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CYBER NOTES

An archives of the Progressive Review

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CONSUMERS FOR COMPUTING CHOICE

DIGITAL FREEDOM NETWORK

ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION

ELECTRONIC PRIVACY INFORMATION CENTER

CIRCUMVENTOR ANTI-CENSOR SOFTWARE

INTERNET FREE EXPRESSION ALLIANCE

SAVE THE INTERNET

BOING BOING'S GUIDE FOR DEFEATING CENSORWARE

JULY 2008 STRATEGIZING AT CUIL Register, UK - Ireland-based Sunday Times columnist Sarah Carey is an old college friend of Cuil CEO Tom Costello, and the Palo Alto, California-based startup recently hired her as its "Strategist to the CEO" - even though she sees Silicon Valley as a some sort of Stepford Wives-like alternate universe. The strategic mother of two describes her first descent into the Valley's heart of darkness in a recent column posted to her personal web site. "I stay in a hotel in Palo Alto and walk around to the office each morning, slowly adjusting to the fact that I am supposed to smile and greet fellow pedestrians and joggers," she writes. "The tree-lined streets are perfumed with flowers and weirdly quiet. They have so much space here that buildings are low rise, mostly only two-storey and the noise of their huge cars is lost into the atmosphere." At one point, she even suspected that much of Palo Alto's native population had been kidnapped and sent north in boxes. "The serenity is catching – I become conscious of my foot fall. People speak quietly, even the children. It’s beautiful, but surreal. You can’t help wondering if all the loud, crazy people have been rounded up and shipped into San Francisco." But what amazed her most was the way Tom Costello and the Cuil kids spent their $33 million in venture capital. "Lunch is ordered in every single day," she writes. "Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area. "The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves." In attempt to earn her keep as Strategist to the CEO, she warned her college classmate that he was heading down the road to ruin. But he explained that in the Valley, that path is unavoidable. "When I observed this [strawberry and muffin] behaviour first I was appalled and took my CEO friend aside," Carey says. "This was disastrous! His company would never succeed if he wasted money like this and didn’t crack the whip. He laughed. This is the way it works out here. You have to be nice to people." And in the end, even Sarah Carey was sucked into the Valley's swirling vortex of profligacy. "Well, if that was the case, he could be nice to me," she says. "I wasn’t going to fly home in the back of the plane. I summoned up the audacity to ask for business class travel and was granted it without hesitation. Knowing the cost of the ticket was over L2000, which is about $5 million given the current exchange rate, I had to walk around for 15 minutes afterwards chanting 'I’m worth it. I’m worth it. I’m worth it.'" RECOVERED HISTORY: JOHN CLEESE EXPLAINS WHY A COMPAQ PORTABLE COMPUTER IS BETTER THAN A DEAD FISH MAY 2008 AIR FORCE SEEKING CONTROL OVER ALL COMPUTERS NOAH SHACHTMAN WIRED The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is. And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected." The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online. The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity initiative." That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks. "You used to need an army to wage a war," a recent Air Force commercial notes. "Now, all you need is an Internet connection." The Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access," a request for proposals notes, "to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware." This isn't just some computer science study, mind you; "research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities." THE NEW INTERNET & THE POLICE STATE ANNALEE NEWITZ, ALTERNET [Oxford University researcher Jonathan Zittrain] thinks we're seeing the end of the freewheeling Internet and PC era. He calls the technologies of today "tethered" technologies. Tethered technologies are items like iPhones or many brands of DVR -- they're sterile to their owners, who aren't allowed to build software that runs on them. But they're generative to the companies that make them, in the sense that Comcast can update your DVR remotely, or Apple can brick your iPhone remotely if you try to do something naughty to it (like run your own software program on it). In some ways, tethered technologies are worse than plain old sterile technologies. They allow for abuses undreamed of in the IBM mainframe era. For example, iPhone tethering could lead to law enforcement going to Apple and saying, "Please activate the microphone on this iPhone that we know is being carried by a suspect." The device turns into an instant bug, without all the fuss of following the suspect around or installing surveillance crap in her apartment. This isn't idle speculation, by the way. OnStar, the manufacturer of a car emergency system, was asked by law enforcement to activate the mics in certain cars using its system. It refused and went to court. APRIL 2008 ATT EXEC: INTERNET MAY BE OVERLOADED BY 2010 ZDNET An AT&T executive has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010. Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.. . . He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase fifty-fold by 2015 and that AT&T was investing $19bn to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network. Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. "Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon and HD is seven to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today," he said. The AT&T executive pointed out that the Internet only exists thanks to the infrastructure provided by a group of mostly private companies. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet--it is no more ethereal than the highway system. It is not created by an act of God but upgraded and maintained by private investors," he said. SMALLER TOWNS GETTING MUNICIPAL WI-FI BEFORE BIG CITIES MARCH 2008 COURT CASE REVEALS EVEN MICROSOFT EXECS DIDN'T CARE FOR VISTA RANDALL STROSS, NY TIMES - Here's one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let's call him, upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals. Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon's woes, he says drivers are missing in every category - "this is the same across the whole ecosystem." Then there's Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring "Windows Vista Capable" logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: "I personally got burned." His new laptop - logo or no logo - lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine," he says. It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He's Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don't exist? That's Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he's Steven Sinofsky, the company's senior vice president responsible for Windows. Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others. . . MORE FEBRUARY 2008 MICROSOFT'S COVERT TAKEOVER OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS WEBSITE PENTAGON: TREAT INTERNET LIKE AN ENEMY WEAPONS SYSTEM GLOBAL RESEARCH - The Pentagon's Information Operations Roadmap is blunt about the fact that an internet, with the potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals. The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy "weapons system". The 2003 Pentagon document entitled the Information Operation Roadmap was released to the public after a Freedom of Information Request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006. . . From the Information Operation Roadmap. . . "We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to fight the net. DoD's Defense in Depth strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will fight the net as it would a weapons system." It should come as no surprise that the Pentagon would aggressively attack the information highway in their attempt to achieve dominance in information warfare. Donald Rumsfeld's involvement in the Project for a New American Century sheds more light on the need and desire to control information. The Project for a New American Century was founded in 1997 with many members that later became the nucleus of the George W. Bush administration. The list includes: Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz among many other powerful but less well know names. Their stated purpose was to use a hugely expanded U.S. military to project "American global leadership." In September of 2000, PNAC published a now infamous document entitled Rebuilding America's Defences. This document has a very similar theme as the Pentagon's Information Operations Roadmap which was signed by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. From Rebuilding America's Defenses: "It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies... are creating a dynamic that may threaten America's ability to exercise its dominant military power." "Much as control of the high seas - and the protection of international commerce - defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new "international commons" be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the infosphere will find it difficult to exert global political leadership. "Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and "combat" likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, cyber-space," and perhaps the world of microbes. . . Part of the Information Operation Roadmap's plans for the internet are to "ensure the graceful degradation of the network rather than its collapse. . . As far as the Pentagon is concerned the internet is not all bad, after all, it was the Department of Defense through DARPA that gave us the internet in the first place. The internet is useful not only as a business tool but also is excellent for monitoring and tracking users, acclimatizing people to a virtual world, and developing detailed psychological profiles of every user, among many other Pentagon positives. But, one problem with the current internet is the potential for the dissemination of ideas and information not consistent with US government themes and messages, commonly known as free speech. Naturally, since the plan was to completely dominate the infosphere, the internet would have to be adjusted or replaced with an upgraded and even more Pentagon friendly successor.   