In short, yes, the bill was intended to fix a problem that needs a solution. But that legal argument exists exactly because the courts are still trying to work out in many many areas whether temporary copies are fair use, or should have some sort of license from the rightsholder.
The compromise solution in this bill between the rightsholders and the large (litigatable) online companies like Apple and Yahoo! was this: yes, temporary copies are licensable, but they get a free (or fixed rate) license.
That's a terrible fix: it saves Apple and Yahoo's bacon, at the cost of allowing rightsholders to point to this law and state *in all other cases* a license is required.
In difficult cases, judges struggle to understand the intent of legislators through examining the whole corpus of law, not only the law they're currently deciding. If this passes, the RIAA and MPAA will cite it in every case they attempt to shut down a new technology or service. They'll say "well, sure, the law says time-shifting is fair use, but *this* law says that temporary copies are licensable, so you should ban the SuperWiFiPod because they haven't got a license from us." The rightsholders fought for this language, and accepted the compromise exactly because they got the chance to lose a battle, and win the wider war.
The other part of the bill that isn't getting quite as much coverage, but is actually a more obvious example of this sleight of hand, is that it casually states for the first time that Net transmissions of data are "distributions" under the Copyright Act. That's an incredibly contentious assertion, because if it were true, groups like the RIAA would be able to use a whole new wing of copyright law against downloaders and companies who offer download services.
So far the RIAA's main tactic to get this broadening of their power is by sneaking the assertion that net transmission is "distribution" into their 19,000 individual suits. If it's accepted by a judge in one of those cases, it becomes precedent, to be used by the rightsholders in fighting new technology -- which is why EFF is attempting to stop them by filing amicus briefs when the RIAA brings it up.
If it becomes Transmission + Reproduction == Distribution becomes accepted judicial practice, the rightsholders can use it to sue XM or Comcast as breaching their distribution right. Sneaking it as an uncontested assertion in a law is just as effective.
One final point: even if you think that the law doesn't say what others are claiming, it's very very useful to have this raised and made clear in Congress. The courts also look at the legislative record when making their determinations. The RIAA will find it much harder to broaden their claims to temporary caches and make transmission equivalent to physical "distribution" if the legislators explicitly say, on the record, that that was not their intent in this law. Although, as ever, it helps to get it down in writing:)
Here's the (partial) list of EFF legal victories - over forty key cases, each against tough opponents. That's not including the work EFF does lobbying against bad laws, technical research on topics like cracking DES, analysing printer dots, and publicising issues like the broadcast flag and the dangers of DRM. To get an example of the breadth of that work, here's another short list of EFF's work last year. We chopped the list at 15 items because the list was compiled for our fifteenth anniversary.
Bennett's right. The other side to this is that we at EFF thought hard about how this could be amended so the market could step into fix these problems, and we think the patch would be fairly straightforward.
The big problem with Goodmail is that it's providing a certification service *and* a revenue stream to ISP intermediaries. So given this new money stream, it's a real temptation for these ISPs to shimmy everyone over to it in the hope of increasing a flow of money from a group who are in many ways the perfect ISP customers: third-party senders (after all, they can't unsubscribe from you, they don't need any maintenance beyond skipping your spam filters, and, hey, no marketing budget: in email tax world, customers cold call *you*).
So, the fix would be: dump the ISP revenue share. That way, there's fairier entry for new entrants into the certification market (because they would be competing for effectiveness as a signaller of good actors, rather than competing on how much money they can hand over to ISPs), and a fairer market for alternative anti-spam/phishing solutions (since an ultra-cheap solution that emerges would get widespread adoption without ISPs saying "well, it's nice, but we make good money from this other system, and if all the false positives went away, our profits from that would actually diminish").
Markets are great tools, but you can have dysfunctional markets if you don't have the correct cultural constraints. Bribery and corruption are great impeders of free market behaviour in many societies. Many markets suffer because the idea of including a bit of cash to sweeten the deal with intermediaries is a given, rather than fiercely disapproved of. When you've got a fledgling market like the email trust overlay so many people are helping build, you have to make sure the right instincts take hold from the get go.
Yep, you're rightThe EFF piece is more a briefing on what we understand is going on behind closed doors right now. It's in the next few weeks that you'll see whether they decide to go ahead with this plan, and what will emerge.
It's more a head's up than a call to arms right now.
It's not true that the EFF "only cares about the US", although its true the core of our expertise is in that country. We now have three people working on international issues. Cory Doctorow works in Europe; Gwen Hinze, an Australian, works on WIPO and free trade agreement issues. Ren Bucholz has just moved up to Canada and will shortly be taking on the job of policies in the Americas.
