite search space and optimize a fixed goal.

So I'm locally pessimistic but globally optimistic! Who said AI is 10 years away? It's here now, in limited forms, yielding a lot of economic value, as your mouse clickstream is datamined so the ads which pop up are for things you might actually buy. But the SF ideal of a humanoid robot like Commander Data is centuries away.

I hold the view that any system which responds to its environment in a conditional way based on some internal state, even a thermostat, has a bit of intelligence. Immune systems, ecologies, and economies design things and solve problems. Every computer program you write has a bit of intelligence captured in it. The problem is, real AI of the sort you are alluding to is an organization which might be realizable as a 10 billion line program or a 10 billion weight dynamical neural system, and no human software engineering team can write autonomous code which is more than 10-100 million lines. Even Windows is just DOS with wallpaper, and big applications always require a human in the loop, selecting subprograms from menus or command lines.

Since 1994, we've been working on how to automatically evolve physical symbol systems which would have 10 billion unique moving parts, what we call "Biologically Complex" systems. When I say "We," it is because everything I do is in collaboration with my Ph.D students! A 10 Billion Line program is an absurd goal obviously, but it drives our research to focus in on the process of growth itself, rather than on what shortcuts we can accomplish by hand. We look at co-evolution, which involves machine learners training each other, and on questions of what kinds of substrates for computing could provide a universe of functionality while being constrained in a way which reduces the size or dimensionality of the search space. This constraint is called inductive bias. We seek minimal inductive bias systems, in which the human hints, or "gradient engineering" tricks are fully explicit. (Sevan Ficici, Richard Watson) We still work on neural nets and fractals as a substrate, and have made some progress in understanding how they work (Ofer Melnik, Simon Levy).

It's been more than five years, and while we are not even at the million line mark yet, I am still optimistic and haven't given up on co-evolution to move to a new field. I think that my lab has made progress in understanding why Hillis's sorting networks and Tesauro's Backgammon player were such breakthroughs and where they were limited. (Hugue Juille, Alan Blair). I think we have begun to understand the nature of mediocrity as an attractor in educational systems and how to change the utility functions to avoid collusion, and apply this to human learning (Elizabeth Sklar). We have become more applied, bring co-evolution to the Internet and to robotics, replicating and extending the beautiful results of Karl Sims from 1994 (Pablo Funes, Greg Hornby, Hod Lipson). All the work is available to study at the laboratory's Web site.

AI and ethics. (Score:5, Interesting) by kwsNI What do you say to the people that feel it is unethical to try to create "intelligence"?

I take this as a shorter version of the longer religious question the editor thankfully didn't select. I've talked to myrabbi, perhaps one of the great theologians around today. Even though I am an atheist, he thinks I am on a spiritual quest to understand [God as] the principles of the universe which allow self-organization of life as a chemical process far from equilibrium which dissipates energy and creates structure that exploits emergent properties of physics. Can a spiritual quest be unethical? I suggest that people with this question read Three Scientists and Their God, by Robert Wright, or watch the Morris documentary "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control".

A second ethical question, besides usurping God's rights, is how can you take funding from national and military agencies like NSF, Darpa and ONR? For the past 50 years at least, they have been the seed capital for the science behind most of the technological progress I know about. With the venture capital economy, that curiosity-based seed function may be privatized, if some of the big VC funds dedicate 10% for long range science, and the ethical question of whether you are doing something for public good or private gain begins to dominate over the religious and military questions. That is the same question many scientists and Linux hackers ask themselves daily: Can I do good and make money without a conflict of interest?

Turing award. (Score:5, Funny) by V. Do we win something if we can fool him into answering a computer-generated question? ;)

It has always been the case that limiting the range of dialog leads to more successful masquerading. In our CEL online educational game, for example, the only interactions between players are the actual plays, which enables artificial agents to be accepted as game partners.

BTW, the Turing Award is an annual lifetime achievement award in computer science, which has gone to people like John Backus for his eloquent apology for Fortran when he should have given us APL and LISP. The Turing Test is the name given to Alan Turing's proposal for testing for successful AI. Given that we don't deny airplanes fly, I think if AI ever flies, we won't question it. So I propose using the Louis Armstrong Test, his answer to the question "What is jazz?"

How should an amateur get started working on AI? (Score:5,Interesting) by Henry House It seems to me that a significant problem holding back the development of AI is that few non-professionals grok AI well enough to offer any contribution to the AI and open-source communities. What do you suggest that I, as a person interested in both AI and open source, do about this? What are the professionals in the AI field doing about this?

Reading is fundamental.

Frankenstein (Score:5, Interesting) by Borealis For a long time there has been a fear of a Frankenstein being incarnated with AI. Movies like The Matrix and the recent essay by Bill Joy both express worries that AI (in the form of self replicating robots with some AI agenda) can possibly overcome us if we are not careful. Personally I have always considered the idea rather outlandish, but I'm wondering what an actual expert thinks about the idea.

Do you believe that there is any foundation for worry? If so, what areas should we concentrate on to be sure to avoid any problems? If not, what are the limiting factors that prevent an "evil" AI?

AI doesn't kill People. AI might make guns smart enough to sense the weight or handsize of the user, preventing children from killing each other. Everything ever invented is capable of good or evil. Evil arises most often when masses of humans are denied fundamental rights. The Evil Rate and Unemployment Rate are closely linked.

I read Bill Joy's article in Wired last month. And I loved the Unabomber's excerpt because it is based on some of the best Philip Dick paranoid Science Fiction, like: Vulcan's Hammer, We Can Build You, and the Simulacrum. There is a lot of SF on the Golem question and one of my favorites is Marge Piercy's He, She, and It , which proposes a moratorium on AI inside humanoid robots. You can have smart software on the Web, and human looking idiobots, but you can't put real AI inside human looking robots, or you have to pay the price.

My lab is indeed working on self-replicating robotics and were worried for a split second about getting the fetal brain tissue reaction when our paper comes out shortly. We can now envision the "third bootstrap", after precision manufacturing and computation, where machines make the machines which make themselves, just as machine tools are used to make more machine tools, and computers compile their own programs. But the replication loop is quite a sophisticated automatic manufacturing process, which requires a large industrial infrastructure, and a lot of liability insurance. So far, no VC's, Saudi Princes, or government agencies have offered the necessary $500M first round of financing for fullyautomateddesign.com.

It would be wrong of me to say leave my frankenbots alone, and go after frankenfoods and frankenano. I think Joe Weizenbaum's book should be required reading, because every few years somebody else comes up with the idea of inserting computers inside animal bodies, so that the first act of any war will be to exterminate all nonhuman life forms. But I do think we have to worry more about large scale industrial and agricultural processes which are allowed to externalize their by-products affecting the environment, than we need worry about robotic ice-9. We will die quicker from e-mail spam caused by viral marketing customer acquisition schemes or from global warming and ozone depletion triggering major climactic change, red tide or another pollutant taking out fish from the food chain, or even from people throwing away old EGA screens and 386 motherboards in landfills, poisoning the aquifers. I promise that for every robot we build, there will be another robot to recycle it when its job is complete.

Anyhow, IMO Joy's angst must reflect the Sun setting on any instruction set architecture besides x86, but that's a different discussion. Talk to me about the ethics, when your very own open source movement leads to the inevitability of an Intel instruction set monopoly by providing a useful alternative to Microsoft :)

Questions based on your academic path (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward The way to the field of AI isn't always extremely clear. What type of background do they expect? Is it mostly a researching position or is it treated like a normal job with normal goals? Are there any classes or subjects or schools you recommend to make it into the AI field? Also, how exactly did you get into the field? How did AI intrigue you into what you do now, despite all the controversy to create an intelligence that could possibly be considered a "god" compared to the human existence? Very interesting to say the least, and something I'm interested in.

There is no AI business field to speak of which is differentiated from the general software business. Most companies which were "AI companies" in an earlier generation of university spin-offs for Lisp Machines, and Expert Systems Shells, failed miserably. Venture Capitalists won't fall into the same sinkhole twice. There are industrial process control companies which use refined bits of AI, e.g. in visual inspection of manufacturing processes, and Neural Network companies, like HNC, who have changed business plans and are now "pattern-recognition e-commerce security." companies. The Speech recognition industry has condensed into one company. Web- based AI means search engines and Language Engines. Ask Jeeves and Google and Direct Hit and many others may use bits of AI and adaptive technologies in their system.

Jobs in AI are just like software jobs everywhere: chain you to a workstation and make you work out boring details in exchange for salary and very little equity. But find a great graduate program in computer science, and you will likely find fun and exciting work for no salary and no equity! And you have to be great at both real and discrete mathematics as well as a natural born programming genius.

As for me, I started programming computers in APL as a freshman in college, and because it was such a high level language and I didn't sleep much, I wrote an awful lot of code in a few years. I was naturally drawn to building heuristic puzzle solvers, game players, and logical theorem provers. Before I met my wife, friends thought I was in love with computers. After working at IBM, I went to graduate school in Urbana and worked with David Waltz on LISP hacking, natural language processing, and reinvented neural networks, which were censored from the AI curriculum of the early 80's. I came to the limit of what could be done with neural networks for intelligence by 1988, and at Ohio State University, started looking at fractals and chaos as a source for generativity. Unfortunately, interesting behavior requires lots of levels and lots of parameters, which is why we started looking at evolution for selecting and adjusting lots of parameters, a focus since I've been at Brandeis.

