The Remote Keyless Entry systems that automobile manufacturers install as standard equipment are there for convenience not for any added security over and above the key/ignition electromechanical interlocks and the standard alarm systems. Those impediments and deterrents to theft would be there regardless of the little remote dongle. (As several others have pointed out, a thief is going to get your car if he wants it bad enough.)
Frankly, my RKE dongle can be a pain in the ass. Depending on how it happens to twist in my pocket against the rest of the keychain, I can set off the panic button by turning just the right way.
Arbitration isn't novel but anonymous contrats are
on
Contracts in Cyberspace
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The trend toward third-party arbitration has been happening for a while. The arbitration process, as I have read, is cheaper for both parties and quicker to resolve. So, I'm not certain why this is seen as a novel trend.
On the other hand, the development of contract assurance techniques for dealings with anonymous parties for open purposes is rather novel. Ordering a pallet of widgets from digital signature 7YkkeL33Tphubar6 is a little more shaky than ordering them from ACME Co.'s.
I've had an AOL account for over 9 years. I don't want to change my email address. I'm too far away for DSL. I don't have (or want to pay for) cable. For what I need home access for, AOL is sufficient.*
Never underestimate the power of inertia. I *like* the fact that I have a few addresses that haven't changed in years and are still useful.
Over the last year or so, the spam in my AOL mailbox peaked, then has dropped off considerably compared to the trash that increasingly infects my other paid, free and work (#$&%!) accounts. I don't know whether or not they have it "under control" but something is working better. YMMV.
[* Every now and then I run into people that say that I need to get an account on a real ISP because *their* ISP is so cool and blocks out AOL email to reduce spam. My usual answer, when I'm being polite, is to suggest getting a better ISP.]
It's not a loophole but there is a cyclic nature to the way that legislation is enacted, challenged, and refined. (And re-challenged, etc., etc.) This is a good thing.
Federal legislation is often broad-brushed and implemented with big clumsy fists. Sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes it is enough. Sometimes it's a little too much but it's tolerated. And sometimes, it really stops something that "outta be allowed". So we have Eldred v. Ashcroft saying that the copyright law extensions are now really too long to be sensible.
Given the relatively few cases the Supreme Court takes up, I think it's a really good sign that this one was. The corporations now have to hold their breath--you can't lobby the Supreme Court. And, although there are plenty of experts that can speculate, it's hard to say whether they will uphold the existing legislation or declare it unconstitutional (and for what reasons). Whatever the outcome, there's a newly painted guidepost in U.S. intellectual property law to work with.
White blood cells ought to end up at sites of inflammation anyway.
External inflammation treatments are designed to get more white blood cells to the location to speed their effect. In that sense, the cold laser treatment would work for inflammation. So would ice and heat. So would ultrasound. (I've used all of these.) Maybe the cold laser is more efficient in luring white blood cells because it could localizes the effect.
Patients are said to notice a difference in 3-5 visits. Well, so did I with icing myself for a couple of weeks. Since I apparently have my cynical cap on today, this "report" strikes me as a thinly-disguised advertisement offering chiropractic treatment for carpal tunnel sufferers. Not that that's bad--I see one today but for very well-defined reasons. But I'm not going to pay--or have my insurance company pay--for him to point a laser at my wrist when an ice pack will do for the pain. (But, as always, one's mileage may vary.)
So the EV-1 didn't work out financially. GM is still trying.
The EV-1 was a big gamble for GM. It was a leap of faith in one technological direction and an answer to an increasingly stiff regulatory environment in California and possibly the nation. And by all accounts, it turned out to be really good for the kind of car it was intended to be.
But the first company to try something doesn't always mean it works out in the long run. (What's that phrase about leaders and arrows in their backs?) One approach to the alternative fuel automobile might make more market sense than another. Hybrids seem to be working better these days. Fuel cells might make sense in five years. (Remember the excitement when we thought the Segway HT was going to have an innovative fuel cell?)
Did the lease cost a lot? Sure! Go buy a Kia for $10,000 that is based on a century of technology, existing infrastructure and plenty of common knowledge on how a vehicle should work if you want something cheap. Want a first generation technology vehicle that has limited volume manufacturing beneifts and could have unforseen operational consequences--or worse, a fatal flaw in its design--and you'll pay more.
(Lease? You bet--there's a heck of a lot of proprietary technology locked up in the EV-1. You don't want just anyone to buy one and take it apart for reverse engineering purposes. [Oh, then there's the possible fatal flaw issue, too.] That's the way the world works today.)