Ian Brown of EDRi (and ex- of FIPR) was on the panel which inspired this. CD-R has given it their support.
The idea would be to act (initially at least) as a one stop shop to redirect media inquiries to the right experts, and direct publicity to other groups. There's not much else you can do for 60K -- but there is enough spare to start seeking out extra funding for bigger co-ordinating efforts.
Actually, the EFF is a 501(c)3 organization, which means that its specifically restricted as to how much lobbying it can do. Instead, the EFF concentrates on being an advocacy organization, representing defendants and plaintiffs in cases where there's a chance of making good case law.
(Actually, in practice, *I'm* the majority of the lobbying bit. If I had any influence on dropping people, I'd be like all "Hey drop *him*! Now pick him up! Now drop him again! You other lawyers, bring me a mojito!". But that's not really how lawyers work, alas.)
Yes, I emailed my senator, but was it wasted effort? I worry that they don't even need to propose the bill anytime soon. Just spread rumors once a month for a year to wear everyone out from fighting it, without even having anything to fight against.
Not really. There's now twenty-seven senators who know full well that many of their constituents care enough to send a message to them. The flag isn't a "quiet topic" for them any longer.
Building up more resistance takes some extra effort: what's important now is to emphasise that this isn't a "spike" issue, and that it's something that many people care about as a long term matter. That won't require everybody jumping to their phones at a moment's notice. It will require a few more dedicated souls to visit their representatives and their staffers, and make clear the subtler ins and outs of the Flag.
To use the inevitable Slashdot Star Trek Borg analogy, you do have to keep rotating your frequencies, but at least that keeps everything interesting. For both sides.
Just between you, me, and a few other passing Slashdot folk, here's the extent of what we know: there's a senator who is (or was) friendly to the idea of dropping a BF amendment into the Senate Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill.
There are a number of opportunities for them to do this: drop it in sub-committee (Tues), full committee (Thurs), or even later in the passage of the bill.
If it's an uncontroversial amendment, and you're a sneaky senator, you're better off dropping it in early, because then the job is done, and someone else has to fight to get it out of the bill.
The more controversial it becomes, the later you should place it (when the bill has some momentum, and fixes are harder).
The BF got a lot more controversial this week.
The campaign switched this to becoming the "Broadcast what?" amendment, to the "Is this that Godforsaken thing that's been melting my staffers phones all week?".
It was always an even split whether the sneak move would go in Tues or Thurs (which was why it was a 48 hour campaign, and we've been targetting the full Appropriations Committee). They could still try and stick it in tomorrow, but that's becoming increasingly unlikely (we're betting 50/50 right now). Too hot a potato.
Next stop in this line of attack would be an amendment on the senate floor, but there's some time to go before that.
I've written about the effect of your messages on the EFF site, but that's mostly statistics on exactly how big the response was (summary: for a campaign targetted at a few senators in a short time-frame, it was huge).
I'm currently pulling together all the possible opportunities the broadcasters have for sneaking the flag in. I'm tempted to publish that, because it would give people a better overview, but there's a bit of me that thinks "Don't let them know what the opposition knows!". What do people think?
I thought everybody should know that you may have just slashdotted the United States Senate Appropriations Committee.
As of 10PM PST, six hours after news first leaked out, we've reached over 4550 messages sent to the 26 senators on the appropriations committee. The median number of emails and faxes per senator is 64; the average is 150.
Patty Murray (D-WA) received over 300 from her constituents on the Broadcast Flag. Kay Hutchison (R-TX) has received over 500 mails warning her of the controversial rider. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) has over a thousand faxes sitting in her inbox telling her not to accept any Broadcast Flag amendment.
And that's not including the telephone calls, which are still continuing.
Hollywood's first chance to slip in an amendment will be at 2PM EST Tuesday, in the Commerce, Justice and Science. Their next opportunity will be the full committeee mark-up at 2PM EST Thursday.
We need to keep the pressure up, but I think it's fair to say that so far this rider is not slipping by unnoticed through the halls of Congress.
If you're in the states below, please call your senator.