DECEMBER 2007 MICROSOFT BOMBS WITH VISTA JET BLUE EXPERIMENTING WITH WIFI IN AIR ECONOMIST - This week JetBlue, a low-cost carrier based in New York, launched a free but limited Wi-Fi data service on one of its Airbus A320 aircraft, in partnership with Yahoo!, an internet giant, and Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. Passengers using Wi-Fi-enabled laptops can use Yahoo!'s mail and instant-messaging services; those with Wi-Fi-capable BlackBerrys can get their e-mail. There is no support for voice calls, following the Federal Communications Commission's decision in March that the in-flight use of mobile phones would not be permitted. But in other parts of the world, voice calling will be allowed. Air France's test will begin on an Airbus A318 in the next few weeks. Rather than Wi-Fi, it relies on a tiny mobile-phone base-station installed on the plane. At first it will allow only mobile-data access and text messaging, but after three months the voice service will be switched on, too. "We will give a questionnaire to every passenger to see what they think before we make a decision to equip more aircraft," says Marina Tymen of Air France. "If people say they want data but no calls, that will not be a problem.". . . Passengers will still have to keep their phones switched off during take-off and landing. This is to reduce the risk of interference with aircraft instruments-though the main reason why the use of mobiles has hitherto been banned on aircraft is, in fact, to avoid disruption of networks on the ground as lots of handsets pass overhead at high speed. New systems get around this problem by blocking out ground-based signals within the aircraft, so that phones connect to the on-board "picocell" instead. This is then linked by satellite to ground-based networks. GALLERY: HOW TO DRESS LIKE A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER OCTOBER 2007 ONLY ONE IN THREE COMPUTER GEEKS CORRECTLY IDENTIFY PROBLEM PERSONAL COMPUTER HISTORY NOW HAS ITS OWN PROFESSOR SCIENTIFIC BLOGGING - The Internet, personal computers, word processing and spreadsheets are so embedded in today's society that it's hard to remember that just 35 years ago they didn't exist. Thomas Haigh, assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is among a very small number of computer experts in the world who are also historians, studying the role of technology in broader social change. These new experts are tracing how computers have changed business and society. Researching late 20th century technology has given Haigh the opportunity to talk to many pioneers who developed both computers and the software that powers them. He conducted a series of oral history interviews for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and has written about the history of word processing and the development of databases. MORE COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM http://www.computerhistory.org/ GUIDE TO COMPUTER HISTORY INFO http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Resources/ResourceFile.htm MODEL 100 SOME CALL the Tandy Radio Shack Model 100 the first laptop. Reporters loved it and some people are still using them. Many editions of the Review's predecessor, the DC Gazette, were composed on a Model 100 and the editor's wife wrote her 200 page master's thesis on a Model 200 which had an external disc drive that could only handle three pages per disc. OLD COMPUTERS - The Tandy 100 was actually a computer made in Japan by Kyocera. All the ROM programs were written by Microsoft, and even a few of them were written by Bill Gates himself These programs include a text editor, a telecommunication program, which uses the built-in modem (300 baud), and a rather good version of BASIC. . . The operating system uses 3130 bytes of the 8 KB RAM. So the 8 KB models didn't sell very well. But there was also a 24 kb model. . . The CMOS CPU allows [people] to use the Tandy 100 for 20 hours with only 4 AA batteries. The model 100/102 is still considered and used as an excellent machine, mainly to type texts when you're on the move (you can transfer them to modern computers) and even to send and receive emails ! http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=233 CLUB 100 http://www.club100.org/index.html Thomas Haigh owns a suitcase-sized "portable" computer from the 1980s. His small handheld PDA (shown on screen) has 2,400 times more processing power and 12,500 times more storage than the 1980s machine. Haigh teaches at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM - The world's most powerful computer at Columbia University's Watson Lab in 1954. THE MODEL 100 T-SHIRT FINDS HOT SPOTS (BUT NOT OPEN NETWORKS) SEPTEMBER 2007 IF INTERNET NEUTRALITY IS LOST, THE WEB BECOMES THE NEW CABLE TV AUGUST 2007 DC EXAMINER - Washington wins the award for "most e-mail addicted" city in the country, according to a new study by Dulles-based AOL. Atlanta, New York, San Francisco and Houston rounded out the top five. Of Washingtonians who have a portable e-mail device, 29 percent say they can't live without it. . . The study showed that 58 percent of Washingtonians check mobile e-mail in bed in their pajamas and 58 percent check it in the bathroom. Other locations include church (18 percent), in the car while driving (45 percent)and at the dinner table (47 percent). JULY 2007 RAMPANT SELF PROMOTION THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S claim that this is the tenth anniversary of the blog - as well as some of the critical reaction to the story - led us to our archives to find what we could about our role in this tale. We've tried to avoid the word blog - preferring to call ourselves an online journal - but the phrase has a ubiquity one can't duck. The Wall Street Journal claimed, "We are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: 'I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,' and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word 'weblog.' "The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were "proto-blogs," embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form." While we refer to Barger as the sainted Jorn Barger - he has been repeatedly kind to this journal over the years - the WSJ has got things somewhat mixed up. It is certainly true that Barger blessed or cursed us with the word blog, but whatever you called it, something was already underway, including at the Progressive Review. As evidence, we would quote from the very issue cited by the WSJ: Barger's December 23, 1997 Robot Wisdom WebLog in which he writes: "There's a new issue of the Progressive Review, one of the few leftwing sources that's vigorously anti-Clinton. . . The lead story this week is Judge Lamberth's condemnation of White House lies about the healthcare taskforce in 1993. Its editor Sam Smith also offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow . . ." Barger's contribution was not just one of nomenclature, but of gracing the Web with an eclectic spirit and curiosity, tapping its holistic wonders and happily mixing technology, politics, literature, philosophy and rants. In musical terms, Barger showed us how to swing. A few examples from that last week of December 1997 illustrates the point (the copious links are not included) - This Day in Joyce History. . . On this date in 1891, Dante Riordan left the Joyce household after the Xmas fight depicted in Portrait. In ?1893 the fictional Rudy Bloom was born. In 1916, Portrait was published by Huebsch. In 1931, John S. Joyce died. In ?1953 John Kidd was born. - Two of the most readable computer journalists-- John Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle-- are about to launch a Siskel/Ebert-style weekly debate site, using 'wallet' technology to charge a dime a week. . . - Gorillas make gorgeous representational art. . . - Email from Frankie? TV.Com claims Frank Sinatra will sometimes answer friendly email. The Sinatra Family site is