While there is a lot of detailed work and dead ends, the search for mechanical intelligence is one of the great unsolved problems, which is in some way deeply equivalent to questions on the origin of life, human language, morphogenesis, child development, and human cultural and economic change. John Casti's book is a great place to start reading about these big problems.

Human brain - AI connection - is there? (Score:5, Interesting) Do you think that a greater understanding of the human brain and how intelligence has emerged in us is crucial to the creation of AI, or do you think that the two are unconnected? Will a greater understanding of memory and thought aid in development, or will AI be different enough so that such knowledge isn't required?

Also, what do you think about the potential of the models used today to attempt to achieve a working AI? Do you think that the models themselves (e.g. the neural net model) are correct and have the potential to produce an AI given enough power and configuration, or do you think that our current models are just a stepping stone along the way to a better model which is required for success?

Obviously there are clear medicinal benefits to brain research. And the study of any real biological system leads to interesting metaphors which can be the basis for a novel computational model. But I think it is unlikely that research into the biology of the brain is crucial to understanding cognition or replicating intelligence. It's like studying the width of wires in integrated circuits of a computer. Even if you get the whole wiring diagram for a computer, it still tells you little about the programs running on it. I think understanding the brain is a problem which is underestimated. I heard 25,000 scientists attend the annual Neurosciences meeting, three times the largest ever interested in AI. It could be called the Mandelsciences meeting, and different labs compete to describe what they find in those little windows on the Mandelbrot set! But I have a lot of friends who are neuroscientists, and I can be just as facetious about linguistics.

Seriously, I believe we have to understand and replicate the processes which lead to the development of the brain and its behavior, not replicate the mammalian brain itself.

The second part of your question "how intelligence has emerged in us" can be interpreted as a more interesting direction. Here, there is a lot of opportunity to relate human intelligence as animal intelligence plus a little more. The fields of evolutionary epistemology, adaptive behavior, and computational neuroethology are quite interesting. It is a great question to understand cognition as it appears in other animals, insects, worms, and even bacterial colonies. The basic principles of multicellular cooperation are more important than the millions of specific adaptations of the human brain.

As for models question, it is sort of like asking whether a chair is built out of metal, wood, plastic, rubber, or cardboard. It doesn't matter, as long as it are strong enough. The organization of molecules has to provide a surface and a normal force at the right height for sitting. As for the organization of 10 billion things which might make an AI? Doesn't matter if it is c, java, lisp, neurons, or tightly coupled markovian 2nd order polynomial fuzzy sets. Will it stand, or collapse under its own weight?

most likely path? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward Dr Jordan:

Do you think that AI is more likely to arise as the result of explicit efforts to create an intelligent system by programmers, or by evolution of artificial life entities? Or on the third hand, do you think efforts like Cog (training the machine like a child, with a long, human aided learning process) will be the first to create a thinking machine?

We are taking the second path, seeking the principles for self-organization so we can harness them to create and invent forms of organization.. There is a 4th path you don't mention, which is the terminator/Truenames hypothesis, that AI will simply arise among the powerful router machines of the internet. How would we recognize coherent behavior arising in telecom infrastructure if it didn't wake up talking English? I think a SETI for coherent intentional behavior emerging out of the infrastructure would be a fun project to do for the people worrying about risks to the information infrastructure.

Software Market & Open Source (Score:5, Insightful) by Breace In your 'hyperbook' about your idea of a software market I noticed that you say that Open Source evangelists should support your movement because it will be (quote) A way for your next team to be rewarded for their creative work if it turns into Sendmail, Apache, or Linux.

I assume (from reading other parts) that you are talking about a monetary reward. My question is (and this is not meant as a flame by any means), do you really think that that's what the Open Source community is after, after all? Do you think that people like Torvalds or RMS are unhappy for not being rewarded enough?

If the OS community doesn't care about monetary rewards, is there an other benefit in having your proposed Software Market?

According to economic theory, utility is what motivates you to make decisions in your own self interest. Simple games, like the prisoner's dilemma, rationalize utility with numeric values to illustrate the concept, but it isn't money at all. If someone behaves in an unpredictable way, we must have our definition of their utility wrong.

There are plenty of motivations for writing open source code, including the challenge and the feeling of altruism, both of which have utility. A lot of people may write open source for credit in the community, which also has utility. If RMS was a radical advocate of anonymity who wrote the GPL so you couldn't put your name on the source code because it promoted the glorification of the individual, participating might provide less utility.

Why not Write a Screensaver? (Score:5, Interesting) by peteshaw First of all, it is indeed an honor to pester a big name scientist with my puny little questions! Hopefully I will not arouse angst with the simplicity of my perceptions. Aha! I toss my Wheaties on Mount Olympus and hope to see golden flakes drift down from the sky!

I have always thought that distributed computing naturally lends itself to large scale AI problems, specifically your Neural Networks and Dynamical Systems work. I am thinking specifically of the SETI@home project, and the distributed.net projects. Have you thought about, or to your knowledge has anyone thought about harnessing the power of collective geekdom for sort of a brute force approach to neural networks. I don't know how NN normally work, but it seems that you could write a very small, lightweight client, and embed it into a screen saver a'la SETI@home. This SS would really be really a simple client 'node'. You could then add some cute graphics like a picture of a human brain and some brightly colored synapses or what have you.

Once the /.ers got their hands on such a geek toy I have no doubt you'd have the equivalent of several hundred thousand hours or more of free computer time, and who knows, maybe we could all make a brain together! I would love to think of my computer as a small cog in some vast neural network, or at least I would until Arnold Schwarzenegger got sent back in time to kill my mom. Whaddayathink, Jordan? Is this a good idea, or am I an idiot?

No, its very imaginative. You could be one of my AI grad students. But rather than focusing on neural networks, which, because of matrix multiplication, do not distribute well, people are looking at such systems for evolutionary computation. You can evolve individuals on networked workstations and collect them, or evolve populations which interact occasionally and pass dna around. Look at Tom Ray's Net Tierra project to see how it is going. My colleague Hod Lipson is developing a screensaver for our evolutionary robotics project, but release 1 will be Windows rather than Linux compatible (./sorry)

Actually, one of my early business plans for the Internet, circa the first working java browsers, was to show naughty pictures while harvesting cycles from your computer and reselling them to people needing computer time. All was needed was an assembly language interpreter in java and some interfacing. The problem is that most computationally intense problems people want to solve have large data flow requirements which conflict with the download of the naughty pictures! When I recently tried to corner the market in pig latin domain names for my new "incubator", panies.com panies.com, I didn't secure putation.com because it sounded bad. One week later I realized it was a pretty good name for a distributed computation service, but somebody else had grabbed the URL!

However, there is a critical piece missing from all these visions. intelligence is a property of an organization of computation, it is not computation itself. The problem of robotics is not the limited power of microcomputers, since we could drive any robot from a supercomputer if we knew what to write! We can get infinite cycles already, but nobody can write a coherent program bigger than 10M lines. We have figure out to use cycles towards discovery of a process of self-organization, rather than on a known software organization itself.

AI Metrics (Score:5, Interesting) by john_many_jars I have read several coffee table science books on the subject and often find myself asking for a way to measure AI. As has been noted, AI is always elusive and is just around the corner. My question is how do you gauge how far AI has come and what is AI?

For instance, what's the difference between your TRON demonstration and a highly advanced system of solving a (very specific) non-linear differential equation to find relative and (hopefully absolute) extrema in the wildly complicated space of TRON strategies? Or, is that the definition of intelligence?

This is a very hard question which I won't be able to joke my way out of. I think that system performance in specific domains can be measured, like a rating system for a game likeTRON. I think we might be able to get a measure of the generative capacity of a system in all possible environments, by capturing strings of symbols representing different actions, and looking at the grammar of behavior. In general, however, observers have an effect on their observations of computational capacity. I usually think of intelligence as a measurement, not the thing being measured, sort of like the difference between temperature and heat, or weight and mass. It could be a measurement of operational knowledge (programmed, not static in a database), or of efficient use of knowledge resources. This measurement is applied to an organization. So committees of very smart people can operate idiotically, and groups of dumb insects can be very intelligent.

My current best working definition is that intelligence is the ratio of the amount of problem-solving accomplished to the number of cycles wasted. When I say we need 10B lines of code, it is not to say that raw program size is a measure of intelligence, but to express the idea that inside that code are enough different heuristics and gizmos to solve lots of problems effectively.

And what about Freedom? (Score:5, Insightful) by Hobbex Mr. Pollack,

I read your article about "information property" and was surprised to find you dealt with the matter completely from the point of view of advancing the market. Their are those of us who would argue that the wellbeing of the market is, at most, a second order concern, and that the important issues that Information age gives rise regarding the perceived ownership of information are really about Freedom and integrity.

These issues range from the simple desire to have the right to do whatever one wants with data that one has access to, to the simple futility and danger of trying to limit to paying individuals something that by nature, mathematics, and now technology is Free. They concern the fact that our machines are now so integral in our lives that they have become a part of our identity, with our computers as the extension of ourselves into "cyberspace", and that any proposal which aims to keep the total right to control over everything in the computer away from the user is thus an invasion into our integrity, personality, and freedom.

Do you consider the economics of the market to be a greater concern than individual freedom?

This is a beautiful question, thank you. My book is exactly about freedom and rights: The freedom to sell a copy of a book you are done reading. The freedom to share in the rewards when something you design or write is in demand by millions of people. The right to own what you buy.

I see an inexorable movement towards dispossessionism, both coming from the "right," with UCITA, secured digital rights, anti-crypto-tampering in the DMCA, and ASP subscription models, and coming from the "left", with ideas that we should give our writing up into free collectivist projects.