COMMERCE, JUSTICE AND SCIENCE SUB-COMMITTEE AND FULL COMMITTEE MEMBERS
ALABAMA Senator Richard Shelby (202) 224-5744 ALASKA Senator Ted Stevens (202) 224-3004 HAWAII Senator Daniel Inouye (202) 224-3934 IOWA Senator Tom Harkin (202) 224-3254 KANSAS Senator Sam Brownback (202) 224-6521 KENTUCKY Senator Mitch McConnell (202) 224-2541 MARYLAND Senator Barbara Mikulski (202) 224-4654 MISSOURI Senator Christopher Bond (202) 224-5721 NEW HAMPSHIRE Senator Judd Gregg (202) 224-3324 NEW MEXICO Senator Pete Domenici (202) 224-6621 NORTH DAKOTA Senator Byron Dorgan (202) 224-2551 TEXAS Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (202) 224-5922 VERMONT Senator Patrick Leahy (202) 224-4242 WASHINGTON Senator Patty Murray (202) 224-2621 WISCONSIN Senator Herb Kohl (202) 224-5653
FULL COMMITTEE MEMBERS
MISSISSIPPI Thad Cochran (202) 224-5054 PENNSYLVANIA Arlen Specter (202) 224-4254 MONTANA Conrad Burns (202) 224-2644 UTAH Robert F. Bennett (202) 224-5444 IDAHO Larry Craig (202) 224-2752 OHIO Mike DeWine (202) 224-2315 COLORADO Wayne Allard (202) 224-5941 WEST VIRGINIA Robert C. Byrd (202) 224-3954 NEVADA Harry Reid (202) 224-3542 CALIFORNIA Dianne Feinstein (202) 224-3841 ILLINOIS Richard J. Durbin (202) 224-2152 SOUTH DAKOTA Tim Johnson (202) 224-5842 LOUISIANA Mary L. Landrieu (202) 224-5824
A TYPICAL CALL
"Hello, Senator _________'s office"
"Hi, I'm a constituent. I'm registering my opposition to the broadcast flag amendment being introduced in the Senate Commerce Justice and Science Appropriations subcommittee mark-up on Tuesday, and in full committee on Thursday."
(*** You can give your own reasons for opposing the flag here. Here's a sample: ***)
"The Broadcast Flag cripples any device capable of receiving over-the-air digital broadcasts. It give Hollywood movie studios a permanent veto over how members of the American public use our televisions. It forces American innovators to beg the FCC for permission before adding new features to TV. "
"This is an important issue which will affect all Americans, and should not be inserted at the last moment, with almost no debate."
"Please oppose the broadcast flag amendment. My name and address are ___________________."
Feel free to change the existing copy - it's all editable. At this point, making a phone call in the morning is your best bet. There's a sample script on Boing Boing's entry.
We don't know who will be introducing it. Possibly Senator Ted Stevens, co-sponsor of the Hollings Bill which would have also enforced mandatory DRM.
The rider isn't there yet. We've got a strong rumour that it's going to be proposed, but if you kick up enough of a stink at this stage, it can be quietly withdrawn with no-one having to take a stand.
Tell you what, why don't you call your Senator anyway, even if you think this is true? What have you got to lose? If the law goes through, you can tell everyone that you were right. And if it doesn't, you get to say you helped stop the flag against all the odds.
Believe me, I love cynicism as much as the next person, but when it stops you from taking the one tiny step, the single principled stand that might have prevented disaster, you're not a cynic. You're a statistic. And a predictable one at that.
Yeah, it makes sense to be concerned about who is running a charity. The reason I got interested in this particular project is because Lee Felsenstein is running it.
Felsenstein's already got quite the track record:
He ran the Homebrew Computer Club, and helped kickstart the PC revolution. His framework let Woz and Jobs sharpen the ideas for the Apple in front of a community of peers. His framework for the club emphasises open architecture rather than competition between inventors, something that you still see in the PC world. Basically, he's doing for Lhaos what he and a few others managed to pull off for the United States a few decades back. Oh yeah, and I remember the folk who said that putting a computer in your home was "laughable", and he asked to "really see the benifit of [that]".
Felsenstein also invented the first cheap modem, the first portable computer, and the first community network.He wrote presciently about the "Commons of Information", years before most of us had even thought about these issues.
I reckon I owe him ten bucks in just paying my backdues for the improvements he's already given my life. If he said he was doing the same for the Invisible Underground Mole People, I'd give him the time of the day.
But he's not. He's doing it for Laotians. The guy who runs the Jhai Foundation, Lee Thorn, is an old Nam vet. In case you don't know this bit of American history, the US dropped more bombs on Laos than the Allies did on Germany and Japan combined. They're still trying to clean up the munitions and put their country back together again. Thinking about it, I probably owe them at least a buck, too.
You rant about going to black-tie events, but when somebody asks you for cash via a thirdy-party Website run out of a DSL line, you're suspicious. Too suspicious, even, to do some basic research on the implications.
Damnit, boy, that's why they do those fancy dinners. So that touchy guys like you can be reassured that this a proper "above board" appeal without you having to bother doing any original thinking. You think your local college spends money more wisely, just because it's a college? You think that the banker at your trust knows what's being done in your name? How much money do you think they wasted getting you to think this way?
