Smut Trading Outstrips Tune Swaps. Will Apple's new paid music service put a dent in free file-trading services like Kazaa and Gnutella? No, because most files being traded on P2P sites aren't music files at all. Surprise -- they're porn. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]
It used to be, when you walked into a New York bar, all you could really smell in the place was the cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Now, you get the bar's real smell, and trust me when I say that's not pretty. The bar I was in last night had a subtle odor that was a mix of stale beer and staler puke.
Thanks, Mayor Bloomberg, for a more fragrant New York.
Federal judge Stephen Wilson ruled Friday that P2P networks Grokster and Streamcast cannot be held responsible for the actions of their users. Wilson wrote:
Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represented Streamcast in the case.
[links: New York Times; CNET; Wired News; Lessig's commentary; EFF; PDF of decision]
The Honda Cog commercial, in QuickTime [4.9MB], courtesy ext|circ. Dan Hon also discusses a free DVD of the commercial, available in the UK, with extras on the making of the advert. (Hmmmm. If the DVD's not region-encoded, it should be playable in the U.S.)
the fight for semantics. Jon Udell's got a nice piece about the emergingly Semantic Blog. One part he missed was the emergence of CC licenses as part of the semantic blog space. Movabletype and Userland now both incorporate CC license options. The technique we've used with html has been questioned, but we are pushing hard to get RDF out there.... [Lessig Blog]
I haven't read these documents yet, but I did some Semantic Web work in my master's program, and it fascinates me. Once the Radio implementation of the CC license rolls out (if it hasn't already), I'll look into putting it in my site. Cool stuff.
I was just looking out the front window, spying on the neighbors with my roommate's binoculars, when I saw a man and a woman walking up to the flea market across the street. The man pushed a stroller with a baby girl inside, and they walked with a young boy on inline skates.
What caught my eye was the man--my height, build, and coloring, with black plastic-rimmed glasses and a shaved head. He looked so much like me--barring that he's fully clean-shaven, both pate and chin--that I'm sure even my mom would be fooled.
He wore a blue-denim jacket and carried a pink diaper bag with a teddy bear on it. Not only would I never wear blue denim above the waistline, I'd pick a more stylin' diaper bag to sling over my shoulder. It's like some weird, domesticated, parallel-universe version of me. I spied on his wife a while to make sure the parallel-me has good taste and, unfortunately, he kinda doesn't.
I'm much better at pickin' the cuties than he is.
Here's an interesting experiment; Cory Doctorow writes:
Unwirer: an online, real-time exhibitionist sf story collaboration. Charlie Stross (who's up for the Hugo, Neb and BSFA awards this year!) and I are collaborating on our third story together, working title "Unwirer." And we're doing it online.
We've set up a Movable Type blog for the collaboration. You can read along as we write, rewrite and discuss the story as we work our way through it. I think this might be a net-first -- an act of auctorial exhibitionism that no one has ever attempted before.
...
We're going to be updating the site daily, more or less, and we hope to have the story done in about a month.
Pope Opens Easter Mass With a Call for Peace. As tens of thousands of people jammed rain-soaked St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II began Easter Sunday mass with a call to the faithful to work tirelessly for peace. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
Oh, uh, yeah. I guess it is Easter. Since I don't celebrate, I lose track. Happy Easter, if you're a Christ person. Also, happy Passover. And, uh, to the rest of you...happy nothing.
Not only am I linked at the blog LibraryStuff, but the owner Steven M. Cohen, has me in his RSS feed as well. Thanks, Steven! I appreciate that.
Also, I found out, by accident, where my posts when I put them in categories. This means I'll start going through my Web log, categorizing everything, and eventually linking to the categories pages, so it's easy to click a link and find all posts in a certain category. As I mentioned earlier, this'll make it easy to find, say, New York stories.
In Washington Whispers: Bookworms, pack rats--nation's secret warriors, the newsweekly U.S. News & World Report reports how the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, has aided the government in tracking down al Qaeda. It's a short piece, but it's interesting.
U.S. News, by the way, has implemented an RSS feed, meaning that I can now easily blog news items from the mag. Hats off to Jenny Levine for pointing it out.
Don't click this link yet.
http://www.honda.co.uk/newcars/accord100k.html
This is a Honda commercial that's aired in the UK. For some reason, they've recorded it as a Flash file, which means it takes bloody forever to load, even on broadband. So don't click unless you can spare the time to let it load.
However, if you do watch it, you'll see one of the most clever ads, I think, ever made for a car company.
