From steve at advocate.net Mon Jan 1 17:16:34 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 17:16:34 -0800 Subject: SCN: Free ISP Message-ID: <3A50BB72.21577.172AD56@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================= (Laurie J. Flynn, NY Times)---It is official: the era of unlimited free Internet service is over, an apparent victim of its own popularity. The announcement last week that Bluelight.com would limit the number of hours subscribers could spend on its site signaled the end of an era, albeit a short one even by Internet standards. Over the last couple of years, dozens of companies announced unlimited Internet access for no charge, the only catch being the barrage of advertising that subscribers were forced to endure. But like Juno Online Services and NetZero before it, Bluelight announced that it could no longer support the strain that active users were putting on its network, with a fraction of its subscribers accounting for the large majority of its traffic. Just the week before Bluelight.com's move, NetZero, the market leader, announced that it would start charging subscribers $9.95 after they reached 40 hours in a given month, saying that 12 percent of its subscribers were accounting for half of its telecommunications expenses. And earlier this year, Juno announced a tiered pricing program, whereby customers who pay $9.95 a month receive better service, get more reliable connections and view fewer ads. "The pure free-I.S.P.-for-everyone experiment is over," said Mark Goldstein, chief executive and president of Bluelight, a privately held company that is majority-owned by the Kmart Corporation. Mr. Goldstein said the timing of Bluelight's announcement was not coincidental: his company was trying to head off a migration of NetZero's heaviest customers to Bluelight's free service. Bluelight.com, he said, did not want them; nor did it want the heavy users it already had. "It's like having a late-night club with all the drunks - they're the ones you're going to kick out of the bar," Mr. Goldstein said. "They make the worst customers." Mr. Goldstein said that some Bluelight subscribers had been using the service to run their businesses, requiring nearly constant access. NetZero and Juno have reported the same behavior. But while disproportionately active users may have struck the final blow to the free I.S.P. movement, the real culprit was the dismal climate for online advertising. A year ago, when free Internet service providers were just beginning their services, advertising was abundant - as was venture financing. Today, there is relatively little of either one for many dot-coms. Last month, Spinway, a San Francisco-based company that provided the underlying technology for Bluelight and free online services from Barnes & Noble and Costco, announced that it could not raise any more capital and was going out of business, handing many of its assets over to Bluelight, its largest customer. That announcement followed shortly after the demise of 1stUp, a Spinway competitor owned by CMGI, the Net holding company. 1stUp, based in San Francisco, was the technology behind free service from Alta Vista and Excite at Home's FreeLane, along with dozens of smaller niche services, like Gay .com, Senior.com and Afronet.com. Shortly after 1stUp's announcement, Alta Vista said that it was canceling its free service; other 1stUp partners are still hoping to find a home someplace else. Back in July, Juno gobbled up two competitors, Freewwweb and WorldSpy, both of which declared bankruptcy and then began referring subscribers to Juno's site. That leaves NetZero and Juno still standing as the industry leaders, each with 3.7 million active users, along with a handful of miscellaneous Web retailers still hoping that sales of merchandise will make up for their free Internet services. But even the two remaining major free providers are walking on rather thin ice these days: like many Internet stocks, shares of both Juno and NetZero, which are embroiled in patent lawsuits against each other over the way ads are displayed on computer screens, have been pummeled in recent weeks. Shares of Juno, which traded at $41.63 in January, closed under a dollar last week. NetZero was also under a dollar, down from a 52-week high of $36.38. Yet rather than disappear entirely, analysts predict that free I.S.P. services are likely to continue in some form, for those customers who do not overuse them. Many analysts say that tiered pricing programs like those announced by Juno and NetZero are the future, and the challenge now is to convert users of the free service into paying customers. Not that long ago, Internet customers bought service by the minute, much like long-distance telephone service - for upward of $100 a month for active users. But by the late 1990's, most Internet providers in the United States had modified their business models, switching to flat monthly fees in an effort to gain more revenue from advertisers and electronic commerce and less from subscriptions. It appeared for some players that eliminating the subscription fee altogether was simply the next step. Adding it back now appears to be yet another one. But it could be that major fee-based services like America Online, the Microsoft Network and CompuServe will end up as biggest beneficiaries of the free-I.S.P. shakeout. All three already offer tiered service, with limited plans priced as low as at $9.95. As more active users are removed from free services, analysts say, they may migrate to those more established names rather than pay the amount to a relative newcomer who might not offer the same level of service. NetZero, however, has considerable brand recognition these days, the result of an advertising blitz that includes television spots during N.B.A. games, and the company's chairman and chief executive, Mark R. Goldston, says the company is signing up new subscribers at a record pace. Bluelight, which did not announce tiered pricing but rather that it would remove heavy users entirely, is in a category of its own. Nine out of 10 of its subscribers got their free Bluelight.com CD-ROM starter kit at a Kmart store, meaning that most of its customers are already Kmart shoppers and thus potential online customers. "E- tailing is just another way for a retailer like Kmart to reach its customers," Mr. Goldstein said, rather than a service intended to exist independently. In the meantime, those start-ups that have survived this far are simply relieved to still be standing, amid the rubble of their competitors. "It started out as a consolidation and evolved into a shakeout," Mr. Goldston said. "We didn't want to be the last man standing - we wanted to be the victor." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From sharma at aa.net Tue Jan 2 04:26:56 2001 From: sharma at aa.net (Sharma) Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 04:26:56 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: The "HELLO!" spam. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You should know that if you call an 800#, they will get a log of hour phone #, even if you have blocked caller id as it is overridden by 800#s. -s On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, J. Johnson wrote: > I don't know if anyone noticed, but this 33 KB "HELLO!" spam that hit the > 'scn' list today has both an 800 number (which has to cost someone money), > and a _local_ 206 number. For anyone that has ever felt frustrated at the > spammers being out of reach--not this time!! This could be a wonderful > opportunity to dig out this particular jerk, and I encourage anyone > interested to investigate. > > The numbers are: > 800-708-7424, access code 6100 or 2001. > 206-222-2826 > > I have a copy of the spam if you need it. > > === JJ ================================================================= > > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * > . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: > majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: > unsubscribe scn > ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== > * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at groupworks.org Tue Jan 2 14:06:17 2001 From: steve at groupworks.org (Steve Guest) Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 14:06:17 -0800 Subject: SCN: Envelope Stuffing Party Message-ID: <005001c07508$3d608de0$0100a8c0@dellxpsr350> Hi Folks Mel and I would like to wish you all a wonderful new year (or even new millennium) and we hope that you enjoyed celebrating whatever and however you felt was appropriate in the last few days of 2000. We have an urgent need for your help. SCN has a fundraising letter that it needs sent out very soon. To get this done, we need some envelope stuffing assistance. Some people volunteered to help us get the bulk of the work done yesterday, but we did not get it all finished. We would like to ask for volunteers to come and help finish the task. If you are free tomorrow evening, Wednesday January 3rd,we are hosting the work party at our home. We can send directions, provide some assistance with local transport (to and from Factoria, Bellevue Transit, South Bellevue Park and Rides and maybe even further), provide snacks and drinks and even offer a movie for those that would like to be entertained while they work. Please reply by calling 425 653 7353 or emailing steve at groupworks.org. Please help - we can use as many volunteers as we can get! The more the merrier! Thanks Steve and Mel -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- Melissa & Steve Guest (425) 653 7353 Presidents of Seattle Community Network http://www.scn.org "Supporting People and Communities with Free Internet Services" * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From femme2 at scn.org Tue Jan 2 15:10:11 2001 From: femme2 at scn.org (Lorraine Pozzi) Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 15:10:11 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Re: More SCNA Work (maybe) In-Reply-To: <005001c07508$3d608de0$0100a8c0@dellxpsr350> Message-ID: As you may all know, on Saturday the 8th, the Parks Dept and the City's Dept of Information Technology will be hosting a forum at Garfield Community Center (23rd & E. Cherry) from 9:00 to noon. Purpose: to keep the many computer centers "on track." As many of you know, I have bitched and moaned about the computer centers being non-functional much of the time, and in some (such as Miller) there was no programming because the computers were so unreliable. The room was locked up 99.44% of the time, with the equipment simply becoming obsolete. The forum will be looking for ideas. I think it would be a good place for SCNA to emphasize its role as providing service to the community. I've been offering an open lab for seniors at Miller (and formerly at Garfield, as well) and it has been quite an experience. Watching a woman in her 90's battling a man twice her size and a couple of decades younger for a functioning computer is as fun as pro wrestling. Sorry I can't make it to the envelope stuffing - hope you have a great turnout. See you Saturday at Garfield. Lorraine femme2 at scn.org * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From be718 at scn.org Tue Jan 2 15:43:25 2001 From: be718 at scn.org (Rich Littleton) Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 15:43:25 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Re: More SCNA Work (maybe) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Lorraine, Good info! However, my calendar (and my fingers) indicate that the 8th of January is a Monday. Perhaps you meant, Saturday the _6th_. Later, Rich ______________________________________________________________________ On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Lorraine Pozzi wrote: > > As you may all know, on Saturday the 8th, the Parks Dept and > the City's Dept of Information Technology will be hosting a > forum at Garfield Community Center (23rd & E. Cherry) from > 9:00 to noon. Purpose: to keep the many computer centers > "on track." As many of you know, I have bitched and moaned > about the computer centers being non-functional much of the > time, and in some (such as Miller) there was no programming > because the computers were so unreliable. The room was locked > up 99.44% of the time, with the equipment simply becoming > obsolete. > > The forum will be looking for ideas. I think it would be a good > place for SCNA to emphasize its role as providing service to the > community. > > I've been offering an open lab for seniors at Miller (and > formerly at Garfield, as well) and it has been quite an > experience. Watching a woman in her 90's battling a man > twice her size and a couple of decades younger for a > functioning computer is as fun as pro wrestling. > > Sorry I can't make it to the envelope stuffing - hope you > have a great turnout. > > See you Saturday at Garfield. > > Lorraine > femme2 at scn.org > > > > > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * > . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: > majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: > unsubscribe scn > ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== > * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From femme2 at scn.org Tue Jan 2 17:55:53 2001 From: femme2 at scn.org (Lorraine Pozzi) Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 17:55:53 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Re: More SCNA Work (maybe) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rich - you are right. It IS Saturday the 6th. Sorry for the confusion. LP On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Rich Littleton wrote: > > Lorraine, > > Good info! However, my calendar (and my fingers) indicate that > the 8th of January is a Monday. Perhaps you meant, Saturday the _6th_. > > Later, > > Rich > > ______________________________________________________________________ > > > On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Lorraine Pozzi wrote: > > > > > As you may all know, on Saturday the 8th, the Parks Dept and > > the City's Dept of Information Technology will be hosting a > > forum at Garfield Community Center (23rd & E. Cherry) from > > 9:00 to noon. Purpose: to keep the many computer centers > > "on track." As many of you know, I have bitched and moaned > > about the computer centers being non-functional much of the > > time, and in some (such as Miller) there was no programming > > because the computers were so unreliable. The room was locked > > up 99.44% of the time, with the equipment simply becoming > > obsolete. > > > > The forum will be looking for ideas. I think it would be a good > > place for SCNA to emphasize its role as providing service to the > > community. > > > > I've been offering an open lab for seniors at Miller (and > > formerly at Garfield, as well) and it has been quite an > > experience. Watching a woman in her 90's battling a man > > twice her size and a couple of decades younger for a > > functioning computer is as fun as pro wrestling. > > > > Sorry I can't make it to the envelope stuffing - hope you > > have a great turnout. > > > > See you Saturday at Garfield. > > > > Lorraine > > femme2 at scn.org > > > > > > > > > > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * > > . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: > > majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: > > unsubscribe scn > > ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== > > * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * > > > > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From jj at scn.org Wed Jan 3 01:27:14 2001 From: jj at scn.org (J. Johnson) Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 01:27:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Hey, loser... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm talking about you, Rich. I say "loser" because I gather that is right where you are going with "the suit". And regarding which you publicly promised an explanation so long ago--a promise so long unfilled that it is reasonable to conclude that your promises are worthless, completely incredible. As long as you have not delivered on your promise to explain why you sued various SCNA board members and volunteers, you shouldn't be saying anything at all. === JJ ================================================================= * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Thu Jan 4 23:12:27 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 23:12:27 -0800 Subject: SCN: Speech Message-ID: <3A55035B.1172.A5E15D9@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ====================== (Carl S. Kaplan, NY Times)---Now that antidiscrimination groups in France have won a partial victory over Yahoo Inc. by pressuring the California-based company to drop auctions of Nazi artifacts from its English-language Web site, civil libertarians and other lawyers fear that other groups will be emboldened to file lawsuits in foreign courts seeking to censor online speech flowing from America. Yahoo's aboutface "will certainly encourage litigants and governments in other countries to go after American service providers" who transmit content that is protected in the United States but offensive and possibly illegal abroad, warned Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union. That's dangerous, he said, because "we could easily wind up with a lowest common denominator standard for protected speech on the Net." Even legal experts who support the right of French citizens to hold Yahoo accountable for the content of its United States-based Web site predicted more suits in the wake of the Yahoo response and the French groups' win. "The fact that Yahoo backed down will probably encourage more lawsuits," said Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an expert in Internet jurisdiction. "But I think the lawsuits would have come in any event," he added, in light of what he said is the right of a foreign court to take steps within its territory to regulate harmful Net flows from abroad. David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University and an expert in Internet law, said it was difficult to predict the next "hot button" issues that might trigger lawsuits against United States online service companies, where free speech traditions