Did enough people lease them? No. Gas prices didn't shoot up, the incentives for consumers just weren't good enough and, dammit, the convenience of $10,000 gas powered vehicle is just too great to overcome. GM can't be forever in the business of offering a next generation vehicle that is selling only to people who are committed enough to take the long view.
[Would I have leased one if I lived in California. I'd like to think yes: I'd been driving Saturns at the outset of the EV-1 program. But the cost would have made me think twice. Full disclosure: My father worked for GM for 40+ years and retired as a senior engineering executive. We both wanted the EV-1 to work out.]
No, it might not. Remember Challenger? Rockets blow up. (And, yes, trucks from Iron Mountain also get into traffic accidents. But you've lost a lot less money using them.)
...you'd use this for...,say, the backup design files for your company's $1G/year mainline products
If I had a billion dollar/year product, I assert (waving the back of an envelope vigorously) that it is cheaper per byte to outfit a private army, take over a small Carribean island and bury the data (suitably protected from the elements) beneath a palm tree than to launch it into space and onto the Moon. Much easier to retrieve, too.
How valuable does my data have to be to invest a skagillion quatloos (or however much it costs) to shoot my data onto the Moon (with the very real risk that it won't make it or get lost) and then spend another skagillion quatloos to bring it back if I need the backups? If someone seriously starts this business in the near future, I'll put a business plan together for not-quite-ultra-secure data storage by putting it in an out-of-service submarine on the bottom of Lake Superior. (Oh, wait, Sealand is already doing something like this.)
So Transorbital has gotten permission (whyever) for sending up a single probe that will a) take detailed pictures, b) drop a "time capsule" on the moon and c) collect lots of telemetry useful to space scientists. The first probably has a market--a detailed lunar atlas would be pretty neat and the other pictures would sell. The second pays for the trip itself but doesn't produce anything of value so it's just a sink for my disposable income.:-) And the third I'm assuming exists but there probably isn't much reason to talk about it--it isn't sexy enough.
Future plans involve dropping navigation beacons? Okay--so they've got a map and beacons. They could sell those to anyone who wants the information. They have a few other one-way craft planned, too.
But commercial uses have to make money. The first commercial use would have to be mining. But that only works if it is cheaper to shove equipment up the gravity well and catch it on the way down than digging somewhere on Earth. Anything else is way too expensive today. Maybe that's changing and Transorbital is betting that it is.
It would be trivial to make the vending machine take pictures and call the police if it detects that the window has been broken. I'd be surprised if they're not already designed this way.
I would be astonished if there wasn't one or more video cameras trained on the front of the machine with a recording loop.
Theft will probably will happen. Look at the many cases of convenience store ATM thefts shown on the several "stupid criminals caught on tape" television shows. There, people are stealing a large, but resonably portable armored box that's filled with money. (Usually by driving a large vehicle into the store and against the machine, then dragging it away.)
But what do you get if you break into one of these machines? Diapers and Spaghettios for everyone are in easy reach but that's probably not worth the risk. And sure, there's a box of money that's inside but I'd design that box to be bolted to the bedrock since this is a fixed position machine.
My guess is that you'd get the machines broken into in the same sorts of situations where convenience stores get looted today--times of "civil unrest".
What I really wanna know is how this will affect communications between parties outside the EU that just happen to pass through EU routers.
My read is that unless the communication involves at least one EU telecom subscriber, nothing will be recorded. [Insert big handwave icon] The bits are just passing through the backbone from Quito to Tashkent.
From the draft...
The data that the draft framework seems to want to have retained looks, in principle at least, no more than the equivalent of telephone logs. In many police procedurals, the detectives "check the phone logs". ("Hey, Gordo called Magdeburg six times last week. Wasn't Icepick Johann rumoured to be hanging out there?") Investigators of all kinds track leads and pull threads. With this kind of data, they might be able to find different kinds of patterns. ("Wow! Gordo started hitting flycheap.com two minutes after he got that last call from Barcelona. Wonder what scared him?")
Re:All this strife over mere names
on
Dyson on ICANN
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The vested interest is not going to go away. I think the more interesting question is how flexible ICANN and the registrars have to be in order to accomodate the vested interest in a certain domain name. It's an artifically valuable commodity. (And one which they really can't profit from in an ethical way.)
