http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/001872.html#001872

MX’s cool site of the week:

http://home.earthlink.net/~atomic_rom/007/intro.htm

Radio emerges from the electronic soup

19:00 28 August 02
Duncan Graham-Rowe

A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by turning itself into a radio receiver.

What should have been an oscillator became a radio
This accidental reinvention of the radio followed an experiment to see if an automated design process, that uses an evolutionary computer program, could be used to “breed” an electronic circuit called an oscillator. An oscillator produces a repetitive electronic signal, usually in the form of a sine wave.

Paul Layzell and Jon Bird at the University of Sussex in Brighton applied the program to a simple arrangement of transistors and found that an oscillating output did indeed evolve.

But when they looked more closely they found that, despite producing an oscillating signal, the circuit itself was not actually an oscillator. Instead, it was behaving more like a radio receiver, picking up a signal from a nearby computer and delivering it as an output.

In essence, the evolving circuit had cheated, relaying oscillations generated elsewhere, rather than generating its own.

Gene mixing

Layzell and Bird were using the software to control the connections between 10 transistors plugged into a circuit board that was fitted with programmable switches. The switches made it possible to connect the transistors differently.

Treating each switch as analogous to a gene allowed new circuits to evolve. Those that oscillated best were allowed to survive to a next generation. These “fittest” candidates were then mated by mixing their genes together, or mutated by making random changes to them.

After several thousand generations you end up with a clear winner, says Layzell. But precisely why the winner was a radio still mystifies them.

To pick up a radio signal you need other elements such as an antenna. After exhaustive testing they found that a long track in the circuit board had functioned as the antenna. But how the circuit “figured out” that this would work is not known.

“There’s probably one sudden key mutation that enabled radio frequencies to be picked up,” says Bird.

19:00 28 August 02
(c) New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992732

Orac!
https://answers.google.com/answers/main

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html

Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002
by Lawrence Lessig

08/15/2002

Editor’s Note: In his address before a packed house at the Open Source Convention, Lawrence Lessig challenges the audience to get more involved in the political process. Lawrence, a tireless advocate for open source, is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. He is also the author of the best-selling book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Here is the complete transcript of Lawrence’s keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002.

(You can also download an MP3 version of this presentation (20.2MB).)

Lawrence Lessig: I have been doing this for about two years–more than 100 of these gigs. This is about the last one. One more and it’s over for me. So I figured I wanted to write a song to end it. But then I realized I don’t sing and I can’t write music. But I came up with the refrain, at least, right? This captures the point. If you understand this refrain, you’re gonna’ understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts:

*Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.

*The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.

*Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.

*Ours is less and less a free society.

In 1774, free culture was born. In a case called Donaldson v. Beckett in the House of Lords in England, free culture was made because copyright was stopped. In 1710, the statute had said that copyright should be for a limited term of just 14 years. But in the 1740s, when Scottish publishers started reprinting classics (you gotta’ love the Scots), the London publishers said “Stop!” They said, “Copyright is forever!” Sonny Bono said “Copyright should be forever minus a day,” but the London publishers said “Copyright is forever.”

These publishers, people whom Milton referred to as old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book selling, men who do not labor in an honest profession (except Tim here), to [them”> learning is indebted. These publishers demanded a common-law copyright that would be forever. In 1769, in a case called Miller v. Taylor, they won their claim, but just five years later, in Donaldson, Miller was reversed, and for the first time in history, the works of Shakespeare were freed, freed from the control of a monopoly of publishers. Freed culture was the result of that case.

Remember the refrain. I would sing it, but you wouldn’t want me to. OK. Well, by the end we’ll see.

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At O’Reilly we thrive on watching the “alpha geeks”, since the early adopters tell us a lot about the shape of the future. One of the most exciting things about our conferences is the opportunity for people to meet and share ideas and knowledge face to face on topics like:

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That free culture was carried to America; that was our birth–1790. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered “printing.” Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.

That was our birth, and more fundamentally, in 1790, because of the technology of the time, all things protected were free code. You could take the works of Shakespeare and read the source–the source was the book. You could take the work of any creativity protected by the law and understand what made it tick [by”> studying it. This was the design and the regime, and even in the context of patents, there were transparent technologies. You didn’t take, you didn’t need to take the cotton gin [for example”> and read the patent to understand how it worked, right? You could just take it apart.

These were legal protections in a context where understanding and learning were still free. Control in this culture was tiny. That was cute, right? Control, tiny . . . OK. And not just then, right? Forget the 18th century, the 19th century, even at the birth of the 20th century. Here’s my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don’t recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, “stole” Willie from Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill.”

It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting”> 14 years–just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter”> to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they’re utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone.

(Audience Applauds.)

Related Resources:

Lawrence Lessig Home Page–Includes links to books (The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace), articles, projects, and news.

An MP3 version of this presentation (20.2MB).

A flash version of Lessig’s presentation, including audio and other source files.

Creative Commons–A nonprofit organization founded on the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

O’Reilly Network Policy DevCenter

O’Reilly Open Source Convention Coverage

It was culture, which you didn’t need the permission of someone else to take and build upon. That was the character of creativity at the birth of the last century. It was built upon a constitutional requirement that protection be for limited times, and it was originally limited. Fourteen years, if the author lived, then 28, then in 1831 it went to 42, then in 1909 it went to 56, and then magically, starting in 1962, look–no hands, the term expands.

Eleven times in the last 40 years it has been extended for existing works–not just for new works that are going to be created, but existing works. The most recent is the Sonny Bono copyright term extension act. Those of us who love it know it as the Mickey Mouse protection act, which of course [means”> every time Mickey is about to pass through the public domain, copyright terms are extended. The meaning of this pattern is absolutely clear to those who pay to produce it. The meaning is: No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. That though we had a culture where people could take and build upon what went before, that’s over. There is no such thing as the public domain in the minds of those who have produced these 11 extensions these last 40 years because now culture is owned.

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.

Things are different now, [different”> from even when Walt produced the Walt Disney Corporation. In this year now, we have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying. You know the things that computers do when you boot them up? Going from copies to, not just copies of the original work, but even derivative works on top of it. Going from 14 years for new works produced by a real author–there are fewer and fewer of those people out there–to life plus 70 years. That’s the expansion of law, but also there’s been an expansion of control through technology.

OK, so first of all, this reality of opaque creativity, you know that as proprietary code. Creativity where you don’t get to see how the thing works, and the law protects the thing you can’t see. It’s not Shakespeare that you can study and understand because the code is, by nature, open. Nature has been reformed in our modern, technological era, so nature can be hidden and the law still protects it–and not just through the protection, but through increasing control of uses of creative work.

Here’s my Adobe eBook Reader, right. Some of you have seen this before, I’m sure. Here’s Middle March; this is a work in the public domain. Here are the “permissions” (a lawyer had something to do with this) that you can do with this work in the public domain: You are allowed to copy ten selections into the clipboard every ten days–like, who got these numbers, I don’t know–but you can print ten pages of this 4 million page book every ten days, and you are allowed to feel free to use the read-aloud button to listen to this book, right?