The Internet is the beginning of Goldstein's "celestial jukebox," the encyclopedia of everything anyone has ever written, every episode of every TV show, and every song by every band. It sounds wonderful until you realize that you will have to pay per view! Bill Gates now has the money to deploy satellites which will force you to rent his word processor for $1/hour, the same rate for renting a movie. The laws on theft of satellite programs, unfortunately, as legal doctrine goes, considers decoding satellite broadcasts as theft of cable services, rather than as protected first amendment rights to receive radio broadcasts. Once secure distribution of programs on a rental basis is established, all content publishing will move inexorably into that mode to maximize profits. No more books, no more records. No more ownership. Dispossession.

The Free software movement, League for Programming Freedom, Open Source Software, on the other hand, talk idealistic young individuals out of their writing. "Contribute it towards a greater good." Be rewarded by occasional e-mails of thanks from your peers. The Free Music movement, or "let's RIP our CD's and trade MP3s through Napster" isn't as politically as economically motivated, but is also making musicians contribute their work for the greater good, at least of dormitories! Dispossession.

Fascism and Communism, while they have philosophical appeal for their mimetic simplicity, have proven themselves consistently the enemies of freedom, enterprise and creativity. Ordinary people are "dispossessed" of their property, which ends up, not surprisingly, in the pockets of the promoters of the simple philosophy.

My purpose in writing License to Bill is to begin a discussion not only on a societal remedy to the microsoft problem, but to secure, as a human right, the right to own information properties I buy, rather than just being able to rent them. I especially want the right to own and sell copies of my own creations, and to own a library of other's creations, reasonably priced based on supply and demand, without fear that a change in technology will render my investments worthless..

A market is just a mechanism which humanity uses to allocate resources fairly. It is neither good nor evil.

To which I would add... (Score:5, Interesting) by joss I also read your IP proposal, and agree with the points mentioned above.

However, I also have a problem with your proposal from an economic perspective:

Property laws developed as a mechanism for optimal utilization of scarce resources. The laws and ethics for standard property make little sense when the cost of replication is $0. The market is the best mechanism for distributing scarce resources, so you propose we make all IP resources scarce so that IP behaves like other commodities and all the laws of the market apply.

We are rapidly entering a world where most wealth is held as a form of IP. Free replication of IP increases the net wealth of the planet. If everybody on earth had access to all the IP on earth, then everybody would be far richer - it's not a zero sum game. Of course, we're several decades at least from this being a viable option since we've reached a local minima. (Need equivalent to starship replicators first - nanotech...)

Artificially pretending that IP is a scarce resource will keep the lawyers, accountants, politicians in work, and will also allow some money to flow back to the creatives, but at the cost of impoverishing humanity.

I could actually see your proposal being adopted, and I can see how it will maintain capitalism as the dominant model, but I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history

Could you tell me why I'm wrong.

Wow! "I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history" Surely this is a wonderful compliment.

The history and future of money is very interesting, and one you can read about in various books, including one byMilton Friedman, and one from the Cato Institute. I think today's software houses who force upgrades on their customers are like the wildcat banks of the nineteenth century, printing up banknotes, and then declaring bankruptcy, vanishing with the deposits and setting up shop in another town.

Before money, there was simply trade in raw and polished goods. Then there was weighing and coinage. Lots of people thought coins were the real value and heartily resisted paper money. The gold and silver standards gave way, and eventually the idea that there was gold for every dollar bill was revealed as a hoax, and now "money" is simply a record in your bank's computer that there is a certain amount you are entitled to withdraw based on the amounts other banks have deposited for you. The only essential different between a rich and poor person is what the bank computers and the registrar of deeds say it is, backed by military force. And the money supply and international exchanges now somehow represents our national wealth with respect to other nations, and other nation's confidence that our banking system isn't duplicating dollars. Instead of objects of trade, money is information about potential trade.

While you might not like the idea that money is abstract and in limited supply, and you have more or less than you want, it is the soft underbelly of "Starship Economics" that Gene Roddenberry died before coming up with the backstory for how to have a non-mediocre society with unlimited replication for all.

I once invented a transporter machine for paper using public key crypto and fax technology. It would hold the source paper in a metal box, verify the copy was printed, and then destroy the original and legitimize the copy. With this system, you could fax a dollar bill to a friend! Now: is a dollar bill is just the likeness of a dollar bill on a crinkly piece of thermal paper, or the actual piece of green stuff? If Paypal can figure out how you can beam money from your palmpilot to mine, but a bug lets you keep a copy of the money, I bet their valuation would go way down.

I am simply saying that permanent use and resale licenses to changeable information (software, art, literature, music, movies) which can be traded securely, without loss or duplication, in a public market, is a form of currency.

Unlimited replication of currency just doesn't work, any more than two copies of William Shatner.

I stake the middle ground. Both the "right" copyright publishers who make currency loss through expiring keys and forced upgrades, and the "left" copyright violators who duplicate currency, will be welcome at my table when they see the light.

----------

Thanks for your interesting questions. My comments do not reflect the official position of my employer Brandeis University, the sponsors of my laboratory's research, or the companies i am involved with, Abuzz, Xilicon, or Thinmail.

Humbly yours,
Jordan Pollack
Bigname@scientist.com
P.S. you too can be a scientist thanks to mail.com:)

tnielson writes: "The April issue of Wired interviews Stuart Parkin, an IBM scientist developing MRAM; Non-volatile, fast, durable, and cheap. It should be great in an MP3 player, and according to the article, could make all of our computers instant-on! Problem is, five years is a long time to wait..."

Anonymous Coward writes "Proposals for a new definition of human rights now before the European Parliament, writes Duncan Campbell in Telepolis, would ban ECHELON and update data protection rules to latest developments in telecommunications technology." Compare and contrast to the United States, where the only legislative proposals before Congress are to increase government spying on the citizenry. Hey, the FBI says "If there's going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it's going to be us. It's going to be the FBI." What more is there to say?

OwenF writes: "Well, the coppers have picked up some 50-year-old for stealing the enigma decoder. He's already out on bail, and they're still looking for a woman seen driving a red car at the museum. Very 'international superthief' type caper, if you ask me. Where's 007 when you need him?" I think it's clear to everyone that the woman in the red car is most likely Carmen Sandiego.

A number of people have written in with the news that the MPAA ^[?] has filed another injunction in the DeCSS case. This time around, they've filed for an injunction against 2600 seeking to stop 2600 from linking to the DeCSS Source Code. Interestingly enough for both (and us, who are in a similar situation) a Judge recently ruled that deep linking was legal. Hopefully, this will enable a better defense.

The Federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Junger v. Daley Tuesday, finding that source code is expressive speech. PeterD.Junger had sued in 1997 to allow posting of some crypto code on the Internet, on the grounds that it is expressive and not merely functional. The court found in his favor: "Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment." Read on for an excerpt from the ruling (or go read the whole thing yourself, lazy!).

See also the Wired article. And may I just say how delightful it is that the court compared source code to written music -- and to the works of JacksonPollack!

Excerpt from the court opinion:

The issue of whether or not the First Amendment protects encryption source code is a difficult one because source code has both an expressive feature and a functional feature. The United States does not dispute that it is possible to use encryption source code to represent and convey information and ideas about cryptography and that encryption source code can be used by programmers and scholars for such informational purposes. Much like a mathematical or scientific formula, one can describe the function and design of encryption software by a prose explanation; however, for individuals fluent in a computer programming language, source code is the most efficient and precise means by which to communicate ideas about cryptography.

The district court concluded that the functional characteristics of source code overshadow its simultaneously expressive nature. The fact that a medium of expression has a functional capacity should not preclude constitutional protection. Rather, the appropriate consideration of the medium's functional capacity is in the analysis of permitted government regulation.

The Supreme Court has explained that "all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance," including those concerning "the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts" have the full protection of the First Amendment. ... This protection is not reserved for purely expressive communication. The Supreme Court has recognized First Amendment protection for symbolic conduct, such as draft-card burning, that has both functional and expressive features. ...

The Supreme Court has expressed the versatile scope of the First Amendment by labeling as "unquestionably shielded" the artwork of Jackson Pollack, the music of Arnold Schoenberg, or the Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll. ... Though unquestionably expressive, these things identified by the Court are not traditional speech. Particularly, a musical score cannot be read by the majority of the public but can be used as a means of communication among musicians. Likewise, computer source code, though unintelligible to many, is the preferred method of communication among computer programers.

Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment.

Jon Rochmis from wired wrote in to tell us that Declan McCullagh has a story up now: Microsoft Loses. There really isn't a lot of details, except that the news is officially out, and that the penalties (and of course many more lawsuits) will be forthcoming.Update: 04/03 09:08 by H :Check out the official government site for the ruling -- in excruciating detail. CNNfn also has got an analysis up.

periscope wrote to us about the Wired story that's currently running about InterVideo's LinDVD. We've mentioned this situation before, but now it looks like something's actually going to happen. As I said before, InterVideo has the CSS license to produce a player that the MPAA won't throw a hissy-fit over.

bahwi writes: "It looks like Judge Jackson has decided to wait until April 6 to issue his next ruling. Most of the states and the Justice Department want a structural change (read "company breakup") and don't want to settle for anything less, but Microsoft keeps saying no. The last two paragraphs are an interesting read, too. Read more about it at Wired."

yankeehack writes: "This is a new article by Declan McCullagh (Wired Magazine) describing the confusion swirling around the CPHACK ruling of Monday, March 27th. What exactly does Mattel have rights to? And what about those who own a copy of the cphack program currently? Read the opinions of some prominent legal scholars on this issue." ery worth reading.