If you know what a Rube Goldberg device is--or you remember the Wallace and Gromit cartoon where Wallace has that machine that gets him out of bed, dressed, and ready for breakfast--that's what going on in this ad. Pieces and parts of a new Accord model set each other in motion, culminating in the unveiling of the new auto.
According to the Daily Telegraph, it took 606 takes to get this thing done right.
Apple Said to Discuss a Music Deal, but Not Too Seriously. Apple Computer has discussed an investment in Universal Music, but a deal is unlikely to be concluded, people close to the discussions said. By Geraldine Fabrikant with Laura M. Holson. [New York Times: Technology]
Poking around at crime stats on the Newsday site, I've come across a link to my local police precinct. I've seen the building pictured, but didn't realize it was a police station. Heh.
Up-to-date neighborhood crime stats are available, in PDF format, and city-wide stats are available as well.
City-wide, crime is down dramatically over 10 years ago, if these stats are any indication. Robberies, murders, rapes, assaults--all are down, by as much as 80%. (For example, in Manhattan North, there were 306 murders reported in 1993, as compared to 60 in 2002.)
I hear a lot about Mayor Giuliani and how his policing policies helped bring about a dramatic downturn in crime in New York, but so far no one's been able to really explain to me what happened. I really need to dig into this because I'm curious.
Internet privacy battle plays out in Charleston
In a decision that threatened the privacy of online purchases, a federal magistrate in Charleston ordered the nation's largest online bookseller on Thursday to turn over its records of a Walterboro real estate broker's book purchases.
Minutes later, though, in a separate hearing, U.S. District Judge David Norton put a hold on federal Magistrate Robert Carr's ruling against Amazon.com.
The government's attempt to get Amazon's records is similar to court battles over what books former White House intern Monica Lewinsky ordered and books purchased by suspected drug dealers in Colorado. In 1998, Lewinsky wanted to keep private her book purchases. The federal court in the District of Columbia agreed with her. In April 2002, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that a bookstore did not have to tell a Denver drug task force who purchased two books on how to make drugs.
This also calls to mind the reporters who dug through Robert Bork's video-rental records during his confirmation hearings and attempts by the government under the Patriot Act to access library records.
Apple said to be in talks to buy Universal Music
[Full story in link, which I urge you to read; requires registration]
In a pairing that would alter the architecture of the music business, Apple Computer Inc. is in talks with Vivendi Universal to buy Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, for as much as $6 billion, sources said.[via Boing Boing Blog]
Such a seemingly unlikely combination would instantly make technology guru Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, the most powerful player in the record industry.
Universal, which reaps about $6 billion in sales annually from artists such as 50 Cent, Shania Twain, U2 and Luciano Pavarotti, would be controlled by a maverick who revolutionized the computer market and coined the mantra "rip, mix, burn," which many in the music business read as an invitation to electronic piracy.
A report released this week by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society finds that Google's SafeSearch feature excludes many innocuous Web pages from search-result listings, including ones created by the White House, IBM, the American Library Association and clothing company Liz Claiborne. By Declan McCullagh. [CNET News]
Full CNET story; Berkman Center report
Intel Coder Not Going Anywhere. A judge orders that an Intel engineer being held without charges in a terrorism investigation will be detained until at least the end of the month. His family and friends continue to protest his detention. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]
Update on the Hawash case.
High court upholds ban on cross burning. A particularly virulent form of intimidation not protected by speech rights. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]
If I can scrape two spare minutes together, I need to track down the text of this decision. I've developed a strange glee for reading Supreme Court rulings.
Back in January, I posted a link to a New York Times article about an online roommate-locater service and its owner. The owner of the roommate site--RoommateFinders.com--also owned, at the time (he might still, I don't know), a Holocaust-revisionist site that is critical of Jews. It appears that somehow wires between the two sites were crossed; email messages also critical of Jews and Israel were mailed out to people who had registered for the roommate site.
Oops.
I posted in this space back in January, linking to the Times article and commenting as follows:
This seems pretty vile; you can bet when it comes time to move from here, I won't be using RoommateFinders.
I am not the Michael F. Dietsch who, as your newspaper reported, was recently arrested for drunken driving.
Sincerely,
Michael T. Dietsch
Consider this a nearly identical letter: RoommateFinders.net does not equal RoommateFinders.com.
I apologize for any confusion my comments might have caused and I have edited my original entry to remove any reference to RoommateFinders. Anyone searching on RoommateFinders should find only this retraction and not the original entry.