Now, Aristotle’s Politics, another book in the public domain [that was”> never really protected by copyright, but with this book, you can’t copy any text into the selection, you can’t print any pages, but feel free to listen to this book aloud. And to my great embarrassment, here’s my latest book, right? No copying, no printing, and don’t you dare use the technology to read my book aloud. [Laughter”> I’ll have a sing button in the next version of Adobe. Read a book; read a book.

The point is that control is built into the technology. Book sellers in 1760 had no conception of the power that you coders would give them some day in the future, and that control adds to this expansion of law. Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we’ve not seen before. Right? Because here, here’s a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What’s that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use; it’s an unregulated use. To give it to someone is not a fair use; it’s unregulated. To sell it, to sleep on top of it, to do any of these things with this text is unregulated. Now, in the center of this unregulated use, there is a small bit of stuff regulated by the copyright law; for example, publishing the book–that’s regulated. And then within this small range of things regulated by copyright law, there’s this tiny band before the Internet of stuff we call fair use: Uses that otherwise would be regulated but that the law says you can engage in without the permission of anybody else. For example, quoting a text in another text–that’s a copy, but it’s a still fair use. That means the world was divided into three camps, not two: Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories.

Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, “What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?” I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control? Now, unregulated uses disappear, we argue about fair use, and they find a way to remove fair use, right? Here’s a familiar creature to many of you, right? The wonderful Sony Aibo Pet, which you can teach to do all sorts of things. Somebody set up a wonderful aibopet.com site to teach people how to hack their dogs. Now remember, their dogs, right? And this site actually wanted to help you hack your dog to teach your dog to dance jazz. Remember (Europeans are sometimes confused about this), it’s not a crime to dance jazz in the United States.

This is a completely permissible activity–even for a dog to dance jazz. In Georgia, there are a couple jurisdictions I’m not sure about [laughter”>, but mainly, dancing jazz is an OK activity. So Aibopet.com said, “Here, here’s how to hack your dog to make it dance jazz.” If anything, it would be a fair use of this piece of plastic that costs over $1,500. You would think, “This is a fair use,” right?

Letter to the site: Your site contains information providing the means to circumvent Aibo, where copy protection protocol constitutes a violation of the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA. Even though the use is fair use, the use is not permitted under the law. Fair use, erased by this combination of technological control and laws that say “don’t touch it,” leaving one thing left in this field that had three, controls copyright, [thereby”> controlling creativity.

Now, here’s the thing you’ve got to remember. You’ve got to see this. This is the point. (And Jack Valente misses this.) Here’s the point: Never has it been more controlled ever. Take the addition, the changes, the copyrights turn, take the changes to copyrights scope, put it against the background of an extraordinarily concentrated structure of media, and you produce the fact that never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the evolution of our culture. Never.

Not even before the birth of free culture, not in 1773 when copyrights were perpetual, because again, they only controlled printing. How many people had printers? You could do what you wanted with these works. Ordinary uses were completely unregulated. But today, your life is perpetually regulated in the world that you live in. It is controlled by the law. Here is the refrain: Creativity depends on stopping that control. They will always try to impose it; we are free to the extent that we resist it, but we are increasingly not free.

You or the GNU, you can pick, build a world of transparent creativity–that’s your job, this weird exception in the 21st century of an industry devoted to transparent creativity, the free sharing of knowledge. It was not a choice in 1790; it was nature in 1790. You are rebuilding nature. This is what you do. You build a common base that other people can build upon. You make money, not, well, not enough, but some of you make money off of this. This is your enterprise. Create like it’s 1790. That’s your way of being. And you remind the rest of the world of what it was like when creativity and innovation were a process where people added to common knowledge. In this battle between a proprietary structure and a free structure, you show the value of the free, and as announcements such as the RealNetworks announcement demonstrate, the free still captures the imagination of the most creative in this industry. But just for now. Just for now. Just for now, because free code threatens and the threats turn against free code.

Let’s talk about software patents. There’s a guy, Mr. Gates, who’s brilliant, right? He’s brilliant. A brilliant business man; he has some insights, he is even a brilliant policy maker. Here’s what he wrote about software patents: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Here’s the first thing I’m sure you’ve read of Bill Gates that you all 100 percent agree with. Gates is right. He is absolutely right. Then we shift into the genius business man: “The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.” Excluding future competitors.

Now, it’s been four years since this battle came onto your radar screens in a way that people were upset about. Four years. And there have been tiny changes in the space. There have been a bunch of “Tim” changes, right? Tim went out there and he set up something to attack bad patents. That was fine. There were a bunch of Q. Todd Dickinson changes. He was a former head of the patent commission–never saw a patent he didn’t like. But he made some minor changes in how this process should work. But the field has been dominated by apologists for the status quo. Apologists who say, We’ve always patented everything, therefore we should continue to patent this. People like Greg Aharonian, who goes around and says every single patent out there is idiotic. But it turns out that the patent system’s wonderful and we should never reform it at all. Right?

This is the world we live in now, which produces this continued growth of software patents. And here’s the question: What have we done about it? What have you done about it? Excluding future competitors–that’s the slogan, right? And that company that gave birth to the slogan that I just cited has only ever used patents in a defensive way. But as Dan Gillmor has quoted, “They’ve also said, look, the Open Source Movement out there has got to realize that there are a lot of patents at stake, and don’t imagine we won’t use them when we must.”

Now, the thing about patents is, they’re not nuclear weapons. It’s not physics that makes them powerful, it’s lawyers and lawmakers and Congress. And the thing is, you can fight all you want against the physics that make a nuclear weapon destroy all of mankind, but you can not succeed at all. Yet you could do something about this. You could fuel a revolution that fights these legal threats to you. But what have you done about it? What have you done about it?

(Audience Applauds.)

Second, the copyright wars: In a certain sense, these are the Homeric tragedies. I mean this in a very modern sense. Here’s a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he’s shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it’s “The Simpsons,” Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groenig, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It’s only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it’s not going to be a problem, call so and so. So they called so and so, and so and so said call so and so.

Eventually, the so and so turns out to be the lawyers, so when they got to the lawyers, they said, Is this going to be a problem? It’s a documentary film. It’s about education. It’s a couple seconds. The so and so said 25,000 bucks. 25,000 bucks?! It’s a couple seconds! What do you mean 25,000 bucks? The so and so said, I don’t give a goddamn what it is for. $25,000 bucks or change your movie. Now you look at this and you say this is insane. It’s insane. And if it is only Hollywood that has to deal with this, OK, that’s fine. Let them be insane. The problem is their insane rules are now being applied to the whole world. This insanity of control is expanding as everything you do touches copyrights.