Farmers will be able to monitor the price of crops in the town markets, negotiate group purchases with the other villages, and make business deals without having to spend days travelling away from the farm. And families will be able to make direct contact for the first time with the Laotian Diaspora - relatives who've left the war-torn area to earn money in the capital of the country, and beyond.
Cheap technology like this, dropped into the very poorest of countries, may provide a chance for these nations to leapfrog into the digital revolution.
Of course, there'll always be someone who'll argue that providing this kind of technology to the least developed countries of the world is missing the point: that we should, as Bill Gates said recently, be spending our money instead on medical and food projects. And, of course, everyone involved in the Jhai project suggests we should do that too. But it's notable that it was the rural villagers themselves who asked for ways to communicate and gain knowledge, not the foundation.
Here's what the jury foreman said about the judgement (from the AP story):
The defense argued that the program merely enabled owners of Adobe eBook Reader software to make copies of e-books for personal use. If an owner makes a backup copy of an e-book or transfers it to another device he owns, they argued, that is permitted under the "fair use" concept of copyright law.
Jury foreman Dennis Strader said the argument made a big impact on the jurors, who asked U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte to clarify the "fair use" definition shortly after deliberations began.
"Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had trouble with that concept," said Strader.
If the case shows anything, it shows that the public see the problem with the DMCA. All the publicity is beginning to make an impact.
The mother of my child wrote this piece about how the attacks on the public domain will affect our daughter.
You may not want to give anyone else's children your work for free, and I understand that. But when someone else offers *your* child a gift for free, and gives you a chance to work one less hour for your children, and perhaps spend one more hour with them instead - well, I'd grab that gift and say thankyou, too.
(And if you don't like the moral aspect, here's a more practical reading: I think it sets a good example for the kids to follow. So, at least, after you've given them all your hard effort for free, they don't turn around and say: "Well, the generosity you showed to me as a child doesn't mean jack in the long run. It's about my feeding *my* kids, grandpa. I'm a descendant, for Christ's sake, not the Pope.")
blogger back up
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Blogger's status page was just updated (1150am-ish PST) to say this:
We have found the cause of the vulnerability and have patched it. Everything is back restored and back online with the exception of the API server and bSTATS.
How Microsoft did something like this
on
WiFi Triangulation
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Microsoft Research did some work on this a couple of years ago - they called it RADAR.
The equations they use are pretty simple, and they seem to be getting very optimistic results. They, too, use signal-strength triangulation, together with a model of the local area (so you feed in how many walls are between you and the AP, for instance), and some processing based on recent history. That's to say, four out of the five latest samples have you outside on the pavement, and one of them has a 50 yards away in the eastern wing, you're probably still on the pavement.
Actually, the scum of the network aren't taking advantage of wireless networks. There are, as we speak, no reports of drive-by spamming in the wild. The article you reference claims to have such evidence, but it was a ZDNet journalist distorting what he heard from an expert. I know, I asked the expert.
I'm not saying drive-by spamming is not a theoretical possibility; I'd argue that there are a number of reasons why you won't see it in widespread use. Firstly, it's no harder to create a throwaway AOL account and spam from there. Secondly, one of the reasons why spamming is so prevalent is because it's entirely anonymous: sitting in front of someone's house hoping they don't spot you streaming through their network simply isn't. A lot of people really hate spammers; it's easy for spammers to laugh at their hatred from their own homes. It's a lot harder when they're sitting in a car, hoping you're not going to leap out with a baseball bat and explain a few things to them.
I understand your concerns about this hypothetical behaviour. But as someone who runs an open network, regularly uses other's open networks, and realises that security is more than just throwing up some foo around the LAN perimeter and hoping no-one gets through, I think it's a distraction from the real problems we have now.
I hear this all the time - that somehow all the protests over RIP were a miserable failure.
As a matter of fact, the final form of the act that passed was substantially improved on the original proposal. The *original* bill was going to demand key escrow: that's to say, you'd have to hand over you PGP keys to a third party before you could use them.
Widespread protest by businesses and individuals stopped that.
As a fix, the government introduced the idea that if you didn't hand over your password, it would be presumed that you were hiding it. That's to say, reversing the burden of proof. People protested about this to, and the final form of the Act goes a long way to mitigating this issue.
There's a lot that's wrong with the RIP Act - but to describe the fight against it as a series of defeats is just as bad. You can make a difference. If you protested against RIP, perhaps you already have.
I haven't looked for a complete list of what you get on a normal install, but you can safely assume a fairly vanilla BSD kit, including development tools: emacs, perl, gcc, etc. It's all free with MacOS X, as it should be. The supplied versions aren't always the most up-to-date, but that's what fink is for.