Wow. Suddenly a lot's going on. Privacy Digest points out links to several privacy and information-policy organizations, which I've added to my sidebar, and also provides information about new RSS feeds out of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I think might have redesigned its Web site.
In the wake of CFP2003, Dan Gillmor surveys the state of liberty in America.
...the architecture of tomorrow is being embedded with the tools of a surveillance society: ubiquitous cameras; the creation and linking of all manner of databases; insecure networks; and policies that invite abuse. They are being put into place by an unholy, if loose, alliance of government, private industry and just plain nosy regular folks.
...
Meanwhile, under cover of a war that has caused the news media to ignore other important news, the Bush administration issued an order that will guarantee the wrongful arrests or harassment of innocent people. The Justice Department told the FBI it no longer needed to worry about the accuracy of its National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database containing 39 million criminal records, including some documents that would barely pass the gossip hurdle.
Think about that last bit for a moment. Criminal records no longer need to be accurate. In the name of "security," are we willing to lock up the wrong person just so we feel safer? If there's a rapist on the streets, and the cops arrest a guy, sure you're going to feel safer. But if the police have arrested the wrong guy, based on "inaccurate" policing, you won't actually be any safer because the real rapist is out on the streets.
Likewise, we might feel safer knowing that the FBI have detained men like Maher Hawash, but if it turns out he really does know nothing about terrorist groups, his detention won't have helped prevent future terrorist attacks in any way. We'd be no more secure. Are we willing to sacrifice the civil rights of men like Hawash just so we can feel more secure?
I've decided to enable Categories routing on this Web log. Ideally, this should make it easier for those who are interested in my New York stories to filter out intellectual freedom geekery, and vice versa.
But I'm not really sure how it works yet, so I'm just tinkering around with it. Patience.
Boing Boing brings to my attention the case of Maher "Mike" Hawash, a software engineer being held without charges in Oregon. Hawash was detained on the morning of Thursday, March 20, in the parking lot of an Intel facility, where he was working. At the same time, several armed FBI agents awoke Hawash's wife and children and searched their home.
Hawash is scheduled to receive a hearing on Monday morning, at the Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon.
Hawash has so far been charged with no crime. Palestinian by birth, he's been a U.S. citizen for over 10 years. At issue here appear to be two contributions Hawash made in 2000 to Global Relief Foundation, an Islamic charity in Illinois that came under FBI scrutiny after the events of September 11. The government suspects Global Relief's leaders of ties to Al Qaeda and believes that Global Relief channelled funds to terrorist organizers.
I say "appear" because Hawash's attorney and his family and friends still have no idea why he's been arrested. Remember, Hawash has not been charged. Futhermore, Hawash's friends also maintain that Hawash himself had no knowledge of possible links between Global Relief and terrorism and believed Global Relief to be a legitimate charity.
Hawash is being held as a material witness. Although material-witness laws require the government to first obtain a warrant before detaining a material witness, those laws also allow courts to seal those records, which has been done in Hawash's case. So even though the FBI presented evidence to a judge explaining why they wanted Hawash, that evidence is sealed and unavailable to Hawash's family.
Detainment is ordinarily supposed to prevent a material witness from fleeing the country, but Hawash's friends argue that with a wife, children, and a successful career as a software engineer, Hawash has every reason to remain in Oregon.
Feinstein Introduces Privacy Act of 2003
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) hopes to stem the rising tide of identity theft and other privacy abuses with legislation setting a national standard for protection of personal information, including Social Security numbers, driver's licenses and health and financial data.
This legislation, known as The Privacy Act of 2003 (S. 745), establishes a two-tiered system of protection for all personal information. For the most sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers, Feinstein's bill calls for an opt-in system that requires companies to obtain an individual's explicit permission prior to the sale, licensing, or renting of the information to third parties.
For non-sensitive personal information such as names and addresses, companies that wish to collect, sell, or market that data must give individuals an opportunity to withhold their personal information if they so choose.
[dc.internet.com via GrepLaw; full text in first link] The PDF on this is 91 pages, but I want to look this over anyway; it's an important bill that's worth study and discussion.A Hotel's Privacy Invasion. I will not be staying again at the Ramada New Yorker hotel, the site of the just-ended Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Dan Gillmor reports on his experiences with the Ramada New Yorker, which demanded photocopies of his drivers license and credit card.More Wireless Internet Access Set for Lower Manhattan Parks. A downtown business improvement district is planning to establish free high-speed wireless Internet access in six parks and public spaces in Lower Manhattan next month. By Edward Wyatt. [New York Times: Technology]