So, the broadcast flag, which says, “Before a technology is allowed to touch DTV, it must be architected to control DTV through watching for the broadcast flag.” Rebuild the network to make sure this bit of content is perfectly protected, or amend it for . . . chips that will be imposed on machines through the law, which Intel referred to as the police state in every computer, quite accurately. And they would build these computers, but are opposed to this police state system.

And then, most recently, this outrageous proposal that Congress ratify the rights of the copyright owners to launch a tax on P2P machines–malicious code that goes out there and tries to bring down P2P machines. Digital vigilantism. And not only are you allowed to sue if they do it and they shouldn’t have done it, but you have to go to the attorney general and get permission from the attorney general before you are allowed to sue about code that goes out there and destroys your machine . . . when it shouldn’t be allowed to destroy your machine. This is what they talk about in Washington. This is what they are doing. This is, as Jack Valente says, a terrorist war they are fighting against you and your children, the terrorists. Now you step back and you say, For what? Why? What’s the problem? And they say, It’s to stop the harm which you are doing.

So, what is that harm? What is the harm that is being done by these terrible P2P networks out there? Take their own numbers. They said last year [that”> five times the number of CDs sold were traded on the Net for free. Five times. Then take their numbers about the harm caused by five times the number sold being traded for free: A drop in sales of five percent. Five percent. Now, there was a recession last year, and they raised their prices and they changed the way they counted. All of those might actually account for the five percent, but even if they didn’t, the total harm caused by five times being traded for free was five percent. Now, I’m all for war in the right context, but is this the ground one stands on to call for a “terrorist war” against technology? This harm? Even if five percent gives them the right to destroy this industry, I mean, does anybody think about the decline in this industry, which is many times as large as theirs, caused by this terrorist war being launched against anybody who touches new content? Ask a venture capitalist how much money he is willing to invest in new technology that would touch content in a way that Hilary Rosen or Jack Valente don’t sign off on. The answer is a simple one: Zero. Zero.

They’ve shut down an industry and innovation in the name of this terrorist war, and this is the cause. This is the harm. Five percent.

And what have you done about it? It’s insane. It’s extreme. It’s controlled by political interests. It has no justification in the traditional values that justify legal regulation. And we’ve done nothing about it. We’re bigger than they are. We’ve got rights on our side. And we’ve done nothing about it. We let them control this debate. Here’s the refrain that leads to this: They win because we’ve done nothing to stop it.

There’s a congressmen: J.C. Watts. J.C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He’s going to resign from Congress. He’s been there seven and a half years. He’s had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it. Boy, not spend 700 years in Washington? He says, you know, I like you guys, but seven years is enough, eight years is too much. I’m out of here. Just about the time J.C. Watts came to Washington, this war on free code and free culture began. Just about that time.

In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here’s the problem with Washington: “If you are explaining, you are losing.” If you are explaining, you’re losing. It’s a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don’t, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you’re off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we’re still explaining. We’re still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property. They don’t get why rearchitecting the network destroys innovation and creativity. They extend copyrights perpetually. They don’t get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that’s why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away.

Now, I’ve spent two years talking to you. To us. About this. And we’ve not done anything yet. A lot of energy building sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. [But”> nothing yet to change that vision in Washington. Because we hate Washington, right? Who would waste his time in Washington?

But if you don’t do something now, this freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away. Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If You Can’t Fight For Your Freedom . . . You Don’t Deserve It.

But you’ve done nothing.

(Audience Applauds.)

There’s a handful, we can name them, of people you could be supporting, you could be taking. Let’s put this in perspective: How many people have given to EFF? OK. How many people have given to EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service? See? Four. How many people have given more money to EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly–to support the other side? How many people have given anything to these people, Boucher, Canon. . . . This is not a left and right issue. This is the important thing to recognize: This is not about conservatives versus liberals.

In our case, in Eldred [Eldred v. Ashcroft”>, we have this brief filed by 17 economists, including Milton Freedman, James Buchanan, Ronald Kost, Ken Arrow, you know, lunatics, right? Left-wing liberals, right? Freedman said he’d only join if the word “no-brainer” existed in the brief somewhere, like this was a complete no-brainer for him. This is not about left and right. This is about right and wrong. That’s what this battle is. These people are from the left and right. Hank Perritt, I think the grandfather of cyberspace–the law of cyberspace running in Illinois–is struggling to get support, to take this message to Washington. These are the sources, the places to go.

Then there is this organization. Now some of you say, I’m on the board of this organization. I fight many battles on that board. Some of you say we are too extreme; you say that in the wrong way, right? You send emails that say, “You are too extreme. You ought to be more mainstream.” You know and I am with you. I think EFF is great. It’s been the symbol. It’s fought the battles. But you know, it’s fought the battles in ways that sometimes need to be reformed. Help us. Don’t help us by whining. Help us by writing on the check you send in, “Please be more mainstream.” The check, right? This is the mentality you need to begin to adopt to change this battle. Because if you don’t do something now, then in another two years, somebody else will say, OK, two years is enough; I got to go back to my life. They’ll say again to you, Nothing’s changed. Except, your freedom, which has increasingly been taken away by those who recognize that the future is against them and they have the power in D.C. to protect themselves against that future. Free society be damned.

Thank you very much.

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, is published by Basic Books.

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oreillynet.com Copyright © 2000 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Security industry’s hacker-pimping slammed
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 15/07/2002 at 15:48 GMT

I spent three days at H2K2 hoping someone would say something worth mentioning in The Register. Finally, on Sunday, a couple of speakers did just that (on which more tomorrow). Best of all was Gweeds’ savage synopsis of a thing which world + dog has no doubt long entertained as a vague suspicion, namely the way hackers pimp themselves in hopes of getting hired at great expense by security companies, and the way conferences provide fertile soil for the illusory threat exaggeration on which the security industry feeds.

The corporate model whereby hackers gravitate towards corporate greed and away from the liberation of data and private resources developed with public funds was pioneered by ISS, Gweeds noted. Hackers now work to expose security flaws with the specific intention of selling out and obtaining funding to become a security company, he said.

Security lists like BugTraq become the matter for resume stuffing. “Post to BugTraq, become a well-known gadfly on the list, and, like Sir Dystic, get a high-paying job at Microsoft. It’s an interesting progression: post a fix to a bug, work on the resume, release some software and then get offered a good job,” Gweeds noted with sarcasm.

He also mapped out the cyclical food chain whereby hacker sell-outs propagate cyber-crime FUD to feed the propaganda needs of government agencies, which helps to lard agency budgets with public funds, and which in turn helps to enrich the security industry.

“L0pht went in front of Congress and testified at the behest of NIPC and talked about how they could get into any network in the United States. The result is that NIPC got increased funds for cyber-defense and FBI got more funding to fight cyber crime. And now L0pht (@Stake) enjoys federal security auditing contracts,” Gweeds observed.

“They’re making money, sure; but they’re also increasing the reach of the Federal police state at the expense of fellow hackers who are being caught and put in jail.”