Even phone numbers can be vitally important to some companies because of their mnemonic value. There's a mattress company that floods drive-time news radio in my area with a jingle singing their mnemonic toll-free number. (I sat on a U.S. standards committee in the late 80s when it received an earnest request from a pizzeria to standardize the location of the "Z" key on the telephone keypad to "0" so that he could have advertisae his toll-free phone number as 800-##-PIZZA. I am NOT making this up.) The telephone companies can't really profit from assignment of phone numbers, either, but they can handle requests and wait-lists for neat ones without too much hassle.
Marketing telephone numbers is a game of mnemonics or repetition ("That's 555-3770. Remember: 555-3770.") What I think is missing is what you need when you somehow ("Don't forget: 555-3770") the telephone number: the telephone directory. If I somehow forget the phone number of the local automobile glass repair shop ("Call 555-3770" now!) I can look it up in the telephone book.
How do I get to the web site for my local automobile glass repair shop? I'm very likely to forget what it was called--unless it's nice and simple--without having to spend time looking it up with limited search tools or directories. This is why domain names are so valuable for web-enabled companies.
[I also think opening up the TLD space more quickly would help--but that's another topic.]
Nothing could be worse than Apple sticking to some visionary principle and completely phasing out CRTs. When you build an integrated system, swings in the price of any component will kill you. The G3 iMac and eMac footprints are not all that big and are perfectly reasonable systems. This is a smart business decision.
[That said, the 17" G4 iMac arrived just in time for my birthday. Woo hoo!]
"Blocking the sites by ISU follows a specific policy, it had been stated by the government institutions responsible for introducing the service in Saudi Arabia.
"Pursuant to the Council of Ministers' decree concerning the regulation of use of the Internet in Saudi Arabia, all sites that contain content in violation of Islamic tradition or national regulations shall be blocked. A security committee chaired by the Ministry of Interior was formulated. One of the tasks assigned to this committee is the selection of sites to be blocked and the oversight of this process. However, due to the wide-spread and diverse nature of pornographic sites, KACST was commissioned to directly block these types of sites. Other non-pornographic sites are only blocked based upon direct requests from the security bodies within the government. KACST has no authority in the selection of such sites and it's role is limited to carrying out the directions of these security bodies."
The Berkman Ceter study was done with the cooperation of the Saudi ISU and reported nothing particularly surprising for anyone using commercial software: lots of pornographic sites were blocked, sites they no doubt added were blocked, some other sites that might be otherwise harmless (although not necessarily by Saudi standards) are blocked, and no particular conclusions can be drawn from the types of sites that are (possibly) inadvertantly blocked. [Slashdot is not one of them, according to the study.]
If nothing else, studies like this should help those of us in more permissive countries like the United States in demonstrating that depending on filtering as a technological cure-all has flaws.
I would like to think that the SISU is looking at the list of blocked sites and saying "hey--we didn't mean to block that" and contacting their vendor. Even their home page has an unblocking request form.
That's it, though. There isn't a "problem", really. If anything, the "problem" is...
Oh, no...there is a problem. People just define it in different ways. [Like you just did.:-)]
If we want to have publicly available access to the Internet we have to raise some kind of curtain or prohibition over "stuff" that one "just doesn't do in public". Whatever that means; by whoever's standards; the "stuff" is not my point. What we should be concerned with is how it will happen.
Eventually, Congress will realize that their big clumsy sticks just keep missing the target. Then they'll get more clever. We may casually suggest separate domains (one or more of them) but that idea can be seized on by Congress as well: if they can't stop the flood of "bad" sites in an effective or legal way, then I see regulations shifting to stamping Government approval (on a voluntary basis, of course) on the "good" sites.
If this shift occurs, then there will be debates over how the classification and approval is done and how the criteria are defined. Once that is in place, the battle then shifts from strategy over all content to tactics over specific sites. What consequences come from this?
(Possible answer: Examine the ACLU web site for their lengthy list of local and state court battles. Multiply by several thousand slightly controversial web sites.)
I've thought about the separate domain idea for a while now as these various court challenges stumble their way through the court system. I think that some "balkanization" or better yet "content certification" is going to be the next major wave in Internet legislation.
Because the entry cost for Internet publication is so low, the U.S. government (and others) are reduced to using blunt instruments like CIPA, CDA, etc., to regulate. They aren't being successful and the "problem" still exists, so you have to change the battlefield.