Bahwi was the first to write with the news that Microsoft and the Government are still talking, at Judge Jackson's suggestion. So, it looks as if a settlement may still be reached.

radja writes, "It seems people are beginning to notice that CPHack falls under the GPL. According to this article in Wired, Mattel may have a little trouble getting CPHack off the Web." Check out yesterday's article about the win Mattel had recently with CPHack.

Michael Dayah wrote to us with a great essay, that I've included below. He addresses the issue of the Drake Equation and what Age we live in now. The Age of Curiosity

Everyone has seen the famous Drake Equation on those educational astronomy shows--the equation that multiplies the nearly infinitely large number stars in the universe by several seemingly miniscule fractions--expressing the number of technological civilizations in the universe that have progressed to the point of radio communication. Despite this, it still always manages to produce some preposterously large number of intelligences from whom we should have already heard. So why isn't the sky saturated with these radio signals from extraterrestrials?

Two hundred years ago, we had no interest in listening for other forms of life on the edge of our galaxy. The scientific knowledge of the time was not developed enough to allow us to be curious about extraterrestrials and radio transmissions from space. Now, our civilization is at the height of its curiosity. On the edge of comprehending quantum mechanics but still searching for a "theory of everything", we understand just enough science to pique our interest--to make us hungry for more. We can see the amazing things--things like nanotechnology--that are possible but just out of our reach. Will this curiosity dwindle as more of this becomes possible--and real?

In our Age of Curiosity, we know computers can simulate our environment and predict what will happen given certain initial conditions. The universe operates under specific physical laws and--given starting conditions, such as the conditions of an early earth on which life arose, a computer could theoretically track the position of every atom as amino acids formed, the first cells divided, and the first creature came out of the water. What stops us from doing this now? Time. Our current level of computational speed is too primitive to handle but the simplest of prediction-type tasks, such as deciding how wind will interact with an airplane or how heat will warp a metal container. Even these are too complex to be calculated on the atomic level; we must use equations that describe the motion and flow of gasses and liquids on a large scale to run such simulations.

Will we still be as interested in contacting other life when computers are fast enough to simulate a million years of evolution in a few days? Who would want to wait a thousand years to get one response from a distant and potentially hostile civilization when we can converse in real time with our own computer-generated population simulated in a consumer-level computer? The only question is of when computer technology will reach this speed. Obviously, such computational speed is far beyond any amount of copper wire and almost any number of cubic miles of nanotechnology. It is not beyond quantum computing, if such a thing is possible on a large scale. How long will this advance take? Ten years? A hundred years? Two hundred years at the absolute most?

What if such a level of quantum computing proves to be impossible? Even if we cannot completely simulate large environments and watch evolution progress on the atomic level, we will have soon unraveled the mysteries of life. The Human Genome Project is nearly complete. Not too many years afterwards, we will know the purpose of every nucleotide of the human genome. Creating entire organisms from nothing but a graphical interface and gene-sequencing machine (which already exists) is no more than a hundred years away. Whether specific advances are possible or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is the eventual decline in curiosity as ability and technology increase. The above two advances are just examples.

When did our civilization have the greatest capability for destruction? Our curiosity about other intelligences and making contact piqued in about the same period as our ability to make atomic weapons. For all civilizations, the discovery of the destructive power of subatomic energy likely follows the discovery of radio communication; the scientific understanding required for both is closely related. Who would want to communicate with a potentially violent race in the prime of their destructive ability and the maximum of their naivety to use this destructive power?

Why is it when we think of other intelligences, we always imagine they are peaceful? We certainly are not. It is time-tested knowledge that when a stronger population encounters a weaker population, the weaker population is enslaved or killed. When human society reached industrialization, the environment and lesser species paid the price. Over one hundred species a day are still becoming extinct because of our actions. When the Europeans came to North America, they killed the Native Americans and enslaved the Africans. Why do we believe this would not hold true for interplanetary relations? Is it wishful thinking, since we will likely be the lesser race? Can you imagine us visiting a planet with Neanderthal-level inhabitants and not vastly exploiting them and their planet, even if just for natural resources? Other civilizations would likely have experienced similar problems in their past; it's not much of an incentive to broadcast your presence.

How long will we even use the current methods of radio communication? Knowing we are broadcasting our presence to many potentially hostile races within striking distance, won't we soon want to use better methods of communication (or, at minimum, bands of the electromagnetic spectrum) which are greatly if not completely dampened or reflected by the atmosphere? This would be perfectly acceptable for localized communications. Since satellite communications can be directed at specific points, there is no major concern about a sphere of electromagnetic noise broadcasting our presence. Certainly other civilizations realize this as well, further decreasing the chance of contact.

One hundred, or for the sake of argument, five hundred years of nominal curiosity about other civilizations is an extremely small slice of the eight billion years or so the universe has been hospitable for the creation and proliferation of life. If every civilization only concerned itself with making contact for a millionth of their evolutionary development, what are the chances of one civilization hearing another other at exactly the right time? If by some remote chance one planet in its Age of Curiosity received radio communication from another civilization and attempted a reply, the broadcaster would have already lost interest and stopped listening.

It is time to update the Drake Equation to include another miniscule fraction--the ratio of a civilization's Age of Curiosity to its lifetime. Will this addition keep the number of communicable civilizations optimistic enough for us earthlings, in our Age of Curiosity?

MacRonin writes: "Richard Stallman interview Value Your Freedom at Wired." The RMS ^[?] interview clocks in at 21 minutes, talking about User Liberation, Amazon Boycotts, Hackers Crackers Pirates, and "Advice to Users." The last one kinda sounds like a William S. Burroughs ^[?] bit.

marks writes "Wired is carrying a story about some folks in San Francisco that are going around and putting up anti-dot-com stickers such as 'blowthedotoutyourass.com' and 'ButIDon'tNeedMyToothPasteDelivered.com.' They even have a website (blowthedotoutyourass.com) where other people can download and print their slogans and paste them other places. Its funny, in that sick, twisted, 'If I hear one more website commercial I'm gonna kill someone' way."

AllynKC wrote: "Wired News has this story on the developments in quantum computing. Federal researchers have developed the worlds first 7-qubit quantum computer. Interesting stuff; but even Wired's toned-down version is, quite honestly, beyond me at some points. Still, the concept of a fully functioning quantum computer intrigues me."

shawnb writes "It seems that IBM has created the world's fastest Linux cluster built from lots of small servers (64 IBM Netfinity 256 servers). The Netfinity servers are linked together using "special clustering software and high-speed networking hardware, which causes the separate units to act as one computer, delivering a processing speed of 375 gigaflops, or 375 billion operations per second." They also go on to say that this is the fastest Linux supercomputer, "it will only rank 24th on the list of the top 500 fastest supercomputers. " "

RiscTaker writes: "Wired reports that the MPAA is investigating the Apex DVD player because of its ability to avoid region coding, Macrovision and CSS. " I bought my Apex 600A last week at the former home of the $99 iOpener, and found that the secret-menu hack described at nerd-out worked flawlessly. Perhaps the MPAA would like to invest in a time machine to revisit the days of mercantilism, or to stuff the encryption cat back into the bag it's long since vacated.

Concealed writes "There is an article in the new Wired which talks about the future of nanotechnology and 'intelligent machines.' Bill Joy, (also the creator of the Unix text editor vi) who wrote the article, expresses his views on the neccesity of the human race in the near future. " From what I can gather this is the article that the Bill Joy on Extinction story was drawn from. Bill is a smart guy -- and this is well worth reading.

Wired has this story about the Amiga comeback, under a new company, which bought the Amiga rights from Gateway. As an old Amiga fan, I will believe it when I see some new machines. You can read more about it here on the official Amiga Web site. I really hope to see something come out of this.

K2 (and many others -- Thanks!) wrote with news about Gnutella: "Just when open-sourcing was becoming mainstream, they pull the plug on it. I just read this on Wired: Open-Source 'Napster' Shut Down. If anybody got the download yesterday, could you make it available somewhere? (That must be legal based on the licensing it was given away under.) Thanks." According to this article, Gnutella was "an unauthorized freelance project and the Web site that allowed access to the software has been taken down." Note also the media companies linked to AOL (Warner and EMI).Update: 03/16 03:01 by H :Check out our original story about it.

A few weeks ago we ran Keep It Legal to Embarrass Big Companies , detailing Peacefire's decryption of X-Stop's blacklist. Then just a few days ago, we noted that CyberPatrol's encrypted list had also been cracked. Well, Mattel, the maker of CyberPatrol and a Big Company, decided it didn't like to be embarrassed -- so it's filing suit against the coders in Canada and Sweden. In addition to demanding the removal of the decryption utility, Mattel is also seeking the logfiles of the Swedish ISP that hosts the decryption utility, to identify everyone who has downloaded it to date. Update: 03/16 6:50 PM EDT by J : Today's news was filled with Mattel's PR lies about their suit. Analysis follows.

Update: 03/16 6:50 PM EDT by J : The problems started with the AP story (cited above). The decryption software posted by the activists was described as "a method for kids to deduce their parents' password and access [pornographic] Web sites."

This was the spin that Mattel's PR people put on the story. They surely didn't want the news media reporting that activists had posted software that exposes their secret, hidden blacklist to the light of day. That wouldn't sound so good - it might get people to ask "why are these blacklists encrypted at all?"