are strong. He reckoned that certain groups in the Middle East might begin to patrol the Internet for anti-Islamic content, such as foreign sites that display women without veils. He also speculated that some foreign antismoking groups might object to sites from abroad that display tobacco advertising, in violation of local laws. "There are a lot of ways information law differs from country to country," he said with a sigh. Earlier this week, Yahoo Inc. announced that it would more actively enforce its terms of service agreement by pre-screening and eliminating hateful and racist material -- such as Nazi memorabilia and Ku Klux Klan artifacts -- from its auction sites. Previously the company did not actively monitor content posted on its auction site, but reserved the right to take down offensive material. The new Yahoo monitoring scheme, which features a combination of specialized software and human reviewers, does not apply to the company's noncommercial entities, such as the many chatrooms, personal Web sites and youth clubs that it hosts. The new program comes on the heels of a controversial ruling by a Paris court on November 20 that ordered Yahoo to begin using blocking software or other means to prevent Web surfers in France from gaining access to the parts of its auction site that featured over 1,200 Nazi-related items -- everything from SS belt buckles to Nazi arm bands. Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez of the Superior Court of Paris gave Yahoo three months to toe the line. After the deadline, the company would be subject to contempt fines of about $13,000 for each day it failed to block out France, the judge Santa Clara-based Yahoo. The Yahoo case first rose to public attention last May 22, when Judge Gomez ordered Yahoo, which is based Santa Clara, Calif., to take all measures to "render impossible" the ability of French Internet users to gain access to Nazi-related auctions hosted on the company's English-language auction pages. The court also asked Yahoo to prevent French eyeballs from accessing any of its other services -- such as chat rooms or hosted Web pages -- that featured discussions constituting "an apology of nazism or which contest the Nazi crimes." In reaching his decision, Judge Gomez said that Yahoo Inc.'s display of Nazi souvenirs and speech justifying Nazi crimes violated a section of the French criminal code. Yahoo's France- based subsidiary, Yahoo France, does not currently host auctions for Nazi memorabilia or host Nazi-related discussions in violation of French law. The Paris-based lawsuit was filed by two groups in France, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) and the Union of French Jewish Students. Last month, Yahoo filed suit in federal district court in San Jose, Calif., asking a judge to declare that the French ruling -- and any resulting fines -- should not be enforced in the United States against Yahoo Inc.'s assets. In legal papers, Yahoo argued that the French decision violated United States notions of jurisdiction and was repugnant to the First Amendment. Yahoo Inc. has said that it has no assets in France that could be seized by the French court. In public comments this week, Yahoo officials asserted that the new monitoring scheme had nothing to do with the actions of Judge Gomez but rather were part of a general housecleaning of its auction policy and the result of ongoing discussions with Jewish groups in the United States, such as the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a telephone interview from Israel that he had been meeting with Yahoo officials for about two years. He said that he applauded the company's decision to eliminate Nazi-related auctions and is hopeful the firm will extend its monitoring program to include its youth clubs. But he said that he believed the French court's recent decision was "the catalyst" behind the company's move. "They had a p.r. black eye," he said. Critics are upset about more than the possible precedent established by Yahoo's new monitoring policy. The ACLU's Steinhardt, for example, fears that the company's legal action in federal court may lose its force. "The Yahoo move complicates their own litigation," Steinhardt said. "I would think an American court would look to see if there is a ripe controversy here" before it issues a declaratory judgment, he said. But he observed that there has been no effort yet to enforce any order or fine against Yahoo and that the gist of the case -- Nazi auction materials -- has been eliminated. Putting legal issues aside, Steinhardt added that he is "disappointed" that Yahoo would succumb to pressure from United States-based groups to censor speech. The Yahoo actions are more subtle and praiseworthy than critics suggest, other lawyers said. Ian Ballon, an Internet law expert based in Palo Alto, said the company's decision to sanitize its commercial auction sites of hateful materials while maintaining strict First Amendment protection over so-called hate speech on its non-commercial sites was a good compromise. "It sounds to me that they have taken a fairly pragmatic approach," Ballon said. "Like a lot of Silicon Valley companies, they're continuing to do business and have routed around legal problems." He added that most large American companies do not offer Nazi- related items for sale. Furthermore, as a Yahoo lawyer pointed out, the company has not done everything that Judge Gomez desired. After all, in the spirit of free expression, the company will continue to permit discussions on its hosted personal Web pages and clubs, accessible in France, that apologize for Nazism or contest Nazi crimes -- so long as the discussions do not incite violence. "Judge Gomez can still say that we are in violation" of part of his order, said Greg Wrenn, associate general counsel for Yahoo's international division. "That's why it is important that we pursue our declaratory judgment action in federal court in California." Wrenn added later: "We are not going to acquiesce in the notion that foreign countries have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate the content of U.S.-based sites." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From be718 at scn.org Fri Jan 5 12:02:57 2001 From: be718 at scn.org (Rich Littleton) Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2001 12:02:57 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Re: Hey, loser... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's too bad the system was down the various times that the suit was well discussed causing JJ to miss the messages. However, to BRIEFLY summarize, it looks like I was tossed out of the e-mail training committee because I lodged a complaint with the board and the governance committee against Sharma Oliver for a very nasty e-mail message she sent me. JJ, of all people, should be as appalled as I was that this happened. By the way, JJ is making progress. At least he has finally understood that the suit was NOT filed against SCNA. (He was very upset about this for quite a while.) The board is discussing the suit at the next board meeting on the second Thursday of January, (Jan 11). [If this timing is not correct, please notify this mailing list.] Board meetings are open, so I look forward to a good representation of those interested in the suit. The board will need to decide at this meeting if it will support the poor reasons for my dismissal and thus put the organization into the law suit, or take action to distance the organization from the improper dismissal. Later, Rich ______________________________________________________________________ On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, J. Johnson wrote: > I'm talking about you, Rich. I say "loser" because I gather that is right > where you are going with "the suit". And regarding which you publicly > promised an explanation so long ago--a promise so long unfilled that it is > reasonable to conclude that your promises are worthless, completely > incredible. > > As long as you have not delivered on your promise to explain why you sued > various SCNA board members and volunteers, you shouldn't be saying > anything at all. > > === JJ ================================================================= > > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From jj at scn.org Fri Jan 5 22:52:53 2001 From: jj at scn.org (J. Johnson) Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2001 22:52:53 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Re: Hey, loser... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: If anyone does _not_ understand that Rich is delusional it is easy enough to supply details. By the way, the latest news I've heard (I haven't been paying much attention of late) is that Rich lost his motion to have the lawyer representing SCNA forced off of the case on the grounds that it is somehow unethical to defend a case that is (in _Rich's_ opinion) so baseless. But SCNA found another lawyer anyway, who is more eager to press Rich, which may explain why Rich is all of a sudden talking to several Board members about why they should settle. By the way, Rich: how come you have never posted a copy of your complaint? You probably couldn't figure out how to. You certainly weren't much of a whiz at e-mail. === JJ ================================================================= * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Sun Jan 7 09:59:38 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 09:59:38 -0800 Subject: SCN: Web borders Message-ID: <3A583E0A.13171.4517838@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================== (Jonathan D. Glater, NY Times)---If the Internet is anything, at least according to its prophets, it is a place without boundaries. Real world geography, with tiresome passports and tedious border checkpoints, does not matter. This is not an appealing notion to many of the world's governments, which would much prefer to control the flow of information across their national borders, just as they try to control the flow of everything else, from people to money. Their distaste for borderlessness, in fact, may soon give cyberspace the same jigsaw- puzzle appearance as the terrestrial world. This possibility was highlighted recently when a French judge ordered Yahoo Inc. to prevent French Web surfers from accessing pro-Nazi sites through Yahoo's popular site on the World Wide Web, or from purchasing Nazi memorabilia through its on-line auction site. The French court was enforcing French law, even though Yahoo is an American company, because its site could be viewed on a computer in France. If the French court has its way, French law will govern what can be viewed on the Web from France - technology permitting. And there's nothing to stop other governments from attempting to limit what their citizens can see. "People really had the idea that the Internet was a different space, and that things were going to happen on the Internet that governments could not regulate," said Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "But, as those governments increasingly recognize, their sovereignty is threatened and they're doing something about it." The issue is complicated by the fact that, while authoritarian nations may simply want control over a potentially subversive source of information, other nations are worried about protecting their cultural identity, said Tony Judt, a history professor at New York University. For example, the language of the Internet is overwhelmingly English, and its culture is often seen as American. That troubles governments concerned about protecting their native culture. In France, controlling the on-line world is "about Frenchness," said Mr. Judt. "It's the only thing that makes them bigger than they are." Not only do governments want to control the ideas that enter their e- space; each government has a different idea of which ideas, what sort of "content," must be kept out. That is why Yahoo is seeking a ruling from an American court that the French decision is unenforceable here. Last week, in what it called an unrelated development, Yahoo said it would begin to search out and remove hateful and violent material from its sites. France and Germany want to block Nazi sites (which are now relocating to the United States to avoid being shut down). The United States tries to prosecute offshore gambling sites. Governments in China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and elsewhere try to censor sites for political or religious reasons. There is a global consensus against very little Web material, for example child pornography, said Daniel Weitzner, a lawyer at the World Wide Web Consortium. And that is a good thing, from the perspective of organizations like the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes online civil liberties. A Web world with borders might force users to reveal personal information, including their geographical location, which could be linked to other data, such as the sites that the user visits. This might make people reluctant to visit certain sites, for fear that they may be identified, said Shari Steele, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer. "A lot of times people are looking for information on the Internet that they wouldn't want people to know they're looking for," Ms. Steele said. Nor is this a matter solely of individual freedom, an American preoccupation not always shared elsewhere. As Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, noted, "The United States attempted to sell its conception of the First Amendment to the rest of the world for 50 years, and the rest of the world didn't buy it." But that is not the reason an open Web should be maintained, said William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International's United States operations. Other cultures' sensitivities should not serve as an excuse to block sites that promote the protection of human rights, he said. "Now it is virtually impossible for a violation to take place, or at least violations in public, in any part of the world without being known almost instantaneously around the world," he said. "There has been virtually no development in the last five years that has been any more important to the success of the human rights movement than the growth of the Web." For example, the Web allowed Amnesty International to get information into China about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and about Chinese human rights violations, despite the government's efforts to block them, Dr. Schulz said. The Web also has allowed people to organize within some countries, he added. Ultimately, however, it is unlikely that the advocates of universal, open Internet access will be able to stave off concerted governmental efforts, so it is likely that in the not- so-distant future, the real-space location of Web users will begin to determine the virtual places they can visit. On a computer in the United States, it might be possible to "travel," under the auspices of the First Amendment, from one pro-Nazi web site to another, said Mr. Lessig. But pornography may be blocked. In another country, the reverse could be true. "This is actually a very medieval conception of jurisdiction: Your rights are carried with you as you travel from one place to another," Professor Lessig said. So the revolutionary advent of the Internet, which has opened the minds of so many millions around the globe, may spur a return to the Dark Ages. Revolutions, they say, always eat their children. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From douglas Tue Jan 9 10:20:54 2001 From: douglas (Doug Schuler) Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 10:20:54 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Article on computer professionals, democracy, SCN, etc. Message-ID: <200101091820.KAA11046@scn.org> I thought I'd mention my article in the latest (Jan, 2001) Communications of the ACM entitled "Computer Professionals and the Next Culture of Democracy." It may be of interest. It's on the web at http://www.scn.org/ip/commnet/cacm-2001.html. It talks about the role (as I see it) of computer professionals not just as hired guns but as active agents for social change. The article discusses SCN, the city's indicator project, and other related topics. Hope you like it! -- doug ****************************************************************** * Help Shape the Network Society * * Sign the Seattle Statement! * * http://www.scn.org/cpsr/diac-00/seattle-statement.html * * Discuss the Seattle Statement! * * http://www.scn.org/cgi-bin/diac-00/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro * ****************************************************************** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From guests at scn.org Thu Jan 11 00:32:00 2001 From: guests at scn.org (Melissa Guest) Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 00:32:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Upcoming meetings Message-ID: hello SCNers! The calendars pages on the web are missing Nancy a lot. Here's a quick summary of the meetings coming up in the next few months: 2nd Annual SCN @ FareStart Dinner - 7:30-9 pm, 2/15. To recognize current volunteers, but all SCN supporters are invited. Julia Hahn (vpc at scn.org) will be sending more details out soon. Excomm - every 1st Thursday, 7-9 pm, Broadview Library (130th & greenwood) Meetings focus on operational issues of SCN, with representatives from each of the operational teams (Education, Helpdesk, Web, IP Services, Registration, SysOps, Volunteer Program & Finance). Contact Julia Hahn or Steve Guest (vpc at scn.org or steve at groupworks.org) for more details. Board Meetings - every 2nd Thursday, 7-9 pm, meeting place tbd (cancelled for Jan - too many board members unable to attend) Meetings are focused on Fundraising and Long Range Planning issues, open to anyone interested in coming - contact Tim McCormack or Melissa Guest (tmccorma at scn.org or guests at scn.org) for more details. General Meetings - every 4th Wednesday, 7-9 pm, University branch library January 24 meeting to feature guest speakers - Alan Miller to provide more info soon! (or contact him at bd166 at scn.org) February 28 - SCN Annual Meeting and Election - more details coming soon from Sharma (sharma at scn.org) Volunteer Orientations