The creation of an ".adult" domain could be only an intermediate step. Commercial Internet sites would have a fair incentive to go there if the regulations were favorable, including insulation from lawsuits over providing "harmful to minors" content.
I think that would break down quickly because there's a difference between "mature", "adult" and "pornographic" content. That would require some subjective examination of the content of the site and a classification decision. Does this sound like the MPAA (and equivalent boards in other countries)? Why, yes.
There would have to be some interesting legal jujitsu to compel backbones, ISPs, publishers and other interested parties to create an "American Intenet Publication Reveiw Board" but doing so would get the government out of big clumsy regulations and make the content providers prove their classifications.
Not that I think this is a good thing--I think legislators will think it is a good thing because it gets them out of the business of having to keep trying one big clumsy law after another. Set up a review board with broad categories and let individual publishers bring their own lawsuits on their individual classifications.
Technological obstacles to enforcing the classifications are left as an exercise for the reader. As mentioned above, large ISPs can simply ignore content tagged as "pornographic", "adult", even "PG-13". Want to provide unclassified content? Well, your audience is limited. (Just like other media today.) Oh, incorrectly tagging your content? That's punishable by fines and imprisonment. (Governments are good at that...)
At the low end of "learning" is asking questions. That's been done on a larger scale before.
Anyone remember the PlanetProject? November 2000. A worldwide poll of humanity asking lots of questions "what it's like to be a human being at the beginning of the millennium." (quote, unquote.) You could connect via a web site or get found by roving pollsters carrying PDAs. 1.2 million participants.
Hurm. http://www.planetproject.com seems to be offline. That's where everything was supposed to be archived "forever". So, I'm left with some press release pointers:
Harris Interactive did the research/statisitcal methodology:
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsbyd at e.asp?NewsID=159
3Com, among others, provided technology and news updates:
http://www.3com.com/corpinfo/en_US/pressbox/pres s_ release.jsp?INFO_ID=2001970
http://www.3com.com/corpinfo/en_US/pressbox/pres s_ release.jsp?INFO_ID=2001971
Slashdot Mirror
The Remote Keyless Entry systems that automobile manufacturers install as standard equipment are there for convenience not for any added security over and above the key/ignition electromechanical interlocks and the standard alarm systems. Those impediments and deterrents to theft would be there regardless of the little remote dongle. (As several others have pointed out, a thief is going to get your car if he wants it bad enough.)
Frankly, my RKE dongle can be a pain in the ass. Depending on how it happens to twist in my pocket against the rest of the keychain, I can set off the panic button by turning just the right way.
The trend toward third-party arbitration has been happening for a while. The arbitration process, as I have read, is cheaper for both parties and quicker to resolve. So, I'm not certain why this is seen as a novel trend.
On the other hand, the development of contract assurance techniques for dealings with anonymous parties for open purposes is rather novel. Ordering a pallet of widgets from digital signature 7YkkeL33Tphubar6 is a little more shaky than ordering them from ACME Co.'s.
I've had an AOL account for over 9 years. I don't want to change my email address. I'm too far away for DSL. I don't have (or want to pay for) cable. For what I need home access for, AOL is sufficient.*
Never underestimate the power of inertia. I *like* the fact that I have a few addresses that haven't changed in years and are still useful.
Over the last year or so, the spam in my AOL mailbox peaked, then has dropped off considerably compared to the trash that increasingly infects my other paid, free and work (#$&%!) accounts. I don't know whether or not they have it "under control" but something is working better. YMMV.
[* Every now and then I run into people that say that I need to get an account on a real ISP because *their* ISP is so cool and blocks out AOL email to reduce spam. My usual answer, when I'm being polite, is to suggest getting a better ISP.]
It's not a loophole but there is a cyclic nature to the way that legislation is enacted, challenged, and refined. (And re-challenged, etc., etc.) This is a good thing.
Federal legislation is often broad-brushed and implemented with big clumsy fists. Sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes it is enough. Sometimes it's a little too much but it's tolerated. And sometimes, it really stops something that "outta be allowed". So we have Eldred v. Ashcroft saying that the copyright law extensions are now really too long to be sensible.
Given the relatively few cases the Supreme Court takes up, I think it's a really good sign that this one was. The corporations now have to hold their breath--you can't lobby the Supreme Court.