Instead, Mattel's PR decided to say that the decryption software allows kids to view pornography. Predictable - this is the same smear that's always dragged out - but the media swallowed it uncritically. (The AP story was repeated on cnet, and everywhere else that uses the AP feed.)

Even the normally-critical Declan McCullagh wrote a story for Wired whose opening sentence was corporate propaganda. "Toy-maker Mattel has sued two programmers who revealed how to circumvent its CyberPatrol blocking software." Thankfully, the rest of his article gave the full story.

Mattel is not upset about CPHack's minor feature of circumventing the program when installed. Peacefire has been distributing their own instructions to disable Cyber Patrol for months now, and hasn't been sued. (They're pretty simple instructions, too.)

Mattel is upset that people can see the flaws in their software which were previously hidden by encryption. They want to continue selling bad software and will use the full force of law to prevent you from learning how bad it is. Legal papers have already been served and the proceedings will presumably begin shortly. Stay tuned - and don't trust press releases.

Frac writes " Think Michael Robertson, CEO of mp3.com, is a pioneer of mp3s and nothing else? Think again. Apparently he is a domain squatter of various registered trademarks that don't belong to him, according to Wired News. A search on network solution's whois reveals that he has a large collection of domains under his belt, a lot of which are names of products that he doesn't own. They are registered under his name, and Filez and mp3.com, his companies. Domain names include tu-cows.com, audiograbber.com, talk-city.com, and metacrawler.net. "

KnobDicker writes "Wired News reports Symantec is pressuring the ISP that hosts the Peacefire anti-censorware organization." Peacefire's founder, Bennett Haselton, wrote a decryptor for Symantec's software's blacklist and posted just that. His tests found that 76% of its .edu blocks were incorrect and that the software violates its privacy policy. Symantec's response? Threaten a lawsuit. But Peacefire isn't backing down. More below...

Let's first get the facts straight. Peacefire has not posted copyrighted material. It has posted code to decrypt I-Gear's encrypted blacklist. This is exactly like the DeCSS case, except the goal is criticizing a product instead of space-shifting movies.

The criticism here is that 76% of the .edu-domain blocks are wrong. This is a huge number. This suggests that, for every time the product blocks you from offensive material at an .edu Web site, there are three other times it blocked you from perfectly ordinary material.

While there are some people (like Bruce Taylor of the National Law Center for Children and Families) who would like to deny it, nobody's making this stuff up. Censorware really does suck. In fact, Peacefire did the same thing to X-Stop, another blocking package, two weeks earlier, and found a 68% .edu error rate. (But its maker hasn't threatened to sue. Yet.)

So what did Peacefire learn about I-Gear? A description of a milking machine system written in Spanish - blocked. Tricks for a flight sim game - blocked. A page entirely in Latin - blocked. Volumes 4 and 6 of "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" - blocked (but you can still read Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 5, go figure).

Furthermore, Peacefire revealed that Symantec is apparently violating its privacy policy by sending information to its servers without telling the user. Your Windows-registered "real name" and "company name" secretly get sent back to Symantec.

You may recall Haselton's Slashdot story "Keep it Legal to Embarrass Big Companies," from two weeks ago. He wondered if these kinds of pressure tactics would be the response to his efforts. It's already started.

The legal issue appears to be whether Symantec's End-User License Agreement (EULA) can contain a clause prohibiting reverse-engineering - and whether that clause can be enforced. UCITA will be the thousand-pound gorilla here, providing real legal muscle behind onerous EULAs. Fortunately, the current legal situation is more iffy, and cnet's story talks about that a little.

Symantec wants to distribute I-Gear only on the condition that nobody looks under the hood or says anything bad about it. And UCITA would back that up - by sending people like Haselton to jail for revealing products' flaws.

And then there's the question of why Symantec is using lousy crypto in the first place. As KnobDicker concludes: "Rather than being thankful that Haselton has conducted testing and work that they should have done themselves in the first place (for *free*), Symantec is crying in their beer and threatening to break out the lawyers to quash the bad press. Chalk up another one for the Open Source model's system of thorough peer review instead of development in a proprietary vacuum."

marks writes, "Wired has an article about the Genome Project. The article takes quotes from doctors who want the squabbling over 'property rights' to stop and the project to go forward to benefit patients. "

marks writes, "Wired has an article about the Genome Project. The article takes quotes from doctors who want the squabbling over 'property rights' to stop and the project to go forward to benefit patients. "

Andy Social writes, "Just saw a Wired article that tells more of the current administration's approach to online privacy. A DOJ commission that President Clinton requested a few months ago seems ready to publish their report and recommends that the U.S. find ways to trace all Internet access..." Another interesting article from Declan McCullagh. Personally, I became a believer in online anonymity while talking to a friend who used to maintain the alt.sexual.abuse.recovery FAQ. Some things are important. Update: 03/06 12:55 by J : Here's the report itself.

jhines sent us a nifty bit over at Wired about a Web design contest.. . the catch is the 5k maximum. The prize? 5120 cents ;) I won't enter: the best I could do was Slashdot's Light Mode.

This story popped in several times in the last couple days and it's pretty slow today so I figure it'll be good for a laugh. Apparently GoHip (no relationship to Goku or Gohan) had some sneaky ActiveX that a lot of people installed. Kinda a scary security situation right there. Makes me glad I don't have any of that OL- I mean CO- I mean ActiveX on this box.

Ant sent us linkage to a story about new microscopes that can view atoms . This puts us one step closer to both Quantum mechanics.

intensity writes, "Wired has an interesting read on efforts to 'make Linux pretty.' I originally got into Linux because it gave me total control over what I could do with my desktop through the X Windowing system. That was in 1995, when setting up X was a chore in itself. Is it time to set down a standard GUI for Linux systems? " It's mostly yet another story about Eazel's Nautilis project (AKA the GNOME 2.0 Desktop)

Maybe Peacefire's timing is bad. Two courts have recently said that the reverse-engineered DeCSS program is illegal to publish in the United States, and UCITA gets closer every second. Yet Peacefire today released a program that reverse-engineers the encryption on a list of sites blocked by a major censorware product. Maybe T-shirts that say 'X-Stop has a 68% error rate for blocking student homepages' will get classified as munitions next. Bennett Haselton shares his thoughts (below) on corporate crypto.

Bennett Haselton is the founder and head of Peacefire, an activist group to support the free-speech rights of young people. He suggests that you might want to download the X-Stop "smoking gun" evidence (4MB) before the company has a chance to remove it from their server.

The feature below was written by Mr.Haselton.

X-Stop is an Internet censoring program with an encrypted database of 370,000 URL's blocked under various categories: Sex, Drugs, Rock `n' Roll, etc. Their competitors like SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol also do not publish their blocked site lists; the officially given reason is to keep kids from using the lists to find smut on the Internet. This is silly, given how easy it is to find Internet porn without the aid of X-Stop's secret database (although if you still want to, you can download our codebreaker, follow the instructions to get the X-Stop list and decrypt it, and help yourself). But for the next part of our report, after we decoded the URL list, we looked at the first 50 URL's in the .edu domain that were still valid, and found that 34 of them were regular student home pages with nothing offensive (hence the "68% error rate" t-shirt slogan). None of those 34 students who responded to our e-mails could think of why X-Stop would want to block their pages.

X-Stop admits on their Web site that their database is put together by a Web spider called "Mudcrawler" and not by human reviewers, but even for a machine, a 68% error rate is pretty bad. And even though the real reason why these lists are encrypted is obviously to keep competitors from stealing them, this also makes it much harder for third parties to find out what the programs really block. In fact, X-Stop had once claimed that every URL on their list was reviewed by a human before getting blocked, but cyber lawyer Jonathan Wallace called them on it when he published "The X-Stop Files" in 1997, asking why X-Stop blocked several sites like the Quakers home page, the AIDS Quilt, and parts of Jonathan's own e-zine, The Ethical Spectacle. Peacefire also put up a page in 1998 about sites blocked by X-Stop, including an affirmative action site and a blind children's hospital. But these examples were all found through trial and error; today is the first day that the entire list of URL's has been made public. And to determine the 68% figure, it was necessary to have a copy of the entire list, so that the first 50 blocked sites could be used as a random sample.

So far, this is more or less the same story that took place in 1997 with another blocking program, CYBERsitter, right down to Jonathan Wallace posting a page about CYBERsitter and getting his site blocked. First, several people posted articles criticizing CYBERsitter's policies, and slowly CYBERsitter's public image deteriorated as word got out that they were blocking sites which criticized their company (even Time magazine got blocked, and then posted an article about how they found themselves on CYBERsitter's list). Then in April 1997, Peacefire released a program that broke the encryption on CYBERsitter's list of blocked URL's. CYBERsitter sent Peacefire a threatening letter demanding that we take down the program and remove all of our links to CYBERsitter's Web page. Jim Tyre, a volunteer lawyer and future founding member of the Censorware Project, sent CYBERsitter a reply telling them they had no case, and we never heard from them again. But UCITA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the two court injunctions against the right to post DeCSS, didn't exist in 1997. If we had released the CYBERsitter codebreaker today, would CYBERsitter actually file a lawsuit?

The outcome of the DeCSS court cases could, in fact, determine the rights of a private citizen to embarrass a big software company by reverse engineering their products and catching them in a lie. It's easy to forget the importance of legal protection for reverse engineering, because sometimes public opinion is enough: RealNetworks never sued Richard Smith when he revealed that copies of RealPlayer included a "globally unique identifier" to track user's listening habits, and Microsoft never sued Andrew Schulman when he discovered that Windows 3.1 threw up fake error messages about DR-DOS. These were large companies that would have been crucified if they had tried to sue someone for discovering something that the public thought they had a right to know anyway. But legal protections are still important, because sometimes public opinion isn't enough - when the software company doesn't have much of an online reputation to worry about, or when then they have a reputation but they don't care about it.