are being held as needed - but we have lots of volunteer openings! Please check out our pages at www.scn.org/vol to see if there are any tasks listed you could help with. Then fill out the volunteer form online! SCN Recruiter, Kristen Fife (xx031 at scn.org) will be in touch! Happy New Year & New Millenium to all of you! Lots of exciting SCN Development planned for 2001! Hope you can join us! - Mel & Steve Guest -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- -=-=- -=- Melissa & Steve Guest, Co-Presidents email: guests at scn.org Seattle Community Network Assoc. ph: (425) 653 7353 http://www.scn.org/scna 8am to 11pm PST "Bringing People & Communities Together with Free Internet Services" * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Thu Jan 11 08:19:14 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 08:19:14 -0800 Subject: SCN: Filters - excellent article Message-ID: <3A5D6C82.6801.38C59C@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================== The Internet Filter Farce (Geoffrey Nunberg, The American Prospect)---"What if the baseball could repair the window?" reads the headline of a recent ad for myCIO.com. The copy continues: "The Internet caused the problem. It's only fitting it should also provide the solution." As it happens, the advertiser is offering remote management of network security. But the slogan would serve just as well for dozens of other electronic products and services that promise to address the manifold anxieties that the Internet gives rise to - anxieties about hackers, threats to privacy, spam, rumors, commercialism, pornography, fraud, lost work time, or simply the difficulty of finding your way around cyberspace. For every article raising the alarm about one or another of these problems, there's a clutch of software engineers sitting in a loft somewhere trying to turn the concern into a market opportunity. It's an understandable response, given the remarkable achievements of the technology and the hype that accompanies every new innovation. But it can also lead to misguided or even irresponsible decisions, as people naively trust the technology to right its own wrongs. It's one of the more dangerous guiding principles of the new economy: The remedy for the abuse of digital technology is more digital technology. The problem is nowhere more evident than in the frenzy to equip homes, schools, libraries, and workplaces with blocking technology - the programs described as "content filtering software" by their makers and as "censorware" by their critics. They go by suggestive names like CYBERsitter, SafeClick, Cyber Patrol, NetNanny, SurfWatch, and I-Gear. It's a good business to be in right now. A recent report by the research firm IDC estimates that the content filtering market exceeds $150 million a year right now and will reach $1.3 billion by 2003. Parents have been buying the software to protect their children, and search engines and Internet service providers (ISPs) have been offering blocking as a subscriber option. Corporations have been using the software to block employees' access to pornography (often citing the threat of sexual harassment charges) or, more generally, to restrict access to any non-work-related Web sites. Schools and libraries have been installing the software, sometimes reluctantly, in response to state and local laws that require its use, and federal legislation mandating filters is in the offing. One reason for the enthusiasm about filters is that they can be seen as a benign alternative to legislative restrictions on speech or access. Such laws generally prove to be unconstitutional - like the Communications Decency Act, which was overturned in 1997. In fact, when the Third Circuit Court suspended enforcement of the 1998 Child Online Protection Act in February 1999, it cited filters as a less restrictive alternative. Advocates of filters argue that since the software is a commercial product that people adopt voluntarily, questions of censorship can't arise. As the director of one service provider that uses the software put it, "The First Amendment is not concerned with the capricious acts of individuals but rather with ... the danger posed by the enormous power wielded by the federal government." Even so, filters have their critics, particularly among civil libertarians and librarians. They argue that requiring filters in schools or libraries can itself be a form of censorship, even if the lists of sites they block are compiled by private companies - a view that was supported in 1998 by a federal district court in Virginia. Filtering advocates have responded that First Amendment concerns don't override the custodial responsibilities of the school or library. In the words of South Carolina Attorney General Charlie Condon, "A public library can constitutionally filter filth from the eyes of children." But "filth" is in the eye of the beholder, and all filters go well beyond blocking hard-core porn, both inadvertently and by design. Of course, First Amendment considerations aren't relevant when individuals or private organizations use filters. But there are other reasons why filters might make us uneasy. In corporate settings, the use of filters is part of a growing tendency to restrict employee privacy, along with e-mail monitoring and other forms of electronic surveillance. These steps may be legal if workers are appropriately notified in advance, but they're a poor substitute for more direct evaluations of employees' productivity. And they can intensify workers' disaffection and alienation, an effect that's exacerbated by the heavy-handed condescension with which employers often try to sweeten the pill. Take the Dilbertesque explanation that one Fortune 500 company offered its employees when it began filtering their Web use a while ago: "Imagine yourself surfing the Web and you come across a link that says, 'Click here for cool stuff.' You click on the link and are suddenly presented with a site that has less than suitable pictures for a business environment. If this has ever happened to you, we have good news." Parental restrictions on children's access to information are clearly in a different category. As Al Gore frequently puts it, "Blocking your own child's access to offensive speech is not censorship - it's parenting." The problem is that parents who buy a commercial filtering program have no way of knowing exactly what speech it blocks, and the software companies are doing all they can to keep their customers in ignorance. The lists of sites blocked by most of the filters are kept encrypted, as are the keyword algorithms they use to block additional sites. And when free-speech advocates have hacked the filters and posted lists of the sites they block, the companies have gotten the courts to suppress the postings on the grounds that they violate provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (Those provisions were relaxed last October to allow some circumvention of encryption mechanisms for purposes of finding out what sites filters are blocking.) All of this has put the censorware companies in a position that would delight any other business: Not only does government mandate the use of their products, it also enforces their right to conceal from the public what exactly those products do. The software companies justify their secrecy by citing the need to protect their intellectual property and by arguing that publication of the lists of blocked sites would enable children to bypass the filters and access inappropriate materials. But neither argument is very plausible. Other companies manage to protect their rights to the databases they compile without keeping them secret, and it would be easy enough to make the lists publicly available without making them accessible to every schoolchild. The real danger for the software companies in making the lists public is that people would rapidly see just how inadequate their software is. That's the real scandal of the filtering controversy: The technology doesn't - and can't - work as promised. Why Filters Fail Filters come in different forms. Some are implemented "upstream," at the level of proxy servers that control access for whole schools, libraries, or businesses; others are implemented "downstream" at individual workstations or PCs. But they all accomplish their filtering in pretty much the same way. The software companies start by compiling "control lists" of the addresses of unacceptable sites. Then, since these lists inevitably miss large numbers of offensive sites, they add automatic keyword filters to block additional sites that contain certain words and phrases. Most of them permit customers to specify the categories of sites they want to block - for example, "sex acts," "perversions," "hate speech," and "drug advocacy," not to mention additional categories like "job search," "games," and "dating," for the benefit of employers. (SmartFilter even adds a category of "worthless sites" that includes things like pages full of cat stories.) And most keep logs of use and make provision for automatic notification of parents or supervisors or system administrators when someone tries to access an excluded