And, although there are plenty of experts that can speculate, it's hard to say whether they will uphold the existing legislation or declare it unconstitutional (and for what reasons). Whatever the outcome, there's a newly painted guidepost in U.S. intellectual property law to work with.
Am I missing something, or is this a no-brainer? The Dole campaign's electronic mail is non-commercial, therefore the law doesn't apply.
Here's one location of the text of the law...
White blood cells ought to end up at sites of inflammation anyway.
External inflammation treatments are designed to get more white blood cells to the location to speed their effect. In that sense, the cold laser treatment would work for inflammation. So would ice and heat. So would ultrasound. (I've used all of these.) Maybe the cold laser is more efficient in luring white
blood cells because it could localizes the effect.
Patients are said to notice a difference in 3-5 visits. Well, so did I with icing myself for a couple of weeks. Since I apparently have my cynical cap on today, this "report" strikes me as a thinly-disguised advertisement offering chiropractic treatment for carpal tunnel sufferers. Not that that's bad--I see one today but for very well-defined reasons. But I'm not going to pay--or have my insurance company pay--for him to point a laser at my wrist when an ice pack will do for the pain. (But, as always, one's mileage may vary.)
So the EV-1 didn't work out financially. GM is still trying.
The EV-1 was a big gamble for GM. It was a leap of faith in one technological direction and an answer to an increasingly stiff regulatory environment in California and possibly the nation. And by all accounts, it turned out to be really good for the kind of car it was intended to be.
But the first company to try something doesn't always mean it works out in the long run. (What's that phrase about leaders and arrows in their backs?) One approach to the alternative fuel automobile might make more market sense than another. Hybrids seem to be working better these days. Fuel cells might make sense in five years. (Remember the excitement when we thought the Segway HT was going to have an innovative fuel cell?)
Did the lease cost a lot? Sure! Go buy a Kia for $10,000 that is based on a century of technology, existing infrastructure and plenty of common knowledge on how a vehicle should work if you want something cheap. Want a first generation technology vehicle that has limited volume manufacturing beneifts and could have unforseen operational consequences--or worse, a fatal flaw in its design--and you'll pay more.
(Lease? You bet--there's a heck of a lot of proprietary technology locked up in the EV-1. You don't want just anyone to buy one and take it apart for reverse engineering purposes. [Oh, then there's the possible fatal flaw issue, too.] That's the way the world works today.)
Did enough people lease them? No. Gas prices didn't shoot up, the incentives for consumers just weren't good enough and, dammit, the convenience of $10,000 gas powered vehicle is just too great to overcome. GM can't be forever in the business of offering a next generation vehicle that is selling only to people who are committed enough to take the long view.
[Would I have leased one if I lived in California. I'd like to think yes: I'd been driving Saturns at the outset of the EV-1 program. But the cost would have made me think twice. Full disclosure: My father worked for GM for 40+ years and retired as a senior engineering executive. We both wanted the EV-1 to work out.]
No, it might not. Remember Challenger? Rockets blow up. (And, yes, trucks from Iron Mountain also get into traffic accidents. But you've lost a lot less money using them.)
If I had a billion dollar/year product, I assert (waving the back of an envelope vigorously) that it is cheaper per byte to outfit a private army, take over a small Carribean island and bury the data (suitably protected from the elements) beneath a palm tree than to launch it into space and onto the Moon. Much easier to retrieve, too.
Ultra-secure data storage, eh?
More like, "Huh? Who writes this stuff?"
How valuable does my data have to be to invest a skagillion quatloos (or however much it costs) to shoot my data onto the Moon (with the very real risk that it won't make it or get lost) and then spend another skagillion quatloos to bring it back if I need the backups? If someone seriously starts this business in the near future, I'll put a business plan together for not-quite-ultra-secure data storage by putting it in an out-of-service submarine on the bottom of Lake Superior. (Oh, wait, Sealand is already doing something like this.)
So Transorbital has gotten permission (whyever) for sending up a single probe that will a) take detailed pictures, b) drop a "time capsule" on the moon and c) collect lots of telemetry useful to space scientists. The first probably has a market--a detailed lunar atlas would be pretty neat and the other pictures would sell. The second pays for the trip itself but doesn't produce anything of value so it's just a sink for my disposable income. :-) And the third I'm assuming exists but there probably isn't much reason to talk about it--it isn't sexy enough.
Future plans involve dropping navigation beacons? Okay--so they've got a map and beacons. They could sell those to anyone who wants the information. They have a few other one-way craft planned, too.