endearingly naif. . . - A couple of x-rated essays at Salon: Susie Bright's very sweet appreciation of the Pam Anderson/ Tommy Lee bootleg sex video - Sixties icon Kerry Thornley, intimate of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jim Garrison and Robert Anton Wilson, and author of the Principia Discordia is in poor health, and fans are encouraged to order a copy of PD straight from the source, autographed on request. - The mass media's undeclared war against the Net is nowhere clearer than in their assaults against Ian Goddard's TWA800 website. CNN has baldly falsified a report that Goddard recanted his site as a hoax. . . - How has the Newt Right so successfully blindsided the progressive Left? A dryish analysis in The Nation argues that we don't lack the funds, but we're spending them with self-defeating unfocus. . . - I am having a fear of modern business practices: A fine culture critic named Tom Frank (not to be confused with Troll Mennie) explores Fast Company, the bastard spawn of Wired and Forbes. . . - Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria (age 20) has been elected Swede of the Year by the evening paper Expressen. Last month it was announced that she's suffering from an eating disorder. . . - Garrison Keillor, quoted on newsgroup misc.activism.progressive: "We're in the clutches of a bunch of folks trying to turn the U.S. into a third world country. Two hundred billionaires, and 260 million poor people. And they haven't done enough damage yet to be beaten." Duncan Riley offers this critique of the WSJ article: |||| According to my history of blogging (still No. 3 on Google BTW, and heavily researched at the time) blogging turned 11 on January 10, the date in which the first credited blogger (according to Wikipedia as well) Justin Hall commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries, although each daily post is linked through an index page. On the journal he writes "Some days, before I go to bed, I think about my day, and how it meshed with my life, and I write a little about what learned me." In February Dave Winer follows up with a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy Project. Winer has often claimed that he was the first blogger, I've long disagreed but whether it was Hall or Winer is a moot point: both were blogging in 1996. . . |||| According to Wikipedia, "A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. 'Blog' can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. At least as early as 1993, the Progressive Review was sending a faxed blog-like substance to our media list as a supplement to the print edition. The earliest mention of an online edition that we could find comes from the August 1994 edition: "If you have an Internet address, send it to us on a postcard or to ssmith@igc.org and we will add you to our Peacenet hotline mailing list. You can also find us at alt.activism and alt.politics.clinton. Sorry, offer not good for networks that carry e-mail charges" There then followed a series of blog-like entries. But none of that really counts because it wasn't on the Worldwide Web. But by June 1995, the Progressive Review was on the web, where only about 20,000 other websites existed worldwide. We announced it like this: "The Review now has a site on the World Wide Web. Pay us a visit at: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/ F Here is some of what you'll find: The Crash of America: How this country's elite ruined the economy, fouled the environment and left Newt Gingrich in charge. From the March 1995 issue. The fully informed jury movement: The right of juries to judge both the law and the fact dates back to the trials of William Penn and Peter Zenger. . ." Still not bloggish, as we initially only posted longer articles. But within a few months - we were promising that "The Progressive Review On-Line Report is found on the Web" and our quasi-blogging had begun. While we weren't the earliest we were certainly in same 'hood and we may hold some sort of record for consistency. We are still brought to you by Turnpike and we are still using Adobe Page Mill to post our non-blog pages. A year or two ago we ran into an Adobe sales rep at Best Buy and mentioned our loyalty, saying that "we still love it." She looked quite cross and said, "That's what a lot of people say." The Web would come to value style over substance in design and conventional loyalty over free thinking in politics. But, inspired by a few like Jorn Borger, we have tried to keep our layout simple and our thoughts complex. In the game of Internet high-low poker, we went low and it doesn't seem to have a hurt a bit. Thanks for sticking around. http://www.duncanriley.com/2007/07/15/wall-street-journal-tries-to-re-write-blogging-history/ http://www.robotwisdom.com/log1997m12.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog JUNE 2007 LET YOUR EYES, NOT YOUR COMPUTER, TELL YOU WHEN YOU'RE OUT OF INK KEN FISHER, ARSTECHNICA - A new study says that on average, more than half of the ink from inkjet cartridges is wasted when users toss them in the garbage. Why is that interesting? According to the study, users are tossing the cartridges when their printers are telling them they're out of ink, not when they necessarily are out of ink. . . Epson's printers were among the highest rated, at more than 80 percent efficiency using single-ink cartridges. . . Printers routinely report that they are low on ink even when they aren't, and in some cases there are still hundreds of pages worth of ink left. The second issue is a familiar one: multi-ink cartridges can be rendered "empty" when only one color runs low. Multi-ink cartridges store three to five colors in a single cartridge. Printing too many photos from the air show will kill your cartridge faster than you can say "blue skies," as dominant colors are used faster than the others. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070618-study-inkjet-printers-are-filthy-lying-thieves.html SCIENCE PUBS REJECT ARTICLES WRITTEN IN WORD 2007 ROB WEIR BLOG - It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good. "Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science." Well, so much for 100% compatibility, eh? . . . More bad news: "Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word." Nature appears to have the same problem: "We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs." Reuse of existing standards is important. When you reuse a standard, you are reusing more than a piece of paper. You are reusing the experience and effort that went into creating and reviewing that standard. You are reusing the experience gathered by those who have already implemented the standard. You are reusing the books and training materials already written for that standard. You are reusing the interfaces for other technologies that have already integrated with that standard or can produce or consume output that conforms to that standard. . . http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/04/math-markup-marked-down.html MAY 2007 WHERE DID THAT @ COME FROM? COMPUTER: HOW STUFF WORKS - What do you call the @ symbol used in e-mail addresses?. . . The most accepted term, even in many other languages, is to call it the at sign. But there are dozens of different words used to describe it. A lot of languages use words that associate the shape of the symbol with some type of animal: - apestaart - Dutch for "monkey's tail" - snabel - Danish for "elephant's trunk" - kissanhnta - Finnish for "cat's tail" - klammeraffe - German for "hanging monkey" - kukac - Hungarian for "worm" - dalphaengi - Korean for "snail" - grisehale - Norwegian for "pig's tail" - sobachka - Russian for "little dog" Before it became the standard symbol for e-mail, the @ symbol was typically used to indicate the cost or weight of something. For example, if you bought five oranges for $1.25 each, you might write it as 5 oranges @ $1.25 ea. It is still used in this manner on a variety of forms and invoices around the world. The actual origin of the symbol is uncertain. It was used by monks making copies of books before the invention of the printing press. Since every word had to be painstakingly transcribed by hand for each copy of a book, the monks that performed the copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of individual strokes per word for common words. So, the word at became a single stroke of the pen as @ instead of three strokes. . . Another origin tale states that the @ symbol was used as an abbreviation for the word amphora, which was the unit of measurement used to determine the amount held by the large terra cotta jars that were used to ship grain, spices and wine. Giorgio Stabile, an Italian scholar, discovered this use of the @ symbol in a letter written in 1536 by a Florentine trader named Francesco Lapi. It seems likely that some industrious trader saw the @ symbol in a book transcribed by monks using the symbol and appropriated it for use as the amphora abbreviation. This would also explain why it became common to use the symbol in relation to quantities of something. http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question507.htm GLOBAL WEB CENSORSHIP INCREASING NEW SCIENTIST - The number of governments that routinely block web sites is increasing, according to the most comprehensive survey of internet filtering yet. Meanwhile, the same study suggests that techniques for blocking undesirable content are growing ever more sophisticated. Previous reports of government internet filtering have been limited to specific countries, such as China, Iran and Cuba, says Rafal Rohozinski, of the Open Net Initiative, which produced the report. . . In its report, the ONI states that governments in at least 25 countries regularly block access to internet sites for political, social or security reasons. It says that Burma, China, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam also filter political content, such as sites belonging to political opposition parties. Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Tunisia and Yemen filter for social reasons: for example by blocking access to pornography, gay and lesbian content and gambling sites. Wider restrictions By comparing their findings to earlier reports, the authors conclude that filtering is currently increasing worldwide. . . Furthermore, the team discovered so-called "event-based" filtering - an upsurge in restrictions during significant political periods such as elections. APRIL 2007 With a tap of your foot, switch your screen when the boss comes in Photo gallery of geek culture Tech support in the Middle Ages LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE INTERNET KIRCHER SOCIETY - When the Mundaneum opened in 1910, its purpose was to collect all of the world's knowledge on neatly organized 3? x 5? index cards. The brainchild of Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine, the vast project eventually totaled 12 million cards, each classified according to the Universal Decimal Classification system developed by Otlet. Le Corbusier was one of many prominent figures enthralled by Otlet's scheme of a "Universal Book." He described it as a panorama of "the whole of human history from its origins," and signed on to design an international "city of the intellect," centered around the Mundaneum. In 1919, the Belgian government turned over 150 rooms in the Palais du Cinquantenaire to serve as a home for the Mundaneum, but five years later revoked the space to use it for a temporary exhibit on the nation's rubber industry. The Mundaneum moved into a series of smaller spaces, and eventually took over a parking garage before closing for good in 1934, the same year that Otlet published his magnum opus Traité de documentation. Though Otlet's name is little remembered today outside the field of information science, he deserves credit for developing many of the ideas behind the modern Internet http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/2007/04/02/mundaneum-the-index-card-internet/ JANUARY 2007 Finally, an ergonomically correct work station NOVEMBER 2006 SYSTEM TO GET AROUND WEB CENSORSHIP INVENTED BBC - A tool has been created capable of circumventing government censorship of the web, according to researchers. The free program has been constructed to let citizens of countries with restricted web access retrieve and display web pages from anywhere. The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab software, called psiphon, will be released on 1 December. . . Psiphon works through social networks. A net user in an uncensored country can download the program to their computer, which transforms it into an access point. They can then give contacts in censored countries a unique web address, login and password, which enables the restricted users to freely browse the web through an encrypted connection to the proxy server. The Citizen Lab said the system provides strong protection against "electronic eavesdropping" because censors or ISPs can only see that end users are connected to another computer and not view the sites that are being visited. It added that using small trusted networks as a delivery mechanism made it more difficult for censors to find and shut down psiphon. However, it also warned potential users that bypassing censorship could violate laws, and urge them to consider potential consequences of doing so. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/technology/6187486.stm OCTOBER 2006 120GB POCKET STORAGE CRAVE - While slightly larger than the usual USBs, the Pexagon Store-It portable USB 2.0 hard drives pack in a lot. The 1.8-inch Store-It comes in a 60GB version for $199, or 20GB for $139, and the 2.5-inch Store-It comes in up to 120GB for $179. They all include an EZ-Touch One Button that instantly backs-up your stuff. The idea is that in age where more and more applications are tied to the Web, you no longer need to carry them with you. Instead of carrying personal laptops for trips, you can take the more portable USB drive and plug it into any laptop at the other end to retrieve your files. The Store-It drives are compatible with both the Mac and PC. http://tinyurl.com/y4x76u SEPTEMBER 2006 COURT RULES CUSTOMS CAN SEARCH YOUR LAPTOP STEVE SEIDENBERG, ABA JOURNAL - In U.S. v. Romm, No. 04-10648, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit ruled that customs officials can seize and search the contents of anyone's laptop computer, even in the absence of a search warrant or probable cause. Some attorneys say the ruling goes too far, invading the privacy of anyone who crosses into the United States. And the ruling may pose special problems for attorneys who need to keep client information confidential when they go on business trips overseas. "What's dangerous about this opinion is that it pushes the line for searches along the border very far toward one end of the constitutional spectrum," says Shaun Martin, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. "It is one thing to turn on your computer in the airport to make sure it is not a bomb. It is another thing for customs officials to turn on your computer and to read everything you ever wrote and to look at everything you ever downloaded." . . . Even worse, the customs official might simply demand the attorney provide the password to the law firm's VPN. Paparelli is aware of at least one instance in which a customs agent asked for an e-mail password so the officer could examine the individual's e-mail correspondence. "Imagine if that were the password of a company employee, and it led the agent into a corporate network database," he says. Perhaps the only way to guarantee protection for confidential data is to leave your laptop at home and connect to your data via a computer that stays overseas. "People should not carry laptops across borders if they don't want their laptops inspected by the government," Paparelli says. http://www.abanet.org/journal/ereport/s15border.html JUNE 2006 GREAT MOMENTS IN THE INTERNET DEBATE SENATOR TED STEVENS [R-Alaska] - There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right. But this service isn't going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what: you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free. Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. . . They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that? Do you know why? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people. . . Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves. . . The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutrality that hits you and me. Link: http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/?entry_id=1512499 PERSONAL SUPERCOMPUTER Only $10,000 for 48GB (Downside: only a 16Mb video card) CYBERSPACE RUNNING OUT OF ROOM LAURIE SULLIVAN, TECH WEB NEWS - The growing popularity of smart phones, IPTV and other gadgets connecting to the Internet is eating up real estate on the net, and soon techies can expect cyberspace to run out of room, according to a Frost & Sullivan analyst briefing. . . By 2012 about 17 billion devices will connect to the Internet, estimates Research firm IDC Corp. Frost & Sullivan's principal analyst for carrier infrastructure Sam Masud agrees. "2012, that's when we estimate the world will be out of IPv4 addresses," he said. "Between 15 and 20 years isn't exaggerating." The IPv4 Internet has room for 4.3 billion addresses. About one-third are already in use, and more than another third are spoken for. IPv6 provides 2^128 possible addresses. Compared with IPv4's 32bits, IPv6's address reads 128 bits long. Imagine the number looking something like this - 360,382,386,120,984,643,363,377,707,131,268,210,929. . . A mandate from the Office of Management and Budget states all federal networks must have the ability to send and receive IPv6 packets by mid 2008. Only 30 percent of the Internet service provider networks, however, will support IPv6 by 2010, and 30 percent of user networks by 2012, according to a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (and the RTI International on IPv6 migration. MAY 2006 I-NET COMPANIES CENSORING MAIL JESSICA E. VASCELLARO WALL STREET JOURNAL - Internet companies are taking more aggressive steps to stop the flow of unwanted e-mail. In a significant number of cases, though, consumers complain that the efforts increasingly are blocking the good along with the bad. Possibly millions of AOL members were temporarily unable