site. The inadequacies of the systems are implicit in this basic architecture. In compiling their control lists, software makers have a natural interest in drawing the circle very broadly, so as to block sites that might be objectionable to one or another segment of their market, even if they wouldn't be considered pornographic or offensive by any reasonable standard. Take safe-sex information. SurfWatch has blocked safe-sex information pages at Washington University, the University of Illinois Health Center, and the Allegheny University Hospitals, and Cyber Patrol has blocked the HIV/AIDS information page of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the site of Planned Parenthood. SmartFilter blocks the safe-sex page of the Johns Hopkins Medical School research group on sexually transmitted diseases. The filters have also blocked numerous sites associated with feminism or gay and lesbian rights. Both I-Gear and CYBERsitter have blocked the site of the National Organization for Women (CYBERsitter cites the "lesbian bias" of the group). I-Gear has blocked the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, BESS has blocked the Gay and Lesbian Prisoner Project, and NetNanny has blocked Internet discussion groups on AIDS and feminism. There's more: Many filters block Web privacy sites and sites that facilitate anonymous Web access. And filter makers routinely use their control lists to block sites critical of their products. SafeSurf has blocked the site of the Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. I-Gear has blocked the site of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and SafeClick has blocked some of the testimony at hearings on filters held by the congressionally appointed Commission on Online Child Protection. That must be the dream of every corporate publicist - to be able to prevent your customers from reading any negative comments about your products. When we pass from control lists to keyword filters, we go from the outrageous to the ridiculous. Sites have been blocked simply because they contain the words witch, pussycat, or button. A government physics archive was blocked because its URL began with the letters XXX. Keyword filters have blocked the sites of Congressman Dick Armey and Beaver College in Pennsylvania. What these anecdotes don't show, though, is just how extensive the overblocking of keywords is. The censorware companies like to claim that their accuracy is extremely high, citing library studies showing that inappropriate blocks constitute a tiny proportion of all Web accesses. For example, Secure Computing, the manufacturer of SmartFilter, claims that a Utah study showed that blocking of miscategorized pages by its program constituted only .0006 percent of all Web access attempts - a figure cited by Arizona Senator John McCain in support of a mandatory-filtering proposal he is sponsoring. But that's a highly misleading way of measuring overblocking: Even if a filter blocked every single site on the Web that mentioned safe sex or breast cancer, the total number of incorrectly blocked accesses would be tiny relative to the huge number of accesses to sites like Amazon.com and Yahoo! By analogy, imagine a police force that arrests every Arab American in town on an antiterrorism sweep, then claims that its false arrest rate is under 1 percent, since 99 percent of the total population was not detained. The only appropriate way to evaluate the filters is to ask what proportion of the sites they block as pornographic or offensive are in fact correctly categorized. And by this standard, the filters fare very poorly. In one recent study, 1,000 randomly chosen addresses in the dot- com domain were submitted to the SurfWatch filter. Of the sites it blocked as "sexually explicit," more than four out of five were misclassified - for example, the sites of an antiques dealer in Wales, a Maryland limo service, and a storage company in California. In another recent study, the free-speech advocate who runs Peacefire.org hacked the Symantec Corporation's I-Gear filter and published the list of the first 50 blocked URLs in the dot-edu domain. Fully 76 percent of these pages were errors or misclassifications, most of them completely devoid of sexual content of any kind. The program blocked a diagram of a milk pasteurization system with accompanying text entirely in Portuguese and two long sections of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It also blocked a tract by the seventeenth-century theologian John Owen entitled "Justification of Faith through the Righteousness of Christ" and a page that contained nothing but a passage in Latin from Saint Augustine's Confessions. (Intriguingly, it is a passage in which the bishop chastises himself for his impure thoughts - but the filter was doubtless triggered simply by the presence of the Latin preposition cum.) This overblocking is an inevitable consequence of the keyword approach. The fact is, it's impossible to single out porn sites reliably simply by the words they use. Go to Disney's Go.com, turn on the GoGuardian filter, and do a search on sex; you will get no hits at all. Then turn it off and discover what you were missing: not just porn pages, but the text of the Scientific American article "Bonobo Sex and Society," the pages on sex discrimination of the Australian Equal Opportunity Commission, and the Michigan Sex Offender Registry. It's true that filters can fare a bit better by looking for combinations of keywords and by doing some statistical analysis of content. But few of them appear to use sophisticated techniques, probably because any effort to reduce the number of false alarms will inevitably reduce the number of genuine porn or hate sites that they block as well. Filtering advocates have argued that blocked Web pages on Saint Augustine or Gibbon are simply regrettable collateral casualties in the war against online porn and racism: Better, after all, to block some inoffensive sites than to allow some offensive ones to get through. As a field director of the profilter American Family Association puts it: "Filters are workable. We'd rather err on the side of caution instead of being too liberal." And there's no question that the software companies have deliberately kept their filters overly broad. It isn't just that they use overinclusive keywords like sex to screen out pages; they have also blocked whole servers or even whole ISPs when any one of their pages is flagged for objectionable content. Cyber Patrol blocked the entire Deja News (now Deja.com) site, which archives thousands of discussion groups on everything from commercial mortgages to archaeology, and all of the 1.4 million pages on the Web-hosting service Tripod.com. And a number of filters block pages containing banner ads that appear to contain links to inappropriate sites. The software makers reason, probably correctly, that their average customer is more likely to be concerned about porn sites that slip through the screen than about the blocking of useful sites - particularly since customers are usually ignorant about how frequently the latter occurs. Yet even with the most overly restrictive filtering mechanisms, the programs don't do an adequate job of blocking porn and other offensive materials. You wouldn't know this from the claims of the software makers. CYBERsitter guarantees that its software blocks "more than 97 percent of all objectionable content" (though it doesn't define "unobjectionable"), and SurfWatch claims that it can "shield users from 90-95% of the explicit material on the 'net." But neither company says how it came up with these figures, and independent tests suggest that they are wildly exaggerated. A few years ago Consumer Reports tested the four most common filtering programs against a list of sites that its investigators judged clearly unsuitable for young children. SurfWatch blocked 82 percent of the sites, the highest score of the group, and CYBERsitter blocked only 63 percent (both programs performed much better than NetNanny, which blocked none at all). Another study showed that the filter BESS failed to screen out more than 275 of the sites identified as pornographic on Yahoo! - a singularly easy group to block, since they've already been located and labeled. A study at the Annenberg School of Communications suggests that filters are even worse at identifying violent content than they are at catching pornography. That result is not surprising. Porn sites often give themselves away with genre-specific keywords like XXX or cum, and this makes for relatively efficient filtering. But the only way to block a large number of violent sites would be to use very general keywords that inevitably lead to the overblocking of thousands of useful or informative sites in the process. Do a Web search on "torture+domination," for example, and you will find a number of disturbingly lurid sites; but you will also find a report from the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, the summary of a human rights conference at the University of Chicago, and several pages documenting the horrors of the Holocaust. What's more, these studies almost certainly