The RIAA, with their campaigns against MP3 technology and reverse-engineering SDMI, is an example of an organization that doesn't care about their online image - and why should they, since we all download our music for free anyway. CYBERsitter is another good example - they do care about their reputation, but in 1997 their image was that of a children's guardian angel and an ally in fighting government censorship, almost immune to criticism. It took an enormous amount of bad press - letters from CYBERsitter's CEO threatening ISP's and flaming people in general, and at one point actually mail-bombing a lady who sent them a complaint - before even advocates of blocking software started distancing themselves from the company. Even today, CYBERsitter's public image is fairly rosy, and their campaigns of legal harassment hardly affected their reputation at all. (What had you heard about CYBERsitter before you read this article?) It's hard to imagine Microsoft, for example, filing a similar lawsuit without embarrassing themselves and turning their intended target into a martyr. The real threat to "reverse engineering for the public good" is from medium-sized companies, small enough that not everything they do will get in the news, but still big enough to afford lots of lawyers.

This threat affects not just programmers, but even journalists who get anonymous tip-offs - like Brock Meeks and Declan McCullagh, who were threatened with an FBI investigation by CYBERsitter in 1996, after they published their "Keys to the Kingdom" article about sites that CYBERsitter and other "censorware" programs blocked. The part of the article that got them in so much trouble was this excerpt from CYBERsitter's bad- word file:

[up][the,his,her,your,my][ass,cunt,twat][,hole]
[wild,wet,net,cyber,have,making,having,getting,giving,phone][sex...]
[,up][the,his,her,your,my][butt,cunt,pussy,asshole,rectum,anus]
[,suck,lick][the,his,her,your,my][cock,dong,dick,penis,hard on...]
[gay,queer,bisexual][male,men,boy,group,rights,community,activities...]
[gay,queer,homosexual,lesbian,bisexual][society,culture]
[you][are][,a,an,too,to][stupid,dumb,ugly,fat,idiot,ass,fag,dolt,dummy]

If this now counts as a "trade secret" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then our list of the 50 .edu sites blocked by X-Stop - and the study that found the 68% error rate - could be declared illegal. And under UCITA, CYBERsitter could even claim the enforceability of these excerpts from their license agreement:

Reverse Engineering Prohibited
Unauthorized reverse engineering of the Software, whether for edcucational, fair use, or other reason is expressly forbidden. For the purposes of this license the term "reverse engineering" shall apply to any and all information obtained by such methods as decompiling, decrypting, trial and error, or activity logging.

Non-Disclosure
Unauthorized disclosure of CYBERsitter operational details, hacks, work around methods, blocked sites, and blocked words or phrases are expressly prohibited.

So any CYBERsitter user who even discusses what the program blocks, would be in violation. Not that CYBERsitter would enforce this against everybody, but they probably would have liked to enforce it against Brock and Declan.

At this point, we don't know how X-Stop will respond to our report. But we do know that for all of their bluster, CYBERsitter never actually sued Brock, Declan or Peacefire. Given that CYBERsitter pursued the matter for months (and the fact that Brock and Declan had actual money), if CYBERsitter gave up, it's because they had no case. If the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, UCITA, or the DVD court rulings change that situation, then it will become much harder to criticize blocking software - or any kind of software - except for the user interface and other things that users can "see" without looking under the hood.

Maybe Peacefire's timing is bad. Two courts have recently said that the reverse-engineered DeCSS program is illegal to publish in the United States, and UCITA gets closer every second. Yet Peacefire today released a program that reverse-engineers the encryption on a list of sites blocked by a major censorware product. Maybe T-shirts that say 'X-Stop has a 68% error rate for blocking student homepages' will get classified as munitions next. Bennett Haselton shares his thoughts (below) on corporate crypto.

Bennett Haselton is the founder and head of Peacefire, an activist group to support the free-speech rights of young people. He suggests that you might want to download the X-Stop "smoking gun" evidence (4MB) before the company has a chance to remove it from their server.

The feature below was written by Mr.Haselton.

X-Stop is an Internet censoring program with an encrypted database of 370,000 URL's blocked under various categories: Sex, Drugs, Rock `n' Roll, etc. Their competitors like SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol also do not publish their blocked site lists; the officially given reason is to keep kids from using the lists to find smut on the Internet. This is silly, given how easy it is to find Internet porn without the aid of X-Stop's secret database (although if you still want to, you can download our codebreaker, follow the instructions to get the X-Stop list and decrypt it, and help yourself). But for the next part of our report, after we decoded the URL list, we looked at the first 50 URL's in the .edu domain that were still valid, and found that 34 of them were regular student home pages with nothing offensive (hence the "68% error rate" t-shirt slogan). None of those 34 students who responded to our e-mails could think of why X-Stop would want to block their pages.

X-Stop admits on their Web site that their database is put together by a Web spider called "Mudcrawler" and not by human reviewers, but even for a machine, a 68% error rate is pretty bad. And even though the real reason why these lists are encrypted is obviously to keep competitors from stealing them, this also makes it much harder for third parties to find out what the programs really block. In fact, X-Stop had once claimed that every URL on their list was reviewed by a human before getting blocked, but cyber lawyer Jonathan Wallace called them on it when he published "The X-Stop Files" in 1997, asking why X-Stop blocked several sites like the Quakers home page, the AIDS Quilt, and parts of Jonathan's own e-zine, The Ethical Spectacle. Peacefire also put up a page in 1998 about sites blocked by X-Stop, including an affirmative action site and a blind children's hospital. But these examples were all found through trial and error; today is the first day that the entire list of URL's has been made public. And to determine the 68% figure, it was necessary to have a copy of the entire list, so that the first 50 blocked sites could be used as a random sample.

So far, this is more or less the same story that took place in 1997 with another blocking program, CYBERsitter, right down to Jonathan Wallace posting a page about CYBERsitter and getting his site blocked. First, several people posted articles criticizing CYBERsitter's policies, and slowly CYBERsitter's public image deteriorated as word got out that they were blocking sites which criticized their company (even Time magazine got blocked, and then posted an article about how they found themselves on CYBERsitter's list). Then in April 1997, Peacefire released a program that broke the encryption on CYBERsitter's list of blocked URL's. CYBERsitter sent Peacefire a threatening letter demanding that we take down the program and remove all of our links to CYBERsitter's Web page. Jim Tyre, a volunteer lawyer and future founding member of the Censorware Project, sent CYBERsitter a reply telling them they had no case, and we never heard from them again. But UCITA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the two court injunctions against the right to post DeCSS, didn't exist in 1997. If we had released the CYBERsitter codebreaker today, would CYBERsitter actually file a lawsuit?

The outcome of the DeCSS court cases could, in fact, determine the rights of a private citizen to embarrass a big software company by reverse engineering their products and catching them in a lie. It's easy to forget the importance of legal protection for reverse engineering, because sometimes public opinion is enough: RealNetworks never sued Richard Smith when he revealed that copies of RealPlayer included a "globally unique identifier" to track user's listening habits, and Microsoft never sued Andrew Schulman when he discovered that Windows 3.1 threw up fake error messages about DR-DOS. These were large companies that would have been crucified if they had tried to sue someone for discovering something that the public thought they had a right to know anyway. But legal protections are still important, because sometimes public opinion isn't enough - when the software company doesn't have much of an online reputation to worry about, or when then they have a reputation but they don't care about it.

The RIAA, with their campaigns against MP3 technology and reverse-engineering SDMI, is an example of an organization that doesn't care about their online image - and why should they, since we all download our music for free anyway. CYBERsitter is another good example - they do care about their reputation, but in 1997 their image was that of a children's guardian angel and an ally in fighting government censorship, almost immune to criticism. It took an enormous amount of bad press - letters from CYBERsitter's CEO threatening ISP's and flaming people in general, and at one point actually mail-bombing a lady who sent them a complaint - before even advocates of blocking software started distancing themselves from the company. Even today, CYBERsitter's public image is fairly rosy, and their campaigns of legal harassment hardly affected their reputation at all. (What had you heard about CYBERsitter before you read this article?) It's hard to imagine Microsoft, for example, filing a similar lawsuit without embarrassing themselves and turning their intended target into a martyr. The real threat to "reverse engineering for the public good" is from medium-sized companies, small enough that not everything they do will get in the news, but still big enough to afford lots of lawyers.

This threat affects not just programmers, but even journalists who get anonymous tip-offs - like Brock Meeks and Declan McCullagh, who were threatened with an FBI investigation by CYBERsitter in 1996, after they published their "Keys to the Kingdom" article about sites that CYBERsitter and other "censorware" programs blocked. The part of the article that got them in so much trouble was this excerpt from CYBERsitter's bad- word file:

[up][the,his,her,your,my][ass,cunt,twat][,hole]
[wild,wet,net,cyber,have,making,having,getting,giving,phone][sex...]
[,up][the,his,her,your,my][butt,cunt,pussy,asshole,rectum,anus]
[,suck,lick][the,his,her,your,my][cock,dong,dick,penis,hard on...]
[gay,queer,bisexual][male,men,boy,group,rights,community,activities...]
[gay,queer,homosexual,lesbian,bisexual][society,culture]
[you][are][,a,an,too,to][stupid,dumb,ugly,fat,idiot,ass,fag,dolt,dummy]

If this now counts as a "trade secret" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then our list of the 50 .edu sites blocked by X-Stop - and the study that found the 68% error rate - could be declared illegal. And under UCITA, CYBERsitter could even claim the enforceability of these excerpts from their license agreement:

Reverse Engineering Prohibited
Unauthorized reverse engineering of the Software, whether for edcucational, fair use, or other reason is expressly forbidden. For the purposes of this license the term "reverse engineering" shall apply to any and all information obtained by such methods as decompiling, decrypting, trial and error, or activity logging.