Also, the Mac OS development environment (which includes updates to NeXTStep's really-quite-impressive development environment, Interface Maker and Project Builder, full API docs etc) is a free download. I believe it's included on the harddrive (as an installable package) on new machines.
Your best bet is to check developer.apple.com. Signing up as a developer is free, although you have to pay $700+ to get stuff like advance betas of the OS, WWDC proceedings on DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
In short, yes, the bill was intended to fix a problem that needs a solution. But that legal argument exists exactly because the courts are still trying to work out in many many areas whether temporary copies are fair use, or should have some sort of license from the rightsholder.
:)
The compromise solution in this bill between the rightsholders and the large (litigatable) online companies like Apple and Yahoo! was this: yes, temporary copies are licensable, but they get a free (or fixed rate) license.
That's a terrible fix: it saves Apple and Yahoo's bacon, at the cost of allowing rightsholders to point to this law and state *in all other cases* a license is required.
In difficult cases, judges struggle to understand the intent of legislators through examining the whole corpus of law, not only the law they're currently deciding. If this passes, the RIAA and MPAA will cite it in every case they attempt to shut down a new technology or service. They'll say "well, sure, the law says time-shifting is fair use, but *this* law says that temporary copies are licensable, so you should ban the SuperWiFiPod because they haven't got a license from us." The rightsholders fought for this language, and accepted the compromise exactly because they got the chance to lose a battle, and win the wider war.
The other part of the bill that isn't getting quite as much coverage, but is actually a more obvious example of this sleight of hand, is that it casually states for the first time that Net transmissions of data are "distributions" under the Copyright Act. That's an incredibly contentious assertion, because if it were true, groups like the RIAA would be able to use a whole new wing of copyright law against downloaders and companies who offer download services.
So far the RIAA's main tactic to get this broadening of their power is by sneaking the assertion that net transmission is "distribution" into their 19,000 individual suits. If it's accepted by a judge in one of those cases, it becomes precedent, to be used by the rightsholders in fighting new technology -- which is why EFF is attempting to stop them by filing amicus briefs when the RIAA brings it up.
If it becomes Transmission + Reproduction == Distribution becomes accepted judicial practice, the rightsholders can use it to sue XM or Comcast as breaching their distribution right. Sneaking it as an uncontested assertion in a law is just as effective.
One final point: even if you think that the law doesn't say what others are claiming, it's very very useful to have this raised and made clear in Congress. The courts also look at the legislative record when making their determinations. The RIAA will find it much harder to broaden their claims to temporary caches and make transmission equivalent to physical "distribution" if the legislators explicitly say, on the record, that that was not their intent in this law. Although, as ever, it helps to get it down in writing
Here's the (partial) list of EFF legal victories - over forty key cases, each against tough opponents. That's not including the work EFF does lobbying against bad laws, technical research on topics like cracking DES, analysing printer dots, and publicising issues like the broadcast flag and the dangers of DRM. To get an example of the breadth of that work, here's another short list of EFF's work last year. We chopped the list at 15 items because the list was compiled for our fifteenth anniversary.
Bennett's right. The other side to this is that we at EFF thought hard about how this could be amended so the market could step into fix these problems, and we think the patch would be fairly straightforward.
The big problem with Goodmail is that it's providing a certification service *and* a revenue stream to ISP intermediaries. So given this new money stream, it's a real temptation for these ISPs to shimmy everyone over to it in the hope of increasing a flow of money from a group who are in many ways the perfect ISP customers: third-party senders (after all, they can't unsubscribe from you, they don't need any maintenance beyond skipping your spam filters, and, hey, no marketing budget: in email tax world, customers cold call *you*).
So, the fix would be: dump the ISP revenue share. That way, there's fairier entry for new entrants into the certification market (because they would be competing for effectiveness as a signaller of good actors, rather than competing on how much money they can hand over to ISPs), and a fairer market for alternative anti-spam/phishing solutions (since an ultra-cheap solution that emerges would get widespread adoption without ISPs saying "well, it's nice, but we make good money from this other system, and if all the false positives went away, our profits from that would actually diminish").
Markets are great tools, but you can have dysfunctional markets if you don't have the correct cultural constraints. Bribery and corruption are great impeders of free market behaviour in many societies. Many markets suffer because the idea of including a bit of cash to sweeten the deal with intermediaries is a given, rather than fiercely disapproved of. When you've got a fledgling market like the email trust overlay so many people are helping build, you have to make sure the right instincts take hold from the get go.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation intervened in the case on behalf of a North Carolina voter, Joyce McCloy. Which I believe pleased Diebold no end.
d. (Disclosure: I work for EFF. What's more, I would be overjoyed if you joined us)
Yep, you're rightThe EFF piece is more a briefing on what we understand is going on behind closed doors right now. It's in the next few weeks that you'll see whether they decide to go ahead with this plan, and what will emerge.