to receive some mail from Google Inc.'s Gmail users recently after AOL held up messages from some new Gmail servers over concerns it might be spam. An AOL software update recently resulted in a stoppage of mail that mentioned at least 60 Internet addresses. An update of Verizon Communication Inc.'s spam filters recently sparked widespread complaints from consumers who were unable to receive and send messages. . . Recently, Mark Fleischer, a 24-year-old commercial real estate broker in Tampa, Fla., was waiting for his client's final approval to go ahead and bid on a $175,000 condo after e-mailing him a list of prices for comparable properties. But Yahoo Inc. blocked his client's response telling him to go ahead with the deal, and Fleischer lost the sale. Yahoo says in such cases it aims to help the sender fix the problem by sending him a rejection message with informational links. As much as 20 percent of legitimate bulk commercial e-mail -- which includes mail users sign up to receive as well as online statements and receipts -- gets caught in spam filters, according to Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based market researcher. The best filters, however, make such mistakes for e-mail between acquaintances only about once a month, according to Ferris. . . There are several measures consumers can take if they suspect their e-mails are getting caught in a spam trap. Adding an address to your online address book will often ensure that e-mails from that sender are delivered to you. AOL lets members tune their spam filters to one of four settings. Senders suspecting their e-mails haven't been received should try sending (or forwarding) the message again. They can also request to be added to a "white list" of approved senders, which may require them to disclose their e-mail address and server addresses. http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/business/14521522.htm BLOGGERS WIN AS AD AGENCY DROPS SLAPP SUIT BOSTON GLOBE - A New York ad agency has dropped its lawsuit against a midcoast man who had used an Internet blog to criticize the state's Internet tourism marketing campaign. In a one-page document filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Bangor, Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC dismissed its lawsuit against Lance Dutson of Searsmont. The agency sued Dutson last month for libel, defamation and copyright infringement over his Web log where he posted comments of the tourism office's Web marketing strategies developed by Warren Kremer Paino Advertising. The lawsuit was dropped "without prejudice," meaning it can be filed again. The suit had claimed that Dutson's blog contained defamatory statements that hurt the ad agency's reputation and its business. The agency also said it owned the copyright to certain images Dutson used in his blog and was asking for $150,000 in damages for each work the agency said Dutson infringed. . . Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, said the case serves as a lesson for companies intent on going after bloggers. Media Bloggers Association is a national organization that was providing legal assistance to Dutson. "Our message is simple: Don't mess with the bloggers," Cox said. The dismissal of the suit came the same day that a Maine lawmaker asked the state to suspend its tourism advertising contract with Warren Kremer Paino pending the outcome of the lawsuit. Republican Rep. Stephen Bowen of Rockport said an avalanche of publicity over the suit has the potential to give Maine a black eye nationally. Bowen called it a case of big business and big government versus a little guy who dared to question the effectiveness of Maine's Office of Tourism. APRIL 2006 AOL BLOCKS E-MAILS CRITICAL OF IT [After this press release was sent out Thursday afternoon, AOL stopped blocking email with links to www.DearAOL.com] ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION - AOL is blocking delivery to AOL customers of all emails that include a link to www.DearAOL.com. Today, over 100 people who signed a petition to AOL tried sending messages to their AOL-using friends, and received a bounce-back message informing them that their email "failed permanently." "The fact is, ISPs like AOL commonly make these kinds of arbitrary decisions silently banning huge swathes of legitimate mail on the flimsiest of reasons every day, and no one hears about it," said Danny O'Brien, Activism Coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "AOL's planned Certified Email system would let them profit from this power by offering to charge legitimate mailers to bypass these malfunctioning filters." After reports of undelivered email started rolling in to the DearAOL.com Coalition, Move On co-founder Wes Boyd decided to see for himself if it was true. "I tried to email my brother-in-law about DearAOL.com and AOL sent me a response as if he had disappeared," said Boyd. "But when I sent him an email without the DearAOL.com link, it went right through." http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_04.php#004556 HEALTH PROBLEMS OF THE GEEK LIFESTYLE DR AA, CAROTIDS - I am a currently practicing board-certified Internal Medicine physician in a large rapidly expanding tech-growth community. . . As a doctor in this area over the last few years, I have discovered some unique health problems associated with this population. . . I affectionately call it the "geek lifestyle" because of my previous life of programming and web design. . . I have noticed several repeating patterns in this geek lifestyle population. . . 1. Horrible sleep hygiene, insomnia and altered sleep patterns is one of the most common complaints to my office. Frequently the complaint is of light sleep or of multiple awakening throughout the night. Although this can be a symptom of depression, this is typically caused by poor sleep habits. It typically starts with somebody waking up in the middle of the night and turning on the laptop or TV. This begins to happen more and more frequently until the patient starts to worry about waking up as soon as they go to bed at night. This stress makes the sleep worse and worse until they finally come to see me. The bed should only be used for two things - sex and sleep. The fix is typically easy if the habit is not too ingrained. The bed should only be used for two things-sex and sleep. . . Headaches: Poor screen position, too small font, screen too bright/too dark, poor sitting posture are all commonly reported causes of chronic headache. Recurrent headaches are a very frequent complaint among heavy computer users. . . Often when I tell my patients that I suspect it is their work environment, they come back and tell me how they fixed it. Poor screen position, too small font, screen too bright/too dark, poor sitting posture are all commonly reported causes of chronic headache. When in doubt, I just tell them to trade offices for a couple of days. If they feel better in the other office, then it suggests that it is related to their personal work environment. . . 3. Back pain is a frequent complaint in my office as well. In the general patient population, chronic back pain is often a sign of depression; however, in the geek this is more frequently due to work conditions or to overuse. Poor posture, incorrectly sized chair, or poorly positioned monitors are common culprits. . . 4. Poor Attention Span I am always amazed at the number of people that mention to me that their attention span is poor. Frequently they will wonder if they have ADD. Sometimes they will even complain about the inability to stay awake during long meetings or stay focuses on non-computer tasks. The typical geek trains their brain to be heavily focused while multitasking day after day. Is it surprising that this same brain does not do well when forced to isolate down to one task? . . . In fact, if I question someone about their attention span, they never, ever have problems staying focused on their computer work. If someone is in the middle of some exciting programming, the focus is always there. Therefore, it is not just a generic "attention" problem. . . http://www.carotids.com/lifestyle/health-problems-related-to-the-geek-lifestyle/ FEBRUARY 2006 TELECOMS, CABLE OPERATORS OUT TO SEIZE INTERNET JEFF CHESTER, NATION - The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out. Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received. To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester JANUARY 2006 TELECOMS PLAN TO RIG INTERNET TO THEIR ADVANTAGE CHRISTOPHER STERN, WASHINGTON POST - The nation's largest telephone companies have a new business plan, and if it comes to pass you may one day discover that Yahoo suddenly responds much faster to your inquiries, overriding your affinity for Google. Or that Amazon's Web site seems sluggish compared with eBay's. The changes may sound subtle, but make no mistake: The telecommunications companies' proposals have the potential, within just a few years, to alter the flow of commerce and information -- and your personal experience -- on the Internet. For the first time, the companies that own the equipment that delivers the Internet to your office, cubicle, den and dorm room could, for a price, give one company priority on their networks over another. This represents a break with the commercial meritocracy that has ruled the Internet until now. We've come to expect that the people who own the phone and cable lines remain "neutral," doing nothing to influence the content on your computer screen. And may the best Web site win. For more than a year, public interest groups, including the Consumer Federation and Consumers Union, have been lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to write the concept called "network neutrality" into law and regulation. Google and Yahoo have joined their lobbying efforts. And online retailers, Internet travel services, news media and hundreds of other companies that do business on the Web also have a lot at stake. Meanwhile, on the other side, companies like AT&T, Verizon and Bell South are lobbying just as hard, saying that they need to find new ways to pay for the expense of building faster, better communication networks. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/21/AR2006012100094.html DECEMBER 2005 CENSORSHIP GROWING ON INTERNET WAYNE MADSEN REPORT - Internet censorship. It did not happen overnight but slowly came to America's shores from testing grounds in China and the Middle East. Progressive and investigative journalist web site administrators are beginning to talk to each other about it, e-mail users are beginning to understand why their e-mail is being disrupted by it, major search engines appear to be complying with it, and the low to equal signal-to-noise ratio of legitimate e-mail and spam appears to be perpetuated by it. . . Take for example of what recently occurred when two journalists were taking on the phone about a story that appeared on Google News. The story was about a Christian fundamentalist move in Congress to use U.S. military force in Sudan to end genocide in Darfur. The story appeared on the English Google News site in Qatar. But the very same Google News site when accessed simultaneously in Washington, DC failed to show the article. This censorship is accomplished by geo-location filtering: the restriction or modifying of web content based on the geographical region of the user. In addition to countries, such filtering can now be implemented for states, cities, and even individual IP addresses. . . News reports on CIA prisoner flights and secret prisons are disappearing from Google and other search engines like Alltheweb as fast as they appear. Here now, gone tomorrow is the name of the game. Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks. America On Line is the most egregious is stifling Internet freedom. A former AOL employee noted how AOL and other Internet Service Providers cooperate with the Bush administration in censoring email. The Patriot Act gave federal agencies the power to review information to the packet level and AOL was directed by agencies like the FBI to do more than sniff the subject line. The AOL term of service has gradually been expanded to grant AOL virtually universal power regarding information. Many AOL users are likely unaware of the elastic clause, which says they will be bound by the current TOS and any TOS revisions which AOL may elect at any time in the future. Essentially, AOL users once agreed to allow the censorship and non-delivery of their email. Microsoft has similar requirements for Hotmail as do Yahoo and Google for their respective e-mail services. There are also many cases of Google's search engine failing to list and link to certain information. According to a number of web site administrators who carry anti-Bush political content, this situation has become more pronounced in the last month. In addition, many web site administrators are reporting a dramatic drop-off in hits to their sites, according to their web statistic analyzers. http://waynemadsenreport.com/ OCTOBER 2005. . . PHILADELPHIA LAUNCHES BIGGEST URBAN WIFI ARSHAD MOHAMMED WASHINGTON POST - Philadelphia announced a plan to build the biggest municipal wireless Internet system in the nation, the latest of a growing number of cities to treat high-speed Web access as a basic municipal service like water, electricity and trash collection. Philadelphia said Atlanta-based EarthLink Inc. will fund, build and manage the 135-square-mile network, which will offer low-income residents service for as little as about $10 a month and could threaten the profits of telephone and cable companies. "Increasingly, city officials view broadband in the 21st century the same way they viewed electricity 100 years ago and telephone service 50 years ago. It's falling into the category of a necessary and essential social service," said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a nonprofit group that favors the development of municipal wireless. "Cities see this as a way to spur economic growth: on the one hand to put tools in the hands of the underprivileged and give them a leg up, and on the other to provide incentives to small businesses to locate in these cities and to expand their operations," Scott said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR2005100401738.html JUNE 20005 . . . BRAZIL GOES OPEN SOURCE; PRESIDENT WON'T EVEN TALK TO BILL GATES http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4602325.stm BBC - In Brazil's Ministry for Cities, staff are busily at work. The scene is much like any other modern office: an open-plan work space crammed with desks, telephones and computers. But there's one big difference. The word 'Microsoft' is nowhere in sight. Instead, computers here now use the Linux operating system. It has many similar functions to Microsoft's Windows - but unlike Windows, it is available for free. Increasingly, Brazil's government ministries and state-run enterprises are abandoning Windows in favor of 'open-source' or 'free' software, like Linux. "The number one reason for this change is economic," says Sergio Amadeu, who runs the government's National Institute for Information Technology. . . Overall, the government reckons it could save around $120m a year by switching from Windows to open-source alternatives. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is studying a draft decree which, if approved, would make the change compulsory for federal departments. . . For Lula, free software is a development issue On the face of it, Bill Gates does not have much to worry about. More than 90% of the world's personal computers still use the Windows operating system. But there are signs of nerves. In January, Mr Gates unsuccessfully sought a private meeting with President Lula at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. MAY 2005. . . COFFEE SHOP TURNS OFF WI-FI ON WEEKENDS http://wifinetnews.com/archives/005325.html GLENN FLEISHMAN, WI-FI NET NEWS - It's too early to say whether it's a trend, but Victrola Coffee & Art in Seattle shuts down its free wi-fi on Saturday and Sunday: I spoke to co-owner and co-founder Jen Strongin today after a colleague tipped me to the fact that this lovely, single-shop coffee establishment had decided to experiment with taking back its culture by turning off the wi-fi juice on weekends. Strongin said that the five-year-old cafe added free wi-fi when it seemed their customers wanted it a couple of years ago. It initially brought in more people, she said, but over the past year "we noticed a significant change in the environment of the cafe." Before wi-fi, "people talked to each other, strangers met each other," she said. Solitary activities might involve reading and writing, but it was part of the milieu. "Those people co-existed with people having conversations," said Strongin. But "over the past year it seems that nobody talks to each other any more," she said. On the weekends, 80 to 90 percent of tables and chairs are taken up by people using computers. Many laptop users occupy two or more seats by themselves, as well. . . Worse than just the sheer number of laptop users, Strongin noted, is that many of these patrons will camp six to eight hours - and not buy anything. This seemed astounding to me, but she said that it was typical, not unusual. APRIL 2005 MINNEAPOLIS TO GO WIRELESS http://www.startribune.com/stories/789/5342733.html STEVE ALEXANDER, STAR TRIBUNE - Minneapolis is about to become an unwired city, creating a universal wireless Internet access network available to every citizen, visitor, business and municipal facility within city limits. The city will unveil a request for a proposal for a privately owned, $15 million to $20 million citywide wireless and fiber-optic network. . . The citywide wireless network is necessary to improve government communications by linking every city building, police car and housing inspector to the city's databases, city officials say. But the network also would be available to every individual and business in the city. Consumers would be able to buy broadband access of 1 million to 3 million bits per second for $18 to $24 a month -- a bit slower than wired cable modem service but about half the price. The network also is expected to create an economic incentive for businesses to locate in Minneapolis. "If someone gets off a plane at the airport and signs up for Minneapolis Internet service, they can sign on with one password