underestimate just how leaky the filters are; and the proportion of offensive content that the filters miss will inevitably grow as the Web swells. For one thing, the filters simply can't keep up with the size of the Web and the vast amount of objectionable material it contains. In a 1999 article in Nature, Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles found that 1.5 percent of indexable Web servers contained pornographic material, a proportion that would translate to around 80,000 servers at the present size of the Web. Since a single server can host a number of sites, a highly conservative estimate would be 150,000 to 200,000 sites that contain pornographic material. These sites wink on and off and change addresses frequently: The archiving service Alexa.com estimates that the average Web site has a life of 75 days. To locate and flag all this content, a filtering service would have to do periodic sweeps of the entire publicly accessible Web, which as of late 2000 contained in the neighborhood of 1.5 billion pages. That's more than anyone could possibly track: Even with the extensive resources that search engines like AltaVista and Inktomi have at their disposal, none of them indexes more than 15 percent of the total, and all of them taken together index less than half of it. And even if you could find all the Web pages, a filtering company would require a full-time staff of more than 2,000 people just to check out the two million new pages that are added every day. Figures like these make a mockery of the filter makers' claims that their control lists can offer anything like comprehensive coverage of the Web. The only possible way to get at most of the objectionable content is through keyword filtering. But however broadly it's applied, that technique misses the large number of porn sites that don't contain explicit terms that will tip off the filter. And sites that do want to include sexually explicit text can choose among a number of simple ways to circumvent the screens. They can represent the text as an image rather than as a string of characters, for example - a technique that's used by many people who don't want their Web page content to be picked up by the "spiders" that crawl the Web compiling the indexes of the search engines. Or they can encode the text in a Java script so it will bypass the filters unnoticed - and do so in such a way that will still allow people to seek them out. At this point, it isn't clear how much the porn site proprietors have been using expedients like these. But if the use of filters becomes widespread enough to cut significantly into the pornographers' profits, there is no question that sexual-content providers will become as resourceful at foiling the software as they have already been in gaming the Web search engines so that their sites come up in the first batch of hits. Alternatives to keyword identification are even less effective. In 1999 Exotrope, a company in Elmira, New York, introduced a system called BAIR (Basic Artificial Intelligence Routine), which it billed as capable of recognizing pornographic images with 99 percent accuracy, thanks to its use of artificial intelligence and "active information matrices." The launch was held at a Schenectady middle school and was attended by New York Governor George Pataki, who hailed the company as one of the fruits of his administration's efforts to create new high-tech industry in the Empire State and applauded the product's usefulness: "You'll be able to have a computer in any classroom unsupervised, a computer at home where your nine-year-old or 10-year-old disappears hours on end, and we can know and be confident that the information they are accessing is appropriate for someone of their age level." But parents who install the BAIR system would be well advised to check in on their kids from time to time. When the software was independently tested, it correctly labeled only two-thirds of a set of pornographic images - and mislabeled as pornographic exactly the same proportion of a set of ordinary portrait photos downloaded from AOL personal ads. In the end, BAIR is just a system that can identify flesh tones with less than 70 percent accuracy--about par for the present state of image recognition, and miles short of a system that could reliably tell the difference between stills from Deep Throat and from My Dinner with Andre. In a way, though, all of this is beside the point. Even if the filters were capable of achieving the fanciful levels of accuracy their advocates like to claim, it isn't as if there would be anything like a corresponding reduction in the diffusion of pornography. If for argument's sake we estimate that there are 150,000 porn sites on the Web, a filter that could screen them out with an accuracy rate of 95 percent would still leave 7,500 available, which is more than enough to satisfy the most assiduous pornophile. Bear in mind that an Internet porn site isn't like a handgun or a gram of cocaine - or, for that matter, like a brick-and-mortar pornographic bookstore - since a single site can serve an indefinitely large number of users from wherever they log in. All of this has a familiar ring to linguists who have been working for years to develop tools that can deal with human language in a naturalistic way. Every few years, a new flurry of hype touts a system that has "cracked" this or that aspect of the problem - automatic translation, for example, or realistic question-answering. But when they're put to the test, the systems never come remotely close to human language capabilities; that goal is not likely to be achieved for decades. It is much easier to reproduce the competence of a chess grandmaster than to reproduce the behavior of the kibitzers around the table. Filtering software is basically just another system of the same type - except that the techniques it uses are much more primitive than those used by modern translation systems and the like. And the task of filters is far more demanding. While translating a simple sentence or understanding a straight-forward question are tasks that are well within the linguistic capacities of a 10-year-old, distinguishing pornography and hate sites from serious discussions of sex or race requires not just adult linguistic competence but adult judgment. It may be that we know obscene material when we see it, as Justice Potter Stewart said, but it is a daunting matter to teach a machine to make such discriminations - or even the much more blatant distinctions that 10-year-olds delight in grasping. Language analysis software can be useful, so long as we make allowances for its shortcomings. Automatic translation systems do a wretched job by human standards. But sometimes even a very bad translation can be useful - if you're simply trying to determine whether a hotel in Paris accepts Visa cards, for example, or whether a scientific paper in Japanese is relevant enough to merit a proper human translation. Software that analyzes language content is fine for making a first pass at sorting incoming corporate e-mail, so long as employees are on hand to clear up its errors. And we can tolerate a fairly low accuracy rate from a natural-language query system like Ask Jeeves; the misunderstood questions and irrelevant responses may be a bother, but they don't do any real damage. When it comes to protecting children from offensive content, however, our tolerance for error is much lower. Politicians and administrators may find it convenient to believe in the efficacy of filters so they can reassure parents that the technology allows us to leave children alone in front of computers and, as Governor Pataki put it, "be confident that the information they are accessing is appropriate for someone of their age level." In the current climate, it's important to be seen as doing something about the problem of offensive content on the Web. But trusting filters to protect schoolchildren from objectionable content is simply irresponsible: It's like entrusting airport security to a metal detector that misses 40 percent of the concealed handguns and beeps at a third of the metal hangers in passengers' suitcases. A Place for Filters? Filter usage will get a big boost if Congress adopts Senator McCain's proposed legislation making filters obligatory in institutions that receive the "e-rate" subsidies established by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 - just one of several proposals along these lines. It's clearly an issue with wide appeal: In a 2000 survey sponsored by the Ford Foundation, 92 percent of respondents favored having schools use filters to block pornography, and 79 percent favored their use to block hate speech. People are right to be troubled by the vast amount of offensive and harmful content on the Web. But there's reason to be troubled, too, by most of the approaches proposed thus far to deal with it, whether technological, legal, or political. Legislative restrictions on the distribution of obscene or indecent content have generally proved to be unconstitutional and, in any case, are extremely difficult to enforce. The Web is not a place that lends itself to police sweeps: Sites