It's more a head's up than a call to arms right now.
It's not true that the EFF "only cares about the US", although its true the core of our expertise is in that country. We now have three people working on international issues. Cory Doctorow works in Europe; Gwen Hinze, an Australian, works on WIPO and free trade agreement issues. Ren Bucholz has just moved up to Canada and will shortly be taking on the job of policies in the Americas.
And EF Canada *is* still around.
Ian Brown of EDRi (and ex- of FIPR) was on the panel which inspired this. CD-R has given it their support.
The idea would be to act (initially at least) as a one stop shop to redirect media inquiries to the right experts, and direct publicity to other groups. There's not much else you can do for 60K -- but there is enough spare to start seeking out extra funding for bigger co-ordinating efforts.
Actually, the EFF is a 501(c)3 organization, which means that its specifically restricted as to how much lobbying it can do. Instead, the EFF concentrates on being an advocacy organization, representing defendants and plaintiffs in cases where there's a chance of making good case law.
(Actually, in practice, *I'm* the majority of the lobbying bit. If I had any influence on dropping people, I'd be like all "Hey drop *him*! Now pick him up! Now drop him again! You other lawyers, bring me a mojito!". But that's not really how lawyers work, alas.)
Yes, I emailed my senator, but was it wasted effort? I worry that they don't even need to propose the bill anytime soon. Just spread rumors once a month for a year to wear everyone out from fighting it, without even having anything to fight against.
Not really. There's now twenty-seven senators who know full well that many of their constituents care enough to send a message to them. The flag isn't a "quiet topic" for them any longer.
Building up more resistance takes some extra effort: what's important now is to emphasise that this isn't a "spike" issue, and that it's something that many people care about as a long term matter. That won't require everybody jumping to their phones at a moment's notice. It will require a few more dedicated souls to visit their representatives and their staffers, and make clear the subtler ins and outs of the Flag.
To use the inevitable Slashdot Star Trek Borg analogy, you do have to keep rotating your frequencies, but at least that keeps everything interesting. For both sides.
There's more info at Deep Links. In a nutshell, Tuesday passed without incident; Thursday's full committee meeting is still to come.
It's not over yet.
Just between you, me, and a few other passing Slashdot folk, here's the extent of what we know: there's a senator who is (or was) friendly to the idea of dropping a BF amendment into the Senate Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill.
There are a number of opportunities for them to do this: drop it in sub-committee (Tues), full committee (Thurs), or even later in the passage of the bill.
If it's an uncontroversial amendment, and you're a sneaky senator, you're better off dropping it in early, because then the job is done, and someone else has to fight to get it out of the bill.
The more controversial it becomes, the later you should place it (when the bill has some momentum, and fixes are harder).
The BF got a lot more controversial this week.
The campaign switched this to becoming the "Broadcast what?" amendment, to the "Is this that Godforsaken thing that's been melting my staffers phones all week?".
It was always an even split whether the sneak move would go in Tues or Thurs (which was why it was a 48 hour campaign, and we've been targetting the full Appropriations Committee). They could still try and stick it in tomorrow, but that's becoming increasingly unlikely (we're betting 50/50 right now). Too hot a potato.
Next stop in this line of attack would be an amendment on the senate floor, but there's some time to go before that.
I've written about the effect of your messages on the EFF site, but that's mostly statistics on exactly how big the response was (summary: for a campaign targetted at a few senators in a short time-frame, it was huge).
I'm currently pulling together all the possible opportunities the broadcasters have for sneaking the flag in. I'm tempted to publish that, because it would give people a better overview, but there's a bit of me that thinks "Don't let them know what the opposition knows!". What do people think?
I thought everybody should know that you may have just slashdotted the United States Senate Appropriations Committee.
As of 10PM PST, six hours after news first leaked out, we've reached over 4550 messages sent to the 26 senators on the appropriations committee. The median number of emails and faxes per senator is 64; the average is 150.
Patty Murray (D-WA) received over 300 from her constituents on the Broadcast Flag. Kay Hutchison (R-TX) has received over 500 mails warning her of the controversial rider. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) has over a thousand faxes sitting in her inbox telling her not to accept any Broadcast Flag amendment.
And that's not including the telephone calls, which are still continuing.
Hollywood's first chance to slip in an amendment will be at 2PM EST Tuesday, in the Commerce, Justice and Science. Their next opportunity will be the full committeee mark-up at 2PM EST Thursday.