anywhere in the city," said Bill Beck, director for business development in the city of Minneapolis' computer operations NOVEMBER 2004 FORMER NYT EDITOR HOWELL RAINES ON THE INTERNET: Perhaps for the first time since invention of the printing press, a new information technology has become more efficient at spreading disinformation than knowledge. MARCH 2004 WORD OF THE DAY: WARDRIVING PATRICK S. RYAN, VIRGINIA JOURNAL OF LAW AND TECHNOLOGY - Abstract: A wardriver gets in her car and drives around a given area. Using her laptop, freely available software, a standard Wi-Fi card, and a GPS device, she logs the status and location of wireless networks. The computer generates a file and records networks that are open and networks that are closed. Once the data is collected, the wardriver may denote an open network by using chalk to mark a sign on a building, called "warchalking," or she may record the location on a digital map and publish it on the Internet. This article will explain the roots of the term "wardriving," and the cultural phenomenon of the 1983 Hollywood movie WarGames that gave birth to the concept more than 20 years ago. Moreover, this article will show that the press has often confused wardriving with computer crimes involving trespass and illegal access. There are inconspicuous ethical shades to wardriving that are poorly understood, and to date, no academic literature has analyzed the legality of the activity. This article will argue that the act of wardriving itself is quite innocuous, legal, and can even be quite beneficial to society. It will also highlight the need for wardrivers - and for anyone accessing open networks - to help establish and adhere to strict ethical guidelines. Such guidelines are available in various proposal-stage forms, and this article will review these ethics within the context of a larger movement among hackers to develop a coherent ethical code. Keywords: Wardriving, war driving, wardialing, phreaking, wargames, war games, hacker, wifi, wi-fi, warchalking, wireless hacking, wireless manifesto, kevin mitnick SENATORS PLAN NEW ASSAULT ON FILE SHARERS WIRED - Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer technology on multiple fronts. A draft bill obtained by Wired News, recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee, would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof. The bill also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing. In addition, on Thursday, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) introduced a bill that would allow the Justice Department to pursue civil cases against file sharers, again making it easier for law enforcement to punish people trading copyright music over peer-to-peer networks. They dubbed the bill "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004," or the Pirate Act. . . So far in 2004, Leahy has received $178,000 in campaign contributions from the entertainment industries -- the second-biggest source of donations to Leahy behind lawyers. Hatch has received $152,360. All these efforts by Congress to impose severe penalties are misguided, said P2P United Executive Director Adam Eisgrau. "As the 40 percent increase in downloads over the last year makes alarmingly clear, like it or not file sharing is likely to (continue) on a massive scale no matter how many suits are brought and what the fine print of copyright or criminal law says," Eisgrau said. "Second, putting a tiny percentage of tens of millions of American file sharers behind bars or in the poorhouse won't put one new dime in the deserving pockets of artists and other copyright owners." FEBRUARY 2004 INSIDE TECH SUPPORT SALON - Several people confess that they've never done more with a computer than check their e-mail. Others admit they haven't even gotten that far. An impromptu contest develops to see exactly who knows the least. There are lots of contenders. I'm listening to them battle for the crown of incompetence as I'm dealt a new hand of cards when a frightening thought occurs to me. Our clueless bunch is now part of the technical-support staff for one of the world's top three computer manufacturers, and in seven days we're going to be taking your calls... A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else... Ted is someone I don't speak to. Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers' problems. Erase everything on the computer's hard drive and start over from scratch. While this can be effective for solving all sorts of software troubles, it's like amputating someone's leg to fix an ingrown toenail. The solution is usually worse than the problem. Most times Ted doesn't actually follow through with his plan. The entire strategy is just a bluff. Most people will balk at the proposition of losing everything and decide they can live with whatever problem they've called to complain about. At the very least they'll decide to hang up, back up their data, and call back -- at which point they'll become someone else's problem. CYBER NOTES WHITNEY PASTOREK, VILLAGE VOICE - They have created a new world order. My society, that of the media-driven entertainment/publishing/music-business-involved/obsessed mid-to-late twenty-something, is being divided into a caste system that I believe in years to come will have the power to control virtually every facet of off-line life. In order of fabulosity, the Blogging Caste System: * Bloggers who live in Williamsburg and work at Condé Nast/are in a band * Bloggers who live in Williamsburg and know someone who works at Condé Nast/date someone in a band * Bloggers who live elsewhere in Brooklyn but can get to Williamsburg easily, ideally by bicycle * Bloggers in general (residents of other parts of the country are fine, so long as those parts are Chicago, L.A., Seattle, or Manhattan) * Non-bloggers who work at Condé Nast/are in a band * Non-bloggers who went to high school with someone who runs a top-tier blog * Non-bloggers who live in Queens and operate barely solvent literary magazines, the literary magazine being, as we all know, the blog of 2000, the old black, so over, etc. This last group will eventually be sent to some sort of work camp where they will be forced to silk-screen T-shirts and knit legwarmers out in the hot sun all day.... Did I mention that blogs are ruining my life? I am no longer getting work done. I am not sleeping enough or eating enough or editing my barely solvent literary magazine, because the aforementioned issues have made it a social imperative that I check up on all the goddamn blogs every single day (and make comments) so that people know I care about their lives/band/Condé Nast. Additionally, I must Google my own name on a weekly basis in search of mentions on blogs, in order to know What People Think About Me. This is a dark, paranoid enterprise, capable of destroying even the staunchest feelings of self-confidence if the search should turn up evidence that, say, someone who actually showed up at my literary event did not enjoy it, or that someone has posted incriminating pictures of me, pictures obviously taken by a cell phone when I wasn't looking... Listen. My name is Whitney Pastorek, and I do not have a blog. I am not on Friendster, I do not live in Williamsburg, and I do not think Death Cab for Cutie is a particularly great band. But I exist. I am a good person, a good friend, and my thoughts and opinions have weight and merit. The bloggers do not control me they only control each other and massive amounts of bandwidth, which isn't even a real thing, just something made up by web-hosting companies to charge more! People! If you find yourself on the lower levels of the B.C.S., join with me in saying NO! NO to letting them diminish our self-worth! NO to letting them drag us out to flash mobs! Turn your faces to the sun! Stand and fight! THE MICROSOFT KILLERS AZEEM AZHAR, PROSPECT, UK - The open source movement eschews proprietary controls and its software is usually produced not by firms, but by networks of volunteers who look after different pieces of an application. For this reason it has, until recently, been regarded as anti-corporate-associated with hackers' bedrooms and academia, an eccentric corner of the market. Today, open source has grown up and has an uncontested momentum in several key areas of the software business. Linux, an operating system that competes in Microsoft's dominant market, has gained a beachhead in many companies. Oracle's dominance in databases is coming under threat from MySQL, whose software was downloaded over the internet around 10m times last year. And nearly 70 per cent of the computers that serve web pages run Apache, an open source application. Almost three quarters of large US companies intend to increase their use of open source technologies, according to Forrester Research. In its February 2003 filing to the Securities and Exchange commission, which regulates stock markets in the US, Microsoft admitted that open source posed a significant challenge to its business model. And it is starting to fight back. Microsoft's original attack on Linux concerned security. But that has backfired. The growth in internet viruses that hop from Microsoft server to Microsoft server has demonstrated that a product with a single architect, like Windows, is more vulnerable than one, like Linux, with many. The open source philosophy means that although the code is open to malicious actors, it is also accessible to more friendly eyes, which can track down and resolve problems quickly. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's aggressive chief executive, once called open source a "cancer." But other blue chips have rallied to the Linux flag. Three years ago IBM announced it was investing $1bn in consulting and support services for Linux-based systems. The greatest concern large companies have about software is support: who will fix problems when they arise? IBM's decision to offer support contracts has calmed those fears, and partly for that reason key components of the New York stock exchange now run on Linux. In a few years, Linux-based computers will handle many of our telephone calls. The new range of telecoms systems from Nokia, the mobile telephone company, will run Linux. And now governments are questioning the need to stretch treasuries to finance proprietary software when free versions are available. When the Munich city government hinted it would dump Microsoft in favour of Linux, Ballmer cut short a holiday to petition the mayor. The intervention was in vain. Last May the city announced that it would install open source software on its 14,000 machines. The Microsoft contract, for licences, training and support, was initially worth $36.7m according to USA Today. The winning bid from IBM and the German Linux group Suse was actually $39.5m, higher than Microsoft's. But Microsoft's strategy of introducing expensive upgrades every few years adds a financial risk for any purchaser. "On strategic issues, it was clearly open source," says Harry Maack, who advised the city. BILL GATES PROPOSES CHARGING FOR E-MAIL JANIS MARA, INTERNET NEWS - Yahoo! and Microsoft are giving serious thought to the idea of e-mail "postage" that costs senders a small fee, company officials said. The admissions come in the wake of Microsoft founder Bill Gates' January comments in Davos, Switzerland suggesting the spam problem will be defeated by a number of different solutions, but "in the long run, the monetary method will be dominant." The monetary approach, known as "sender pays," has different variations and is currently being used by several anti-spam companies, including IronPort and Vanquish. The latest company getting buzz for advocating such an approach is a Silicon Valley start-up called Goodmail. Under Goodmail's model, bulk e-mail senders pay outright for "postage" that guarantees their e-mail will be delivered to participating ISPs, who are paid for accepting the mail. Understandably, ISPs are interested in exploring this idea, as it helps them defray the soaring costs of handling e-mail. Microsoft hasn't committed to any particular company's approach, a spokesman said, "We continue to look at these and other innovative approaches that help change the economic model for sending spam." Its partner in an anti-spam coalition, Yahoo!, is also investigating a number of different options, including the solution Goodmail offers, the start-up's CEO confirmed. JANUARY 2004 ANICK JESDANUN, ASSOCIATED PRESS - Americans who use the Internet consider it at least as important as newspapers and books, even as they've become more skeptical of what they find online, a UCLA survey finds. . . Only 53 percent of users believe most or all of what they read online, down from 58 percent a year earlier, according to the survey, which was released Friday by the Center for Communication Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Further, nearly a quarter of those who expressed concern about using credit cards over the Internet say nothing can ease their fears. Among its findings: - About 61 percent of Internet users find the Net "very" or "extremely" important as an information source, compared with 60 percent for books and 58 percent for newspapers - within the margin for error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. By comparison, 50 percent of the Internet users find television important, 40 percent think that of radio and 29 percent of magazines. . . -Internet users are spending more time online, averaging 11 hours per week, up by more than an hour from a year earlier. - Nearly 30 percent of Americans do not use the Net, most commonly because they don't have a computer or one good enough. But nearly half the nonusers say they are likely to go online within a year. - The Internet may be cutting into television time, with Internet users watching 11 hours per week of TV, or one hour less than in 2001. Internet users also average 5 hours less of TV each week than nonusers. THOMAS C GREENE, REGISTER, UK - Care to register a .mil Web site of your own for free? The DoD has gone out of its way to make it a snap. An unbelievably badly-protected admin interface welcomes you to register whatever domain you please (http://Rotten.mil anyone?), or edit anything they've already got. The interface is so ludicrously unprotected that it's been cached by Google and fails to mention that you must be authorized to muck about with it. Incredibly, default passwords are cheerfully provided on the page. Following an anonymous tip from an observant Reg reader, we've encountered the page in question in the Google cache, and after a bit of our own poking about have also discovered an equally unprotected (and Google-cached) admin interface encouraging us to add a new user, like ourselves, say, which requires no authentication. All you have to do is find that page and you can set yourself up with a user account, manage your new .mil Web site, fiddle about with other people's .mil Web sites, and generally make an incredible nuisance of yourself. We are, of course, straining against every natural, journalistic impulse in our beings by neglecting to mention any useful search strings with which to find it. . . Ironically, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently ordered DoD to purge military Web sites of information that might benefit evildoers. That's all well and good, but it might behoove the DoD to stop offering them admin privileges first. INTERNET FANATICS ARE NOT GEEKS REUTERS - The typical Internet user - far from being a geek - shuns television and actively socializes with friends, a study on surfing habits says. The findings of the first World Internet Project report present an image of the average Netizen that contrasts with the stereotype of the loner geek who spends hours of his free time on the Internet and rarely engages with the real world. Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added. SPAM FILTERS THE GOOD WITH THE BAD MICHAELL DELIO, WIRED - Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail. Refrain from describing anything or anybody as "free." Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like "Hello," and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line. Oh, and don't ever use the word opt, particularly in conjunction with the words "in" or "out." These are fast becoming the new rules of e-mail communication, enforced not by prim-faced etiquette experts but by spam filters that scrutinize the contents of incoming messages for "spammy" words and shuttle suspects off to junk-mail holding tanks or directly into the abyss of the deleted items folder. As spam continues to proliferate wildly -- within a week after the anti-spam Can-Spam act went into effect on Jan. 1, unsolicited commercial e-mail increased by almost 7 percent, according to spam-filtering vendor MX Logic -- some individual users, businesses and ISPs feel forced to filter for spam more aggressively. And while vigorous filtering will purge spam from in boxes, it can also act as an unintended censor by suppressing any mention of the typical spam themes -- and even references to spam itself -- in legitimate personal e-mails. . . America Online's public relations department recently sent out a press announcement about the company's spam-blocking efforts, and was dismayed to discover that many reporters' e-mail filters tagged the release as spam. AOL media reps had to send out another mailing asking reporters to visit the company's corporate web site to read the release. DECEMBER 2003 SPAM POLICE CONFINING THE INTERNET BUSINESS WEEK - Paul Prentice was under siege. All through last winter and spring, the manager of security and directory services at Steelcase Inc. was frantically fighting the rising tide of spam pouring into the Grand Rapids (Mich.) office-furniture company. At the same time, he was fielding a flood of angry e-mail from executives and workers. They all begged him to get spam under control. Like many of his colleagues throughout the corporate world, Prentice hired a spam-filtering company, in his case, Postini Inc., to stem the flow. Spam is down to a trickle in Grand Rapids these days. But what began as a campaign against junk mail has evolved into a company-wide revamp of Internet communications. The filtering system that scrutinizes each piece of mail, Prentice quickly saw, can handle lots of other jobs. Now he's broadening its mandate. The system is searching mail for competitive leaks, ferreting out inappropriate attachments