But commercial uses have to make money. The first commercial use would have to be mining. But that only works if it is cheaper to shove equipment up the gravity well and catch it on the way down than digging somewhere on Earth. Anything else is way too expensive today. Maybe that's changing and Transorbital is betting that it is.
It would be trivial to make the vending machine take pictures and call the police if it detects that the window has been broken. I'd be surprised if they're not already designed this way.
I would be astonished if there wasn't one or more video cameras trained on the front of the machine with a recording loop.
Theft will probably will happen. Look at the many cases of convenience store ATM thefts shown on the several "stupid criminals caught on tape" television shows. There, people are stealing a large, but resonably portable armored box that's filled with money. (Usually by driving a large vehicle into the store and against the machine, then dragging it away.)
But what do you get if you break into one of these machines? Diapers and Spaghettios for everyone are in easy reach but that's probably not worth the risk. And sure, there's a box of money that's inside but I'd design that box to be bolted to the bedrock since this is a fixed position machine.
My guess is that you'd get the machines broken into in the same sorts of situations where convenience stores get looted today--times of "civil unrest".
What I really wanna know is how this will affect communications between parties outside the EU that just happen to pass through EU routers.
My read is that unless the communication involves at least one EU telecom subscriber, nothing will be recorded. [Insert big handwave icon] The bits are just passing through the backbone from Quito to Tashkent.
From the draft...
The data that the draft framework seems to want to have retained looks, in principle at least, no more than the equivalent of telephone logs. In many police procedurals, the detectives "check the phone logs". ("Hey, Gordo called Magdeburg six times last week. Wasn't Icepick Johann rumoured to be hanging out there?") Investigators of all kinds track leads and pull threads. With this kind of data, they might be able to find different kinds of patterns. ("Wow! Gordo started hitting flycheap.com two minutes after he got that last call from Barcelona. Wonder what scared him?")
The vested interest is not going to go away. I think the more interesting question is how flexible ICANN and the registrars have to be in order to accomodate the vested interest in a certain domain name. It's an artifically valuable commodity. (And one which they really can't profit from in an ethical way.)
Even phone numbers can be vitally important to some companies because of their mnemonic value. There's a mattress company that floods drive-time news radio in my area with a jingle singing their mnemonic toll-free number. (I sat on a U.S. standards committee in the late 80s when it received an earnest request from a pizzeria to standardize the location of the "Z" key on the telephone keypad to "0" so that he could have advertisae his toll-free phone number as 800-##-PIZZA. I am NOT making this up.) The telephone companies can't really profit from assignment of phone numbers, either, but they can handle requests and wait-lists for neat ones without too much hassle.
Marketing telephone numbers is a game of mnemonics or repetition ("That's 555-3770. Remember: 555-3770.") What I think is missing is what you need when you somehow ("Don't forget: 555-3770") the telephone number: the telephone directory. If I somehow forget the phone number of the local automobile glass repair shop ("Call 555-3770" now!) I can look it up in the telephone book.
How do I get to the web site for my local automobile glass repair shop? I'm very likely to forget what it was called--unless it's nice and simple--without having to spend time looking it up with limited search tools or directories. This is why domain names are so valuable for web-enabled companies.
[I also think opening up the TLD space more quickly would help--but that's another topic.]
Alpha never made it past NT 3.5.
Alpha made it to NT 4.0. But that took considerable pressure and releases almost always lagged Intel releases.
Nothing could be worse than Apple sticking to some visionary principle and completely phasing out CRTs. When you build an integrated system, swings in the price of any component will kill you. The G3 iMac and eMac footprints are not all that big and are perfectly reasonable systems. This is a smart business decision.
[That said, the 17" G4 iMac arrived just in time for my birthday. Woo hoo!]
This is taken from the Saudi Internet Services Unit Content Filtering pages:
"Blocking the sites by ISU follows a specific policy, it had been stated by the government institutions responsible for introducing the service in Saudi Arabia.
"Pursuant to the Council of Ministers' decree concerning the regulation of use of the Internet in Saudi Arabia, all sites that contain content in violation of Islamic tradition or national regulations shall be blocked. A security committee chaired by the Ministry of Interior was formulated. One of the tasks assigned to this committee is the selection of sites to be blocked and the oversight of this process. However, due to the wide-spread and diverse nature of pornographic sites, KACST was commissioned to directly block these types of sites. Other non-pornographic sites are only blocked based upon direct requests from the security bodies within the government. KACST has no authority in the selection of such sites and it's role is limited to carrying out the directions of these security bodies."