We need to keep the pressure up, but I think it's fair to say that so far this rider is not slipping by unnoticed through the halls of Congress.
If you're in the states below, please call your senator.
COMMERCE, JUSTICE AND SCIENCE SUB-COMMITTEE AND FULL COMMITTEE MEMBERS
ALABAMA Senator Richard Shelby (202) 224-5744
ALASKA Senator Ted Stevens (202) 224-3004
HAWAII Senator Daniel Inouye (202) 224-3934
IOWA Senator Tom Harkin (202) 224-3254
KANSAS Senator Sam Brownback (202) 224-6521
KENTUCKY Senator Mitch McConnell (202) 224-2541
MARYLAND Senator Barbara Mikulski (202) 224-4654
MISSOURI Senator Christopher Bond (202) 224-5721
NEW HAMPSHIRE Senator Judd Gregg (202) 224-3324
NEW MEXICO Senator Pete Domenici (202) 224-6621
NORTH DAKOTA Senator Byron Dorgan (202) 224-2551
TEXAS Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (202) 224-5922
VERMONT Senator Patrick Leahy (202) 224-4242
WASHINGTON Senator Patty Murray (202) 224-2621
WISCONSIN Senator Herb Kohl (202) 224-5653
FULL COMMITTEE MEMBERS
MISSISSIPPI Thad Cochran (202) 224-5054
PENNSYLVANIA Arlen Specter (202) 224-4254
MONTANA Conrad Burns (202) 224-2644
UTAH Robert F. Bennett (202) 224-5444
IDAHO Larry Craig (202) 224-2752
OHIO Mike DeWine (202) 224-2315
COLORADO Wayne Allard (202) 224-5941
WEST VIRGINIA Robert C. Byrd (202) 224-3954
NEVADA Harry Reid (202) 224-3542
CALIFORNIA Dianne Feinstein (202) 224-3841
ILLINOIS Richard J. Durbin (202) 224-2152
SOUTH DAKOTA Tim Johnson (202) 224-5842
LOUISIANA Mary L. Landrieu (202) 224-5824
A TYPICAL CALL
"Hello, Senator _________'s office"
"Hi, I'm a constituent. I'm registering my opposition to
the broadcast flag amendment being introduced in the
Senate Commerce Justice and Science Appropriations
subcommittee mark-up on Tuesday, and in full committee on
Thursday."
(*** You can give your own reasons for opposing the flag
here. Here's a sample: ***)
"The Broadcast Flag cripples any device capable of
receiving over-the-air digital broadcasts. It give
Hollywood movie studios a permanent veto over how members
of the American public use our televisions. It forces
American innovators to beg the FCC for permission before
adding new features to TV. "
"This is an important issue which will affect all
Americans, and should not be inserted at the last moment,
with almost no debate."
"Please oppose the broadcast flag amendment. My name and
address are ___________________."
"Thank you for your time."
Feel free to change the existing copy - it's all editable. At this point, making a phone call in the morning is your best bet. There's a sample script on Boing Boing's entry.
We don't know who will be introducing it. Possibly Senator Ted Stevens, co-sponsor of the Hollings Bill which would have also enforced mandatory DRM.
The rider isn't there yet. We've got a strong rumour that it's going to be proposed, but if you kick up enough of a stink at this stage, it can be quietly withdrawn with no-one having to take a stand.
Tell you what, why don't you call your Senator anyway, even if you think this is true? What have you got to lose? If the law goes through, you can tell everyone that you were right. And if it doesn't, you get to say you helped stop the flag against all the odds.
Believe me, I love cynicism as much as the next person, but when it stops you from taking the one tiny step, the single principled stand that might have prevented disaster, you're not a cynic. You're a statistic. And a predictable one at that.
Bermaaaaaaaaaaan!
I guess AOL found out again...
Yeah, it makes sense to be concerned about who is running a charity. The reason I got interested in this particular project is because Lee Felsenstein is running it.
Felsenstein's already got quite the track record:
He ran the Homebrew Computer Club, and helped kickstart the PC revolution. His framework let Woz and Jobs sharpen the ideas for the Apple in front of a community of peers. His framework for the club emphasises open architecture rather than competition between inventors, something that you still see in the PC world. Basically, he's doing for Lhaos what he and a few others managed to pull off for the United States a few decades back. Oh yeah, and I remember the folk who said that putting a computer in your home was "laughable", and he asked to "really see the benifit of [that]".
Felsenstein also invented the first cheap modem, the first portable computer, and the first community network.He wrote presciently about the "Commons of Information", years before most of us had even thought about these issues.
I reckon I owe him ten bucks in just paying my backdues for the improvements he's already given my life. If he said he was doing the same for the Invisible Underground Mole People, I'd give him the time of the day.