Non-Disclosure
Unauthorized disclosure of CYBERsitter operational details, hacks, work around methods, blocked sites, and blocked words or phrases are expressly prohibited.

So any CYBERsitter user who even discusses what the program blocks, would be in violation. Not that CYBERsitter would enforce this against everybody, but they probably would have liked to enforce it against Brock and Declan.

At this point, we don't know how X-Stop will respond to our report. But we do know that for all of their bluster, CYBERsitter never actually sued Brock, Declan or Peacefire. Given that CYBERsitter pursued the matter for months (and the fact that Brock and Declan had actual money), if CYBERsitter gave up, it's because they had no case. If the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, UCITA, or the DVD court rulings change that situation, then it will become much harder to criticize blocking software - or any kind of software - except for the user interface and other things that users can "see" without looking under the hood.

Ben Green says, "First of all, I want to thank Robin Miller, Hemos, and CmdrTaco for giving me the opportunity to participate in this discussion. Slashdot has been a great resource for me both professionally and recreationally, since I started at Gore 2000."

1) Internet Policy
by Uruk (#6)

Something that I've seen missing from all of the candidate's Web sites is their policy on the Internet. How can you campaign on the Internet and not discuss the issues pertaining to the very media you're putting your ideas out on?

Ben:

This is a great question and one I obviously cannot speak for other candidates on. As for Al Gore's policies on Internet and Tech issues, there is quite a bit of content on our site regarding those issues.

Making all our content easy to find is a challenge for sure. We recently added a search feature that returns 139 pages when queried for the word "Internet", and 164 pages when queried for the words "Internet Policy". Without going in to painstaking detail, some of the topics covered in relation to Internet policy at algore2000.com, are a comprehensive Tech policy paper, and answers to four questions posted by visitors to the Town Hall portion of the Web site.

Incidentally, video of Gore's speech from Baltimore on Monday, which addressed the issue of the "Digital Divide" is posted on the site, as well as a text version.

You can search the Gore 2000 Web site from the main index page, as well as all 50 state pages, Town Hall, The Agenda, and The Briefing Room.

2) Why Linux?
by VP (#8)

According to netcraft, algore2000 is running Linux and Apache. What were the reasons for choosing that platform, and were they mainly technical, or political? Was this your initial choice, or did you change the platform at some point?

Ben:

Originally, algore2000.com ran on an NT box using the IIS Web server. The move to Linux came about for a number of reasons, and coincided with the campaign's move from K Street in Washington, DC to a new location on Charlotte Avenue in Nashville.

Our primary reasons for moving to Linux:

i) Performance ii) Reliability iii) Security iv) Cost-effectiveness

The move to Nashville and the subsequent reinvigoration of the campaign is in many ways analogous to our site's move to the Linux platform and what it has allowed us to do on the Internet.

Throughout most of last year, the campaign was overspending on many things and Web hosting was one of them. When Al Gore announced that he was moving us all to Nashville, we took a look at all our expenses to see where we could cut costs. When we determined that changing hosts would save us money, it allowed me an opportunity to fully explore the possibility of moving the site to a Linux environment.

Our long-term plans called for a lot of dynamic page generation and up until that point we had been using asps for our interactive forms. We also assumed that our site would start getting a lot more traffic as we moved into the primary season, so server performance was definitely an issue as well. Expanding the functionality of the site with asps and would have been expensive.

It became clear to me at that point that Linux was our best option, and given the chance to switch over it was an easy decision to make.

Since we moved to Nashville, this campaign has really turned around and our web site has improved a great deal. By using a tool called asp2php, we were able to convert our existing asps to a format compatible with Linux, and add a ton of functionality such a publishing system, state by state pages, and other stuff that you can see by visiting our site. Michael Kohn, (naken@i1.net) the author of asp2php, deserves much of the credit for making this happen. Our site wouldn't be what it is now without his help. There are other people who deserve credit for this as well Jeff Barger (maczilla-at-look-dot-net), who helps me administer our listservs, provided great advice and ideas.

The real heavy lifting was done by Eric Loeb, (frontaloeb@yahoo.com) who is one of the real pioneers of the field of politics and the Internet having worked on Clinton-Gore '92's e-mail distribution system, and the first - ever campaign Web site for Ted Kennedy's 1994 re-election. Eric is the chief software engineer at Gore 2000. During the month of January, he worked around the clock for three weeks to build algore2000.com's customized publishing system with php and mysql.

3) Marketing
by TheTomcat (#10)

What marketing and advertising methods have you found most successful for promoting the Web site? We all know that banners are dying, and the creators have to become more creative to get people to even NOTICE the banners. Is old media (television, print -- newspapers, magazines, billboards etc., radio.) the backend to the Web site's marketing campaign, or have you found innovative ways to make online promotion work?

Ben:

Probably the coolest promotion we have done so far has been our use of RealFlash. Back when Al Gore announced his candidacy last June, we bought 500,000 "pre-roll" impressions on the Real Broadcast Network to promote the live Web cast of the announcement speech. The click-through rate was very good, far better than we expected. If you aren't familiar with RealFlash, it is basically a flash presentation that is viewed in a RealPlayer, and is served to folks who are using the "presets" in the RealPlayer. Eileen Quigley and Sam Tucker at RealImpact helped us put that together, and it was the first-ever paid Internet advertising by a presidential campaign.

Other than paid promotion, we have seen traffic on our site affected by news events. Obviously the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary generated a lot of traffic to our site, which has tripled since the first of the year. We are now averaging slightly less than 20,000 user sessions per day.

Whenever Al Gore is out on the campaign trail he mentions the Web site, the news media picks it up, and the site gets hit. One day last fall when Gore was on the "This Week With Sam & Cokie" he mentioned the site address - we signed up 1000 volunteers in less than two hours.

4) Bad Press
by Signal 11 (#11)

In an increasingly wired society rumors and myths propagate at incredible speeds - how do you diffuse rumors and myths. For example, if I start a rumor that Mr. Gore said he "fathered Linus Torvalds" - how do you diffuse that? Rumors and myths often come about as a minor distortion of the truth which then goes through the "telephone game". How do you keep the public informed about what a candidate /really/ thinks, as opposed to what other people think the candidate thinks?

Ben:

This type of thing is dealt with on case by case basis. Most of the time these things don't even warrant a response. If you respond it only lends credibility to the charge.

5) External links?
by Pseudonymus Bosch (#20)

Linking to another sites is an essential feature of the Web.

Would you recommend linking to another sites from your boss' site? If yes, what kind of sites (supporters, other candidates, ~independent~ media, Slashdot :), supported campaigns)?

Would you object to being linked from another sites, even from opponents?

Ben:

Our links are mostly to voter registration information sites, such as Motor Voter registration forms and the like. As a general rule linking to other sites from a campaign page should be done selectively, because it can potentially detract from the purpose of having a campaign Web site in the first place.

Of course, we have links to download tools like the Adobe Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer, and QuickTime as well.

To the extent which an external link helps Gore supporters in having a better experience on our site we will add them.

This is an evolving area of campaign finance law, and as I understand it, other sites can link into ours, but FEC regulations are very clear in prohibiting links from corporate sites.

6) What's the true measure of success?
by A Big Gnu Thrush (#29)

This Wired article talks about the flood of donations received through McCain's Web site after a win in NH. Increasingly, the most effective form of political activism appears to be cash. While a strong Web presence could promote a dialogue of issues, this does not seem to be taking place.

If a Web site brought in little or no money, could a candidate still view it as successful, or is income the final measure of success?

Ben:

Excellent question. Every campaign has different sets of priorities. Obviously, raising money is a challenge for every campaign and we are no different in that respect. For Gore 2000, using the Internet to expand participation in the political process is more of a priority than using the Internet to raise money. Although we have been very successful in that regard, having raised over 1.1 million online since the site launched last April.

In my humble opinion, the degree to which the Internet is integrated into every aspect of a campaign is the degree to which that campaign will succeed on the Internet. At Gore 2000, it is ubiquitous - almost everything we do has an Internet component - including fundraising. This article, which ran on the New York Times Web site last Saturday, sheds some light onto how the various campaigns are raising money on the Internet.

Over 100,000 people have joined our online community, by volunteering, signing up for Gore Mail, or joining our voter outreach programs. This has allowed many people to get to know Al Gore, ask him questions, and become connected to the process. By that measure, our site and our Internet campaign have been a tremendous success thus far.

7) Interactivity in sites?
by Saige (#47)

The current political candidate sites seem to be little more than political rhetoric and volunteer information. Are there any plans to treat the Web site differently than a broadcast medium? I mean, including interactivity, such as message areas for open discussions, polling booths to get a feel for what people are really interested in. And also perhaps for offering large amounts of data about a candidate's past actions in government, such as voting records (and perhaps reasons for the vote).

Ben:

Our site offers users two-way communication and a vast amount of information on all things Gore. Of course there is a lot more we can do, and as the campaign progresses you will see the addition of more features that facilitate greater interactivity. We are also getting a steady flow of great ideas and insight from those that know the Internet best.