Gweeds also believes that the window between when an exploit is developed by the underground and publicly released is shrinking as hackers turned security-knights hasten to pad their resumes with proppies on BugTraq. This may be good for the computing public at large, but when the purpose of hacking is to liberate information which may well be of concern to the public, then it’s just another sell-out.

One of the nastier things a blackhat can do is exploit a company, say, for quick cash, which can be done many ways. Money can be leached from a bank; proprietary information can be sold to a competitor, or sold back to the owner in a simple blackmail scam. These familiar and dark scenarios, along with numerous others, are the ones eagerly propagated by the Feds through the mainsteam press.

Yet one of the best things a blackhat can do is obtain and disseminate information which the public needs to know, e.g., internal memos indicating unsafe products, discrepancies betwen a company’s SEC filing and its own acounts, dirty dealings with local property owners, and a hundred other routine crimes of corporations protected by walls of silence and spin and totalitarian internal rules.

The rush to publish and take credit for discovering and patching a new exploit hobbles the positive efforts of blackhats with a social conscience (though admittedly no one knows how big a category that is).

Finally, Gweeds elaborated the scam of corporate-sponsored security conferences and their role in nourishing the hacking/security/Fed food-chain, the most famous of which is BlackHat, and its handy companion side-show, Defcon.

“BlackHat brings together CEOs and corporate secuity people and government and military people, to tell them why they need to spend money on security services and products.” They then learn about intrusion techniques from hackers who are there essentially to frighten them.

And then, when it’s over, “BlackHat attendees get a free pass to Defcon, a hacker culture freak show, so they can see the people they’re supposed to be afraid of up close and personal,” Gweeds said.

It was a refreshing piece of cynicism well expressed, and for me the highlight of the entire conference. I do hope USA Today caught it. ®

http://theregister.co.uk/content/55/26198.html

http://www.danger.com/

Feds Open ‘Total’ Tech Spy System
By Eliot Borin

2:00 a.m. Aug. 7, 2002 PDT
Had Winston Churchill been alive in the months subsequent to Sept. 11 he might well have described U.S. intelligence agencies’ performance prior to the attack thusly: Never have so many known so much and done so little.

On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will begin awarding contracts for the design and implementation of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system.

It’s a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists’ information signatures — clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards — and decode them prior to an assault. It’s a task, the Information Awareness Office (IAO) says, that is beyond “our current intelligent infrastructure and other government agencies.”

TIA program directors make it clear they also believe the task to be beyond current technology, noting that they are primarily interested in revolutionary advances in science, technology or systems and “development of collaboration, automation and cognitive aids technologies that allow humans and machines to think together about complicated and complex problems.”

So insistent are they on building a better mousetrap — or, more accurately, a brand new terrorist trap — that they have officially warned potential contractors that not a dime will be invested in “research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to existing technology.”

According to the IAO’s blueprint, TIA’s five-year goal is the “total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information … although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.”

It is precisely the thought of petabytes of raw data being under the control of an agency with limited public accountability that troubles civil liberties activists like Lee Tien, senior staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“We should resist the expansion of any ‘data-veillance’ program that doesn’t have adequate safeguards and accountability,” Tien says. “This program sounds like a counterpart of the movement toward requiring a national ID card. People like to think of that as an identification system, but it’s actually a tracking system.

“The Total Information Awareness program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster unless there are provisions for citizens to find out who is looking at their records and to see and correct those records.”

“What I don’t want to see is a system that’s the worst of both worlds, unable to predict acts of terrorism in a timely manner because of the sheer mass of mostly irrelevant information clogging its channels, but perfectly attuned for intimate spying on regular citizens and activists like Martin Luther King.”

Even in these early days, Tien’s concerns have some resonance. Among the topics DARPA spokespersons would not discuss in connection with this article were the program’s budget, whether the technology was being developed for deployment by an existing intelligence department or a new “super spy” agency, and which program elements the contracts being issued this month cover.

“This DARPA project sounds a lot like Spielberg’s Minority Report premise of ‘PreCrime,'” said security consultant and author Richard Forno, referring to the fictional law enforcement office that arrests folks before they commit a crime.

“I mean, I’m a geek, but my two degrees are in international relations. Does that mean if all of a sudden I start buying books on terrorism, bio-war or current affairs, I’m going to be labeled a potential bad guy?”

http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,54342,00.html

http://security.tombom.co.uk/shatter.html

http://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/index.php

http://www.deleteddomains.com/

I mean it’s not as though I use this as a home/work bookmark center!

… In Translucent Databases, Wayner extends this concept of hashing in new and important ways. For example, what if a police department needs to build a database of sexual-assault victims that lets them identify trends but hides personal information? You could use a translucent database where the first column is the hash of the victim’s name, and the second column is a hash of their full address, and the third column is a hash of their block and street. You can now group incidents together by grouping entries with identical block hashes; you can see if the incidents refer to the same person by checking to see if those hashes are different.

Wayner’s approach makes it possible to let victims update their records without giving anybody else the ability to search by a person’s name. You do this by adding a password to the victim’s name — a password known to the victim and nobody else.

For example, if you were to use the MD5 hash function, you could key a victim’s report with the value of MD5 (“J. Smith/color4”) where “color4” is Smith’s password. If Smith remembers that her password is “color4”, then she will be able to update her database entry in the future — perhaps to tell the database administrators that her perpetrator has been caught. If there is a concern that victims might forget their passwords, the database can have additional columns that are protected with other passwords, known to other people. For example, a second column where the password is known only to the intake officer. By creating multiple keys using different combinations of data, it’s possible to protect a translucent database against browsing while simultaneously providing for people’s natural tendency to forget critical pieces of information…

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08/02/simson.html

http://www.wayner.org/books/td/

http://www.cornerstonemag.com/sed/
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/helpsheets/regex.html

sed ‘s/ *(.*)//; s/>.*//; s/.*[:<"> *//’ emails_out.txt

echo “zxxxxx http://www.co.uk asdasd” | sed ‘s/.*www/www/g’
echo “www.co.uk asdasd” | sed ‘s/[ “>.*$//g’
sed ‘s/.*www/www/g’ www.txt > www_out.txt ; sed ‘s/[ “>.*$//g’ www_out.txt > www_out2.txt

perl -pi~ -e “s/h3p/php/g;” `find . -name “*.php”`

Thursday, 25 July, 2002, 08:03 GMT 09:03 UK
Women look to shape the future

Few women attracted to work in technology jobs

Emma Smith, founder of the Wired Woman Society and co-author of Technology With Curves, explains why women need to be more involved in the world of technology.

Women are using technology more than ever before. They do more online shopping than their male counterparts and are making up an increasing percentage of internet users around the world.
But while the number of women who use computers is increasing, fewer and fewer are studying computer science at university.

It seems that women are shying away from the very careers that would give them their best shot at gaining influence and making a difference in the 21st Century.