But he's not. He's doing it for Laotians. The guy who runs the Jhai Foundation, Lee Thorn, is an old Nam vet. In case you don't know this bit of American history, the US dropped more bombs on Laos than the Allies did on Germany and Japan combined. They're still trying to clean up the munitions and put their country back together again. Thinking about it, I probably owe them at least a buck, too.
You rant about going to black-tie events, but when somebody asks you for cash via a thirdy-party Website run out of a DSL line, you're suspicious. Too suspicious, even, to do some basic research on the implications.
Damnit, boy, that's why they do those fancy dinners. So that touchy guys like you can be reassured that this a proper "above board" appeal without you having to bother doing any original thinking. You think your local college spends money more wisely, just because it's a college? You think that the banker at your trust knows what's being done in your name? How much money do you think they wasted getting you to think this way?
I wrote a bit about this in my Irish Times article on the project:
Info about donating via Paypal here.
If the case shows anything, it shows that the public see the problem with the DMCA. All the publicity is beginning to make an impact.
The mother of my child wrote this piece about how the attacks on the public domain will affect our daughter.
You may not want to give anyone else's children your work for free, and I understand that. But when someone else offers *your* child a gift for free, and gives you a chance to work one less hour for your children, and perhaps spend one more hour with them instead - well, I'd grab that gift and say thankyou, too.
(And if you don't like the moral aspect, here's a more practical reading: I think it sets a good example for the kids to follow. So, at least, after you've given them all your hard effort for free, they don't turn around and say: "Well, the generosity you showed to me as a child doesn't mean jack in the long run. It's about my feeding *my* kids, grandpa. I'm a descendant, for Christ's sake, not the Pope.")
Microsoft Research did some work on this a couple of years ago - they called it RADAR.
The equations they use are pretty simple, and they seem to be getting very optimistic results. They, too, use signal-strength triangulation, together with a model of the local area (so you feed in how many walls are between you and the AP, for instance), and some processing based on recent history. That's to say, four out of the five latest samples have you outside on the pavement, and one of them has a 50 yards away in the eastern wing, you're probably still on the pavement.
Venkata N. Padmanabhan has some more papers on this on his homepage. Victor Bahl has a demonstration here but I guess it only works on IE.
Actually, the scum of the network aren't taking advantage of wireless networks. There are, as we speak, no reports of drive-by spamming in the wild. The article you reference claims to have such evidence, but it was a ZDNet journalist distorting what he heard from an expert. I know, I asked the expert.
I'm not saying drive-by spamming is not a theoretical possibility; I'd argue that there are a number of reasons why you won't see it in widespread use. Firstly, it's no harder to create a throwaway AOL account and spam from there. Secondly, one of the reasons why spamming is so prevalent is because it's entirely anonymous: sitting in front of someone's house hoping they don't spot you streaming through their network simply isn't. A lot of people really hate spammers; it's easy for spammers to laugh at their hatred from their own homes. It's a lot harder when they're sitting in a car, hoping you're not going to leap out with a baseball bat and explain a few things to them.
I understand your concerns about this hypothetical behaviour. But as someone who runs an open network, regularly uses other's open networks, and realises that security is more than just throwing up some foo around the LAN perimeter and hoping no-one gets through, I think it's a distraction from the real problems we have now.
I hear this all the time - that somehow all the protests over RIP were a miserable failure.
As a matter of fact, the final form of the act that passed was substantially improved on the original proposal. The *original* bill was going to demand key escrow: that's to say, you'd have to hand over you PGP keys to a third party before you could use them.
Widespread protest by businesses and individuals stopped that.
As a fix, the government introduced the idea that if you didn't hand over your password, it would be presumed that you were hiding it. That's to say, reversing the burden of proof. People protested about this to, and the final form of the Act goes a long way to mitigating this issue.
There's a lot that's wrong with the RIP Act - but to describe the fight against it as a series of defeats is just as bad. You can make a difference. If you protested against RIP, perhaps you already have.
I haven't looked for a complete list of what you get on a normal install, but you can safely assume a fairly vanilla BSD kit, including development tools: emacs, perl, gcc, etc. It's all free with MacOS X, as it should be. The supplied versions aren't always the most up-to-date, but that's what fink is for.
Also, the Mac OS development environment (which includes updates to NeXTStep's really-quite-impressive development environment, Interface Maker and Project Builder, full API docs etc) is a free download. I believe it's included on the harddrive (as an installable package) on new machines.
Your best bet is to check developer.apple.com. Signing up as a developer is free, although you have to pay $700+ to get stuff like advance betas of the OS, WWDC proceedings on DVD.