8)How long will the site be up?
by Pseudonymus Bosch

Disk space is cheap.

Will somebody maintain the site up after the election, even as a frozen site? It will be valuable for historians (and electors who would check the promises).

Ben:

One of my colleagues here has the greatest (and largest) collection of political memorabilia I have ever seen. In fact, it is so large that he recently added a 2000 sq. foot addition to his house to accommodate it. Our plan is to archive the site at this facility, which is not far from Nashville and is complete with a DSL connection. If anyone has any ideas about this, please feel free to e-mail me (ben@min.net) about them.

9) How does the Web site affect the candidate?
by Silas (#62)

Many of the questions posted so far ask you to discuss how the Web site and its upkeep influence the voters and the campaign. I'd like to you to discuss how having a Web site affects the candidate, his views, his methods, his public personality.

That's my main question, here are some points to ponder:

It seems that having a Web site as large and significant to the campaign as Gore's or most of the others would tend to force them to be more responsible, to be held more accountable for each and every utterance. In a world where disinformation and twisting of facts is commonplace in the popular media, how does a Web site like yours influence the candidate's` ability to take advantage of this?

Are Gore or any of the others more or less likely to refer back to their campaign managers and Web site before making statements about policy and moral issues? Or is it just as easy to perform an "about face" because the Web site can be updated just as quickly? Can campaigners now say "please see the FOO section of my Web site" instead of answering questions about specific issues?

Ben:

Al Gore visits algore2000.com every day, and I get regular feedback from him - and ideas for what we can do with the site. He frequently mentions the url at campaign appearances, and is so familiar with the content that he can direct people to its various sections when asked about specific issues. His detailed knowledge of policy and issues allows him to interact with voters AND refer them to the Web site at any time.

10) Lowest common denominator
by BOredAtWork (#195)

I'm a 20 year old male; this will be the first time I can vote in a presidential election. I am one of your target demographics. I'm a student; so my time to research the candidates is limited. One of my major sources of information is the Web - cnn.com and the various candidate sites in particular. At this point, my vote is up for grabs.

Algore2000 is a good site. I'm sure there was countless hours of thought put into each and every detail, especially the "agenda" page. That page in particular is a work of persuasive art, right down to the picture of Al with a pair of cops (tough on crime), and the (over)use of red, white and blue. The list of catch phrases is an especially nice touch; who could possibly NOT support "Saving Our Schools," "Fighting for America's Seniors" and "Improving Health Care," right?

My question for you, sir, has to be this: Why does algore2000.com seem to think I'm a fool? Am I supposed to be genuinely impressed by the load of press releases and speeches? I hate to break the news to you, but I want to see real content, NOT glazed over executive summaries. Take for instance something VERY relevant to me as a college student - the link from the front page about Al's Plan to Make College More Affordable. It leads here. The extent of the "details" stated is this:

"Gore announced new details of his National Tuition Savings Program, which is designed to help families save for college. The plan allows families to invest funds in an account where their money will be protected from inflation and can be withdrawn to pay for higher education expenses tax-free. The plan will also guarantee the cost of college tuition at any participating college or university in the country."

The rest of the press release is all fluff. No mention of whether this is limited to public or private universities, 2 or 4 year degrees, graduate school, part or full time study, etc. And this is the *basic* stuff. I'm also interested in why this would be a better option than, say, investing in short-term CD's.

That's just ONE example from the many I could have chosen. Nearly all the "content" of algore2000.com is fluff. And shots at Bill Bradley. The simple fact is this does not impress me. Actually, since this site represents Al Gore, I'm inclined to believe Al relatively clueless - if he wasn't, surely he'd tell us HOW he plans to fund his proposed programs, tax cuts, etc. Any politician can CLAIM to support any number of things. Algore2000 picks popular issues, and loads the wording of them such that ANYONE would be nearly forced to agree. Come on, who on earth DOESN'T support "A better educational system?"

What I could like to see from algore2000.com, as well as EVERY OTHER CANDIDATE is DETAILS. I want to know HOW you plan to provide a tax cut - will this come at the expense of the defense budget? Money always comes from somewhere; I want to know what has to be CUT to lower taxes. And don't tell me "unnecessary pork" or some trite answer. I want to see numbers.

And I want a big ass chart, with a column for every candidate, and a row for every issue. "Do you support abortion as it currently stands? y/n" "Do you support the abolition of legal abortion under all circumstances? y/n" "Do you support abortion under limited circumstances? If so, when?" Things like that. REAL questions. Some more: "Do you support the reverse engineering of software for porting and compatibility purposes?" "Do you support CDA in its current form?" And more of the like. I don't want to read "Al Gore supports technology and innovation" - I want to read HOW he supports them.

Simply put, algore2000.com seems to play to the lowest common denominator - the average american, who sadly enough has little interest in politics, and little technical knowledge. I think this is a mistake; this audience doesn't read political advocacy Web sites on a wide basis. You'd do better to use the Web site to provide details and elaborate on Al's statements and ideas rather than just rehash them.

One more side note: I followed Jesse Ventura's campaign slightly - I don't know his stance on most of the issues. I dont live in Minnesota, so I didn't take the time to research him. What I DO know is that I was very impressed when a reporter asked him if he supported some obscure bill I'd never heard of. Ventura replied something like "Well, to be honest, I'm not familiar with that at all. I'm not gonna lie to you; I don't know everything, or have all the answers you wanna hear. But I learn fast; I'll read up on it." When can we expect Al Gore to say something like THAT?

Ben:

Ø Algore2000 is a good site.

Well, that's a good start. I like this guy already.

Ø Why does algore2000.com seem to think I'm a fool?

Hmmmmm. Sounds like he changed his mind. Uh-oh.

>Nearly all the "content" of algore2000.com is fluff.

I disagree.

> Simply put, algore2000.com seems to play to the lowest common denominator - the average american, who sadly enough has little interest in politics, and little technical knowledge.

To answer this question in all candor, I would remind everyone that the average American is our target audience! However - I for one take exception to your assertion that "average Americans" have little interest in politics or technology. Working on this and other campaigns has shown me that average Americans are driving the demand for technology and therefore are driving the technology industry in this country. The large number of volunteers we have recruited through the site is also and clear indication that we are connecting with people interested in helping the campaign. algore2000.com is for all everyone - not just geeks like you and me. Our site has the most content, the most detailed content, more interactive features of ANY of the presidential campaign sites - AND it runs on Linux and PHP!

Hey - don't get me wrong - you and I know that we can always do better with our Web sites - so your point is well taken.

Thanks, and now I'm going back to my duties as Al Gore's Webmaster.

A Stanford University study released Tuesdy found that the Net is causing Americans to spend less time with friends and family. The more time spent on the Net, says the study, the more isolated we are. Is this so? You don't have to be described by pundits, academics and journalists. You can speak for yourselves here:Update: 02/17 04:30 by H :Oh, check out the story about dogs and people on Wired today - it's hilarious.

The Stanford study, prepared by the university's Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, found that 55% of Americans now have access to the Net. Of those, 36% said they were online at least five hours a week.

The study strongly challenged the assertions of Net advocates and enthusiasts (like me) who argue that the Net creates, communicates, promotes contact and is frequently used by people to connect, rather than disconnect with other humans.

According to Stanford researchers, Internet users are lonelier than other Americans, and are spending more time away from them. Interestingly (and, to me, dubiously), the survey defined loneliness in this way: whether you spend physical time with family and friends, whether you attend fewer social events, whether you spend less time reading newspapers and watching TV, shopping in stores, or are working more at home than before. In other words, the survey defines a radically new environment by nearly ancient measures of human contact.

The Stanford study didn't appear to consider e-mail or other virtual contact - gaming, communities, mailing lists, messaging systems, as contact with other humans. It suggested that the Net was invading the home with work and creating a pervasive new wave of social isolation.

Do online contacts - e-mail, communities like this, messaging systems, mailing lists - not count as connective, or as making contact with people? Are virtual friends friends? Is it more social to watch TV or read a paper than to be online, no matter what you do there?

I've met my closest friends online, and joined some of the most enduring communities of my adult life on the Net. From the first, I've seen it as a way for me to connect with other people, not get away from them.

But here's a chance to say for yourselves whether you consider the Net isolating or not, rather than to have studies or others describe that experience for you:

/ writes, "According to a Wired interview with Dr. Anita Borg (her real name) of the Center for Women and Technology, the number of women majoring in CS has dropped considerably of late, as those in the field likely already know. She gives her thoughts on the causes and entertains some solutions."

/ writes, "According to a Wired interview with Dr. Anita Borg (her real name) of the Center for Women and Technology, the number of women majoring in CS has dropped considerably of late, as those in the field likely already know. She gives her thoughts on the causes and entertains some solutions."

Project Gamma writes,"In this Wired News report they give credit to Apache, naming it one of the most overlooked yet one of the most successful Open Source projects. (Paraphrased) "

Project Gamma writes,"In this Wired News report they give credit to Apache, naming it one of the most overlooked yet one of the most successful Open Source projects. (Paraphrased) "

Pig Hogger writes "It's official. The IETF has officially decided NOT to " consider requirements for wiretapping " in protocols, says this Wired.com story.

Now that they won't touch it, does this means that the vendors will implement it themselves? If so, I can't wait to see the backstabbing and fumbling that will happen when they will try to keep their proprietary ways under wraps... What will we see, a CISCO wiretapping standard, which is thoroughly incompatible with the Lucent Bugging Protocol??? "