One of the most commonly cited reasons for not pursuing careers in technology is its image. Many women, particularly young women, think that technology careers are geeky, anti-social and even boring.

The truth is somewhat different. Some of the most influential people are web developers, engineers, video game programmers, 3D effects creators and industrial designers, who are using technology to revolutionise the tools and content that shape our world.

The technologies they create are shaping our homes, workplaces, media and worldview.

Going digital

For women to take their place as equal partners in the future, women who study psychology should also study human computer interaction.

Technology jobs seen as geeky

Women who study law should take their place among the policy-makers who, every day, are making immense decisions about privacy, the digital divide, free speech and child protection.

Women who love history should learn how knowledge management, archiving, and content storage are setting the stage for a complete overhaul of the museum experience.

And women who want to teach should also play a role in building e-learning systems that people actually use.

Being able to design computer interfaces, influence privacy policy, build interactive museums and create teaching tools is what women throughout history have fought for.

Even when societal norms and the legal system made it nearly impossible for women to work in information technology, they stood their ground so that today, women who want to shape technology can do just that.

History of invention

Looking at the history books shows that women have been creating new technologies for centuries.

There are probably even more women inventors than most people are aware of, given that until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act, everything owned or invented by a woman was legally her husband’s possession.

Still, the patent records show how much women have contributed to the world of technology:

In 1903 Mary Anderson came up with windscreen wipers which became standard equipment on all American cars by 1916.
In 1938, Katherine Blodgett was awarded the patent for non-reflecting glass, a discovery that has since been used to de-ice aircraft wings and increase the effectiveness of smoke screens.
During the mid-1900s, Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper invented the first computer compiler which helped computers understand simple commands.
In the 1950s Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar, the synthetic fibre used to make bullet-proof-vests.
New Yorker Marion Donovan invented the disposable nappy in 1950.
These women shaped technology against the odds. Today the odds are more in women’s favour.
Yet many women shy away from the careers that will give them a chance to make the biggest difference, in part just because they do not understand them.

Shaping technology

Women still think that shaping technology means sitting alone at a desk, staring at a screen and writing code.

Carly Fiorina: One of the few role models in technology

In fact shaping technology means thinking creatively, understanding people’s needs and inventing new ways of communicating and working together.

Tomorrow’s leading artists, politicians, managers and interior designers will all use and shape technology in order to succeed.

If women were shaping technology perhaps the next windscreen wiper would emerge alongside an entirely new web browser and cars that suit a woman’s way of life.

Anita Borg of Xerox PARC in California holds workshops that bring women from all walks of life together to brainstorm new technologies.

“If women were more involved in creating new technologies,” says Ms Borg, “cars would have a place for you to put your handbag.”

——————————————————————————–
Emma Smith runs At Large Media, a London-based new media consulting company. She also works with e-skills UK to improve the image of technology careers in the UK.
(c) BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2132168.stm

System Admin type people – check this out :
http://www.samspade.org/

WASHINGTON, July 15 — The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Monday to create a new punishment of life imprisonment for malicious computer hackers. By a 385-3 vote, the House approved a computer crime bill that also expands police ability to conduct Internet or telephone eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION had asked Congress to approve the Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) as a way of responding to electronic intrusions, denial of service attacks and the threat of “cyber-terrorism.” The CSEA had been written before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks last year, but the events spurred legislators toward Monday evening’s near-unanimous vote.

CSEA, the most wide-ranging computer crime bill to make its way through Congress in years, now heads to the Senate. It’s not expected to encounter any serious opposition, although there’s not much time for senators to consider the measure because they take August off and are expected to head home for the year around Oct. 1.

“Until we secure our cyber infrastructure, a few keystrokes and an Internet connection is all one needs to disable the economy and endanger lives,” sponsor Lamar Smith, R-Tex., said earlier this year. “A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb.”

Smith heads a subcommittee on crime, which held hearings that drew endorsements of CSEA from a top Justice Department official and executives from Microsoft and WorldCom. Citing privacy concerns, civil liberties groups have objected to portions of CSEA.

A committee report accompanying the legislation predicts:

“A terrorist or criminal cyber attack could further harm our economy and critical infrastructure. It is imperative that the penalties and law enforcement capabilities are adequate to prevent and deter such attacks.

AUTHORITIES GIVEN WIDER ACCESS

By rewriting wiretap laws, CSEA would allow limited surveillance without a court order when there is an ongoing attack” on an Internet-connected computer or “an immediate threat to a national security interest.” That kind of surveillance would, however, be limited to obtaining a suspect’s telephone number, IP address, URLs or e-mail header information not the contents of online communications or telephone calls.

Under federal law, such taps can take place when there’s a threat of “serious bodily injury to any person” or activity involving organized crime.

Another section of CSEA would permit Internet providers to disclose the contents of e-mail messages and other electronic records to police in cases involving serious crimes.

Currently it’s illegal for an Internet provider to “knowingly divulge” what users do except in some specific circumstances, such as when it’s troubleshooting glitches, receiving a court order or tipping off police that a crime is in progress. CSEA expands that list to include when “an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure of the information without delay.”

Hacks, Viruses & Scams

–Con artists use ‘suckers list’ database
–Hacker mailing list goes corporate
–Stiff sentence for Net auction fraud
–Student charged with hacking university system to boost grades
–Government to the cyber rescue?
–Virus tempts with peek at passwords
–Bug of the Day
–Step inside the world of hacking

Clint Smith, the president of the U.S. Internet Service Providers Association, endorsed the concept idea earlier this year. Smith testified that CSEA builds on the controversial USA Patriot act, which Congress enacted last fall. He said that this portion of CSEA “will reduce impediments to ISP cooperation with law enforcement.” The Free Congress Foundation, which opposes CSEA, criticized Monday evening’s vote.

“Congress should stop chipping away at our civil liberties,” said Brad Jansen, an analyst at the conservative group. “A good place to start would be to substantially revise (CSEA) to increase, not diminish, oversight and accountability by the government.”

If the Senate also approves CSEA, the new law would also:

–Require the U.S. Sentencing Commission to revise sentencing guidelines for computer crimes. The commission would consider whether the offense involved a government computer, the “level of sophistication” shown and whether the person acted maliciously.

Formalize the existence of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. The center, which investigates and Advertisement responds to both physical and virtual threats and attacks on America’s critical infrastructure, was created in 1998 by the Department of Justice, but has not been authorized by an act of Congress. The original version of CSEA set aside $57.5 million for the NIPC; the final version increases the NIPC’s funding to $125 million for the 2003 fiscal year.

Specify that an existing ban on the “advertisement” of any device that is used primarily for surreptitious electronic surveillance applies to online ads. The prohibition now covers only a “newspaper, magazine, handbill or other publication.”

Most industry associations, including the Business Software Alliance, the Association for Competitive Technology, the Information Technology Association of America, and the Information Technology Industry Council, have endorsed most portions of CSEA.