The Berkman Ceter study was done with the cooperation of the Saudi ISU and reported nothing particularly surprising for anyone using commercial software: lots of pornographic sites were blocked, sites they no doubt added were blocked, some other sites that might be otherwise harmless (although not necessarily by Saudi standards) are blocked, and no particular conclusions can be drawn from the types of sites that are (possibly) inadvertantly blocked. [Slashdot is not one of them, according to the study.]
If nothing else, studies like this should help those of us in more permissive countries like the United States in demonstrating that depending on filtering as a technological cure-all has flaws.
I would like to think that the SISU is looking at the list of blocked sites and saying "hey--we didn't mean to block that" and contacting their vendor. Even their home page has an unblocking request form.
Is there something wrong here?
That's it, though. There isn't a "problem", really. If anything, the "problem" is...
:-)]
Oh, no...there is a problem. People just define it in different ways. [Like you just did.
If we want to have publicly available access to the Internet we have to raise some kind of curtain or prohibition over "stuff" that one "just doesn't do in public". Whatever that means; by whoever's standards; the "stuff" is not my point. What we should be concerned with is how it will happen.
Eventually, Congress will realize that their big clumsy sticks just keep missing the target. Then they'll get more clever. We may casually suggest separate domains (one or more of them) but that idea can be seized on by Congress as well: if they can't stop the flood of "bad" sites in an effective or legal way, then I see regulations shifting to stamping Government approval (on a voluntary basis, of course) on the "good" sites.
If this shift occurs, then there will be debates over how the classification and approval is done and how the criteria are defined. Once that is in place, the battle then shifts from strategy over all content to tactics over specific sites. What consequences come from this?
(Possible answer: Examine the ACLU web site for their lengthy list of local and state court battles. Multiply by several thousand slightly controversial web sites.)
I've thought about the separate domain idea for a while now as these various court challenges stumble their way through the court system. I think that some "balkanization" or better yet "content certification" is going to be the next major wave in Internet legislation.
Because the entry cost for Internet publication is so low, the U.S. government (and others) are reduced to using blunt instruments like CIPA, CDA, etc., to regulate. They aren't being successful and the "problem" still exists, so you have to change the battlefield.
The creation of an ".adult" domain could be only an intermediate step. Commercial Internet sites would have a fair incentive to go there if the regulations were favorable, including insulation from lawsuits over providing "harmful to minors" content.
I think that would break down quickly because there's a difference between "mature", "adult" and "pornographic" content. That would require some subjective examination of the content of the site and a classification decision. Does this sound like the MPAA (and equivalent boards in other countries)? Why, yes.
There would have to be some interesting legal jujitsu to compel backbones, ISPs, publishers and other interested parties to create an "American Intenet Publication Reveiw Board" but doing so would get the government out of big clumsy regulations and make the content providers prove their classifications.
Not that I think this is a good thing--I think legislators will think it is a good thing because it gets them out of the business of having to keep trying one big clumsy law after another. Set up a review board with broad categories and let individual publishers bring their own lawsuits on their individual classifications.
Technological obstacles to enforcing the classifications are left as an exercise for the reader. As mentioned above, large ISPs can simply ignore content tagged as "pornographic", "adult", even "PG-13". Want to provide unclassified content? Well, your audience is limited. (Just like other media today.) Oh, incorrectly tagging your content? That's punishable by fines and imprisonment. (Governments are good at that...)
At the low end of "learning" is asking questions. That's been done on a larger scale before.
d at e.asp?NewsID=159
s s_ release.jsp?INFO_ID=2001970
s s_ release.jsp?INFO_ID=2001971
Anyone remember the PlanetProject? November 2000. A worldwide poll of humanity asking lots of questions "what it's like to be a human being at the beginning of the millennium." (quote, unquote.) You could connect via a web site or get found by roving pollsters carrying PDAs. 1.2 million participants.
Hurm. http://www.planetproject.com seems to be offline. That's where everything was supposed to be archived "forever". So, I'm left with some press release pointers:
Harris Interactive did the research/statisitcal methodology:
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsby
3Com, among others, provided technology and news updates:
http://www.3com.com/corpinfo/en_US/pressbox/pre
http://www.3com.com/corpinfo/en_US/pressbox/pre