Copyright © 1995-2002 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved

http://www.msnbc.com/news/780923.asp?cp1=1

ePC 96 bits:
http://www.autoidcentre.org/

New competition to Search Engine Watch:
http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/

Wonder if I’ll have to upgrade my PC? 🙁
http://www.project-entropia.com/

This is funny 🙂
http://www21.brinkster.com/freethought/projectentropia/pec64.html

About Project Entropia!
Project Entropia will be the next generation of interactive entertainment. In Project Entropia you will able to enter a whole world with amazing three-dimensional environments using a computer and the internet. It will be a massive virtual world where millions of users can interact with each other at the same time. Project Entropia will have a real economy system that allows you as a user to exchange real life money into PED (Project Entropia Dollars) and then back into a real currency again. Project Entropia will be free of charge with no monthly costs, which means that aside from the fees for your own local access to the internet while you are connected, the client software will be available with no payment to MindArk. All you need to do is get hold of the software that will be distributed in various ways, for example through the internet or on free CD’s in computer magazines.

When you decide to enter the world of Project Entropia as a citizen you will be able to create your very own visual three-dimensional persona. This is easy because you will be using a character generation system that defines the freedom we intend to offer you. Project Entropia gives you the possibility to experience a life inside a vast virtual reality as it suits you. It will present you with social interaction with people all over the world as well as real online services inside an incredible virtual environment. Project Entropia is also meant to help you to fulfill your dreams and fantasies with adventures inside an expanding science-fiction universe. For all of you who are familiar with the term “massive multiplayer online role-playing games” or MMORPG, Project Entropia will be that and much more. If you don’t know what a MMORPG means just read on!

As a MMORPG the world of Project Entropia is set to take you on an epic journey into the future, to a place far away from Earth, beyond the boarders and frontiers of known space. The central point in the human universe is now focused on one single colony on a distant planet named Calypso. The world on Calypso will be under constant development and will initially include three vast continents with large expanding cities where you begin your life. The cities will offer you an immense virtual playground for social interaction with other players in a thriving social community. It will contain various forms of in-game institutions, real online services and a variety of virtual entertainment.

Together with all other online users you will have the possibility to take an active role in the creation of a whole new civilization, to explore entire continents in an evolving world and claim land where you can establish new communities. Should you choose to leave the peaceful and secure cities you may be forced to struggle against the wild untamed nature, against hostile mutants and invading robots. You must learn to use all available resources and a growing multitude of skills, wit, guts, teamwork and equipment to reclaim a lost paradise. Take on quests and pull the strings of the past to discover more of the story behind Project Entropia as the future unfolds before you in a growing web of intrigues that will take on epic proportions. Whatever you may find it’s only the beginning, and whatever you do may alter the future of an entire world!

[snip”>

You see, in this case, those tips that are forming and reading the
depressions are very, very small. Atomically small. They’re actually
the tips of Atomic Force Microscopes, and they can form and read
depressions so small (10 nanometers in diameter), and so close together,
that this thermomechanical storage technique can store hundreds of
gigabits/square inch — perhaps as much as one terabit/square inch!
Which is well beyond the (currently) anticipated magnetic recording
limit of perhaps 150 gigabits/square inch (see below). Another way to
look at this is that “about three billion of [these depressions”> fit in
a punch card hole.” (http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=
technologynews&StoryID=1072736)

According to an AP article brought to our attention by reader R. Gautier
(http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20020611/D7K2NC281.html), this
prototype can already store the text of 25 million pages on the surface
of a postage stamp! That’s 20-times the density of today’s common disk
drives. And this is just the prototype…

This isn’t the death knell for traditional magnetic disk drives — the
read/write speed of Millipede appears (at this time) to be far slower,
and so its initial implementation may be to vastly increase the amount
of memory in portable devices. Imagine, if you will, that if this
technology increases its storage capacity at anything like the “Moore’s
Law-plus” rate of current storage increases, we could have portable
digital devices that might NEVER run out of room for storing pictures,
audio, video, and more.

Which would change a lot of rules.

[snip”>
Copyright (c) 2001-2002, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights reserved.
http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com

I Told You So
Alas, a Couple of Bob’s Dire Predictions Have Come True

By Robert X. Cringely
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020627.html

Just over three years ago I wrote a column titled “Cooking the Books: How Clever Accounting Techniques are Used to Make Internet Millionaires.” It explained how telecom companies were using accounting tricks to create revenue where there really was none. Take another look at the column (it’s among the links on the “I Like It” page), and think of Worldcom with its recently revealed $3.7 billion in hidden expenses. Then last August, I wrote a column titled “The Death of TCP/IP: Why the Age of Internet Innocence is Over.” Take a look at that column, too, and think about Microsoft’s just-revealed project called Palladium.

The end is near.

Sometimes I’d rather be wrong, but it’s a no-brainer to guess that accountancy, which has apparently become something of an art form or interpretive dance, could have a dark side. And you’ll never lose money betting for Microsoft and against Microsoft’s competitors and customers.

Let’s concentrate on the Microsoft story. Last August, I wrote of a rumor that Microsoft wanted to replace TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol — a protocol owned by Microsoft — that it would tout as being more secure. Actually, the new protocol would likely be TCP/IP with some of the reserved fields used as pointers to proprietary extensions, quite similar to Vines IP, if you remember that product from Banyan Systems. I called it TCP/MS in the column. How do you push for the acceptance of such a protocol? First, make the old one unworkable by placing millions of exploitable TCP/IP stacks out on the Net, ready-to-use by any teenage sociopath. When the Net slows or crashes, the blame would not be assigned to Microsoft. Then ship the new protocol with every new copy of Windows, and install it with every Windows Update over the Internet. Zero to 100 million copies could happen in less than a year.

This week, Microsoft announced Palladium through an exclusive story in Newsweek written by Steven Levy, who ought to have known better. Palladium is the code name for a Microsoft project to make all Internet communication safer by essentially pasting a digital certificate on every application, message, byte, and machine on the Net, then encrypting the data EVEN INSIDE YOUR COMPUTER PROCESSOR. Palladium compatible hardware (presumably chipsets and motherboards) will come from both AMD and Intel, and the software will, of course, come from Microsoft. That software is what I had dubbed TCP/MS.

The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That’s taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we’ll all have to buy new computers.

This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn’t choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It’s a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love.

Ironically, Microsoft says they will reveal Palladium’s source code, which is little more than a head feint toward the Open Source movement. Nobody at Microsoft is saying anything about giving the ownership of that source code away or of allowing just anyone to change it.

Under Palladium as I understand it, the Internet goes from being ours to being theirs. The very data on your hard drive ceases to be yours because it could self-destruct at any time. We’ll end up paying rent to use our own data!

Can you tell I think this is a bad idea?

What bothers me the most about it is not just that we are being sold a bill of goods by the very outfit responsible for making possible most current Internet security problems. “The world is a fearful place (because we allowed it to be by introducing vulnerable designs followed by clueless security initiatives) so let us fix it for you.” Yeah, right. Yet Palladium has a very real chance of succeeding.

How long until only code signed by Microsoft will be allowed to run on the platform? It seems that Microsoft is trying to implement a system that will enable them, once and for all, to charge game console-like royalties to software developers.

But how will this stop the “I just e-mailed you a virus” problem? How does this stop my personal information being sucked out of my PC using cookies? It won’t. Solving those particular problems is not Palladium’s real purpose, which is to increase Microsoft’s market share. It is a marketing concept that will be sold as the solution to a problem. It won’t really work.

Let’s understand here that not all Microsoft products are bad and many are very good. Those products serve real customer needs and do so with genuine purpose, not marketing artifice. But Palladium isn’t that way at all. This is NOT about making things better for the user. This is about removing the ability for the end user to make decisions about how his or her computer functions. It is an effort by Microsoft to take literal ownership of Internet technology, Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” strategy applied for the Nth time, though on a grander scale than we’ve ever seen before. While there is some doubt that the PC will survive a decade from now as a product category, nobody is suggesting the Internet will do anything but grow and grow over that time. Palladium assures that whatever hardware is running on the network of 10 years from now, it will be generating revenue for Microsoft. There is nothing wrong with Microsoft having a survival strategy, but plenty wrong with presenting it as some big favor they are doing for us and for the world.

What’s saddest about this story is that it could be positive. The world is a dangerous place and finding ways to make people responsible for what they do on the Net is probably good, not bad. I just don’t think we have the right people on the job.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html

http://www.the5k.org/

http://www.pimientolinux.com/peru2ms/index.html

I reckon this is the neatest site I’ll find this month, just hope too many people don’t catch on.
Adobe’s $10 a month sucks.

Why don’t they PayPal it and charge up your account and you pay per byte?

However they nice people are doing it on the house to promote their PDF plug-ins.

http://www.gobcl.com/

Thank you Mr or Mrs BCL

FREE goBCL SERVICE FROM BCL TECHNOLOGIES IS BACK
goBCL: the fast, free and flexible PDF and HTML creation tool for business professionals

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. April 23, 2002 – BCL Technologies, Inc., a leader in document management and web publishing software, announced today that its free document publishing service, GoBCL is back online with new and improved functionalities and advanced features. GoBCL was offline for a short period of time while it was undergoing several major upgrades, but the service now is once again active. GoBCL provides customers with a fast and free document conversion tool for creating PDF (Portable Document Format) or HTML (Hypertext Mark Up Language) formats from anywhere in the world…

http://www.bclcomputers.com/corporate/press_releases/04_23_02_gobcl_back.htm

Stuart Millar, Lucy Ward and Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday June 19, 2002
(c)The Guardian
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,740063,00.html

Ministers were yesterday forced into a humiliating climbdown over plans to hand a host of public bodies the right to demand access to the communicatio

ADVERTISEMENT

ns records of telephone and internet users.

Bowing to intense public and political pressure, David Blunkett, the home secretary, admitted that the government had “blundered” into the issue as he announced that the proposals had been shelved to allow more consultation.

The move stunned opposition politicians and civil liberties groups, who had been expecting ministers to unveil tighter safeguards yesterday in response to the wave of resistance that had been growing since the Guardian revealed details of the proposals last week.

The draft order extending the reach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – due to be debated yesterday, then postponed until next week as opposition swelled – has been withdrawn until the autumn at the earliest. It would have given a host of government departments, local councils and quangos the power to demand, on their own authority, access to detailed communications logs, including individuals’ email records and mobile phone location data. Current legislation gives only the police, the intelligence services, customs and excise and the inland revenue these powers.

Last night the Home Office also withdrew a second draft order giving the same list of public bodies the power to authorise themselves to conduct surveillance against individuals and to use informers.

In a development certain to increase pressure on ministers to restrict the number of bodies able to demand communications data, the Guardian has discovered that the watchdogs appointed to monitor the way ministers and public bodies use the sweeping powers given to them under the act have expressed serious doubts about their ability to do their job properly. It emerged yesterday that the chief surveillance commissioner, Sir Andrew Legatt, will have to oversee the activities of 1,039 public authorities with only a staff of 22 to help him.

In a little-noticed report published this year, he warned: “I clearly cannot carry out any meaningful oversight of so many bodies without assistance.”

Attributing the government’s change of heart partly to the objections of his son, Hugh, who works in the IT industry, Mr Blunkett said the proposals had been interpreted “entirely in the wrong direction”.

“When you are in a hole you should stop digging, and having full consultation on the issues raised seems the best way to do it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One.

Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, said: “Had we not made clear that we would seek to defeat these outrageous proposals they would have been rammed through the Commons.”

Richard Allan, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “This government is not overly willing to stand up and defend civil liberties on principle so I think what has really caused this decision is the fact that the proposals are completely unworkable.”

The Devil is in the detail

· Police, the intelligence services, customs and excise and the inland revenue will be given the power under section 22 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to compel telephone, internet and postal service providers to hand over the detailed communications logs of individual users, without first seeking the permission of a judge.

· The Home Office wants to expand this list to include seven government departments, every local council and a host of other public bodies, including the postal service commission and the food standards agency.

· Until this section of Ripa comes into force, the police and all these other organisations can request communications data from service providers under the Data Protection Act, but the provider can refuse if they do not believe there are sufficient grounds for the request. In such cases, the agency making the request must convince a judge to give a court order to obtain the data.

· The data obtained could include name and address, phone calls made and received, source and destination of emails, identity of websites visited, and mobile phone location data which records the user’s whereabouts whenever the phone is switched on to within a few hundred metres. To access the content of communications (eg by placing a wiretap on a telephone or intercepting an email), the authorities still require a warrant from the home secretary.

· The data obtained could include name and address, phone calls made and received, source and destination of emails, identity of websites visited, and mobile phone location data which records the user’s whereabouts whenever the phone is switched on to within a few hundred metres. To access the content of communications (eg by placing a wiretap on a telephone or intercept an email), the authorities still require a warrant from the home secretary

· The data can be obtained on the grounds of national security, preventing or detecting crime, protecting the economic wellbeing of the UK, public health and safety, collecting tax, preventing death or injury in an emergency and any other purpose specified in an order by the home secretary.

Sam Costello, IDG News ServiceBoston Bureau
June 13, 2002, 09:20
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=699337

A new virus can, for the first time, infect image files, according to antivirus software company McAfee Security, a division of Network Associates Inc. This means that the virus could be spread through Web sites containing infected image files, and force antivirus companies to re-engineer their products, McAfee officials said.

The virus, which is being called W32/Perrun by McAfee, is not yet in the wild — meaning it is not spreading on the Internet — and was sent to McAfee by its author early Thursday morning Eastern time, said Vincent Gullotto, senior director for McAfee AVERT (Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team), located in Santa Clara, California.

The virus is built to spread first as an executable, or .exe, file and then in JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) image files, he said. The virus, were it to be spread in the wild, would appear as an executable which would infect JPEGs when it was run, he said. The executable can be transmitted in standard ways, such as by downloading and via e-mail. The first JPEG viewed after the executable is run will have the virus code appended to it, Gullotto said. The virus will then seek out other JPEG files in the same directory and try to infect them, he said.

W32/Perrun is the first virus to infect JPEGs, according to McAfee.

Only machines that already have the executable file on them could be infected because of the way the virus is written, he said. It’s possible, though, that future derivatives of the virus could do away with the executable as a prerequisite for infection, he added.

Because JPEGs are a common image format on the Web, the virus poses a risk of infecting any user who views an infected file on a Web site, Gullotto said. Users would have to have the executable on their systems for this to occur, he said.

The initial version of W32/Perrun that McAfee has examined does nothing more than try to infect other JPEG files, but future versions could be modified to include all manner of code, including Trojan horses and other programs that could potentially leave PCs open to attackers, he said. Future versions of the virus could also be modified to attack other file types, including text files, MP3s and more, he said.

“This may begin to change the face of what files virus writers start to pay attention to,” Gullotto said. “While these files have been safe, we may see a time in the future when these files are not safe.”

Such a circumstance could also force antivirus companies to re-engineer their products, he said. Current antivirus software would experience serious performance degradation if it had to scan image and other files for viruses, he said. If this type of virus attack becomes more prevalent, antivirus software will have to be modified to handle it, he said.

Deception about plans to extend surveillance amounts to an abuse of power
The snooper’s law proves government can’t be trusted

Hugo Young
Tuesday June 18, 2002
(c) The Guardian

http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/comment/0,7496,739531,00.html

Whether Tony Blair is worth trusting is a personal judgment. We can all have our opinions. Look into his eyes, study his body language, gawp at his sortie to the press complaints commission, measure the density of his apologia for what did or did not happen round the Queen Mother’s catafalque, and you may decide against him. Contemplate his enemies, think about their motives, reflect upon the obsessive malignity of their campaign, stare blank-eyed at the self-righteous hyperbole with which they pronounce that he will never be believed again, and you may come to a different view – if you care enough to get into this stuff at all.

Personal assessments will doubtless reflect some prior prejudice. And because they’re ultimately unverifiable, they attract thousands on thousands of words. There’s an inverse ratio between journalistic output and evidential proof. The issue is as elusive as the passion is intense and the objectivity resonantly absent. Does this one man, Prime Minister Blair, deserve our trust? There will be no final answer, just as there never was with Margaret Thatcher, or John Major, or any other leader.

Government, on the other hand, is something else. It is never to be trusted. Here, there is a final answer. Not that government is always bad or wrong. It is essential to the good of mankind. But in the matter of power, government absolutely never deserves our unquestioning reliance. Its use of power demands eternal vigilance. Yet perhaps because this is so tediously so – so lacking in novelty, so unamenable to prurient speculation – its truth is neglected. Contrast the passions about our leader’s disputed follies, and the bored indifference directed to an outrage now being committed by the machine of which he is temporarily in charge.

Next Monday there will be a last chance for MPs to stop this abomination. The story began two years ago, when the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) passed into law. It was a complicated measure, essentially addressing the outgrowth of electronic data and the need to both enable and control the use of such data by government. It was about sharing and disclosing, and the thrust of it was about crime and national security, along with tax evasion. The branches of the public service listed as authorised to make demands on relevant internet providers and users were exclusively the police, the military, the intelligence services and the inland revenue.

Even before September 11 showed us how this kind of data might be legitimate and useful for the protection of society, Ripa had taken its place in a growing body of such extensions of government power. Hardly a terrorism atrocity could take place anywhere without the British governing machine seizing its moment for emergency legislation. Collecting more and more information became part of the official response to such crisis, regularly approved by parliament. Its justifica tions seeped into the economic as well as security area. Just about anything harmful to any kind of national interest provided a pretext for official data collection.

Then came September 11. The security machine – ie government, one might say, rather than this government uniquely and as such – grew greedier. Last winter’s anti-terrorism bill, among other things, entered the same information warehouse as Ripa, demanding that more should be made available, for a range of purposes which, but for the vigilance of a handful of Lib Dem peers, would have extended even further. As a pair of measures, Ripa and the latest anti-terrorism act legitimise the official capture of private communications – not their content, but every other telling detail electronically available by piecing them together – more copiously than in any other democratic regime in the world.

All this is a done deal, passed by parliament, and it is bad enough. Challenged to defend it, the representatives of the machine – pro tem known as Labour ministers – trot out familiar claims. It was all entirely benign and above board, Bob Ainsworth, Home Office minister, wrote in the Guardian last week: there would be no “fishing expeditions”. Moreover, the system would be regulated. The interception of communications commissioner was in charge of the public interest, and would see it defended: a promise that might be more credible were it not for the disclosure by a parliamentary committee in March 2001 that the commissioner, Lord Justice Swinton Thomas, with a two-strong office, “did not even have enough staff to open the mail”.

Now, though, the story gets worse. Unless parliament vetoes the relevant executive order on Monday, a story broken by the Guardian last week will come to pass. A panoply of new public authorities will be vested with the powers that Ripa confines to police, military, intelligence and tax officials. There are 24 new categories, one of which includes every local authority. Everything from the Health Department to the food standards agency will be given the power to snoop, with only Swinton Thomas to check them: tens of millions of privacy invasions, potentially, invigilated by an office of three people, with the subjects of the snooping left in ignorance.

Trust is the right neuralgic word to raise here. There are several breaches of it. One was the calculated failure to list all these public authorities when Ripa was struggling through the Lords. Controversial already, the bill might have been judged insupportable if ministers revealed that the health and safety executive were to get the same powers as MI6. Plainly the machine’s full intentions were held back as a piece of crude political calculation which parliament could do nothing about. This was a conventional, but still confidence-sapping, abuse of power.

Second, when the question was raised with Patricia Hewitt – on the Guardian website, during the election – she denied three times that a new law would be passed compelling service providers to log and retain for up to seven years all data on email addresses and websites browsed, which is in effect what the anti-terrorism act and the extension of Ripa provide for. Confronted with this u-turn, the machine says that September 11 changed everything. That is an irrelevant distraction. The authorities that are about to be given power to call on such data have little, more usually nothing, to do with terrorism.

Third, where is this to lead? A natural ambition of the machine is to have access to all information about every citizen, which electronic storage makes possible if the right legislative framework is provided. The extended Ripa helps make that framework. This prospect seems rather more central – more revolutionary, bold and sinister – to the life of Britain than the question of whether we see Alastair Campbell as a bigger liar than the editor of the Daily Mail. Yet the same level of indignation somehow eludes it. Raging at the leader, we miss the elephant, on which he is but a passing gnat.

h.young@guardian.co.uk