change their addresses frequently, and the people responsible for them are hard to find and identify. Then, too, a large proportion of offensive and pornographic sites are located at servers outside U.S. jurisdictions; setting up a Web site in Thailand is even easier than opening a bank account in the Bahamas. So it's unrealistic to expect too much from efforts at supply-side controls. The other solutions that have been proposed also have their limitations. Self-rating policies for Web sites raise issues of practicality and enforcement. "Whitelist" or "greenspace" domains restricted to prescreened age-appropriate material may be useful for younger children, but they inevitably exclude huge amounts of valuable information. There are limits, too, to what we can expect from adult supervisors. "Tap on the shoulder" policies put librarians in the dubious position of having to police their patrons' Web use. What's more, monitoring policies are likely to inhibit young people from using the Web to find answers to their questions about topics like safe sex, suicide, homosexuality, or other areas of concern that they might have reasons for concealing from parents, teachers, or librarians. Filters raise even more problems than most of these other solutions do, but in the current political climate, it isn't likely that they will go away. Still, before we allow anyone to install filters in public institutions, we can ask that the programs be improved and made more selective, and that their makers be held accountable to reasonable standards of public disclosure. For starters, the filter companies should be required to list publicly the names of all identifiable organizations, publications, and sites included on their control lists, along with a brief description of the offending content. This is simply a matter of truth in advertising: If a filter is blocking a large number of gay and lesbian sites or safe-sex sites, people have a right to know this in advance. Indeed, it's hard to see how the use of filters in libraries could be constitutionally defended if the librarians have no way of knowing what point-of-view biases they might incorporate. Second, the blocking of sites by filters used in public institutions should be subject to judicial or administrative review. At present, sites can be unblocked only by individual customers. The filter companies claim that this policy leaves the ultimate discretion over blocking with libraries and local users. But the users of filtering software don't generally know in advance which sites it blocks, and even if they did, they wouldn't have the resources to examine and unblock thousands of URLs one by one. As a result, someone whose site is unreasonably blocked to hundreds of thousands of users - usually unbeknownst to them - has no recourse other than to appeal to the filtering company. The determination that a site is obscene or harmful to minors ultimately belongs with the courts or administrators (or, in the home, with parents) rather than with software makers who have an interest in drawing the circle as widely as they can. Third, we should require that the makers of filtering software submit their products for independent testing before they are installed in public institutions, and that the results of such tests be made public. This is a simple matter of consumer protection: If a piece of software fails to block 40 percent of a random sample of pornographic sites, parents have a right to know that before they entrust their children to it for protection. And software makers ought to be held accountable for the claims they make about their products' efficacy, just as the makers of tires and cough syrup are. Steps like these might encourage the makers of filtering software to be more discriminating in compiling their control lists and to try to improve the accuracy of their blocking algorithms. Indeed, one reason why filters perform so badly is that the software makers' ability to keep their performance a secret has up to now exempted them from the competitive pressures that would ordinarily force them to bring their products up to the level of other kinds of language software. But even with these improvements, no one should be under the illusion that filters are going to enable us to make the Internet 100 percent child-safe or that we can return to an age when the library was a haven protected from unsavory content. That apparently can be a hard point to grasp, to listen to how filtering advocates evoke the traditional role of the library when arguing for restrictions on content. "Libraries don't have copies of Hustler or Deep Throat on their shelves," they say, "so why shouldn't they block the same sort of material when they occur on the Net?" But once we open up access to the Internet, no one is in a position to control the kinds of material that people can find there. Tearing down the walls of the library cuts two ways: It opens up a new world of knowledge, but it also allows the street people to come and camp out in the reading room. On the whole, it's a favorable bargain, but parents and teachers will have to help children deal with the pitfalls of Web surfing, the way they've had to come to terms with the pullulation of violence and disturbing content in other media. This isn't to say that we shouldn't try to protect kids as best we can. But once the window is broken, there is nothing the baseball can do to keep out the draft. Copyright 2001 by The American Prospect, Inc. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From be718 at scn.org Thu Jan 11 14:54:33 2001 From: be718 at scn.org (Rich Littleton) Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 14:54:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Re: VA Upcoming meetings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I noticed that the board meeting for this month was cancelled. I was told by the attorney for the 6 defendants that this January meeting was going to consider the lawsuit and my questions about SCNA being pulled into the suit if it supports the actions of the 6 defendants. On such an important issue, why can't the board members attend the meeting? After all, they each offered themselves publically to handle the organization's business. The possibility of SCNA being brought into a lawsuit is pretty important and should be discussed at a well publicized and accessible meeting. This board meeting would have been a good occassion. At such a meeting, the scna members should be able to ask questions. Later, Rich ______________________________________________________________________ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From anitra at speakeasy.org Thu Jan 11 16:15:02 2001 From: anitra at speakeasy.org (Anitra Freeman) Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 16:15:02 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: WHEEL in need of office supplies Message-ID: WHEEL, our homeless women's organizing group, has run out of office supplies -- including copier/laser printer paper -- and currently has no funds to buy any more. Funds are coming, and by next month we'll have our own supplies again, but for right now it's a real pain. Does anyone know where we can get some free office supplies? Write On! / Anitra L. Freeman / http://www.speakeasy.org/~anitra/ "We can't help everyone. We can't fix everything. It hurts. But it is better to live with pain than to live without caring." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Thu Jan 11 23:59:27 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 23:59:27 -0800 Subject: SCN: Trespass Message-ID: <3A5E48DF.28977.336DB30@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ========================== (Carl S. Kaplan, NY Times)---Robots beware. Life in cyberspace just got harder for you. Times first got really tough for robots -- those automated search programs that periodically crawl through Web sites extracting and copying information -- as a result of a controversial decision by a federal district court judge in San Francisco in May 1999. In that case, Judge Ronald M. Whyte relied on the ancient law of trespass to chattels to temporarily ban an Internet company from using a "bot" to invade and copy auction listings from the computer system of eBay, the auction giant. Now a federal judge in Manhattan has picked up on the trespass idea and altered its requirements a bit, making it even easier for companies to use the law to stop the pesky software critters, some lawyers say. The upshot, critics of the latest ruling say, is that the easier it becomes to use the law to thwart robots, the easier it becomes for some companies to lock up or selectively protect publicly available information. "A lot of people are looking for some legal hook" to keep public information on their sites away from competitors, said Dan L. Burk, an expert in Internet law who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School. He added that he expects to see "an enormous proliferation" of trespass cases against robots in the coming months. The latest decision concerning software robots came about in a legal batte between Register.com Inc. and Vario Inc. Register.com is a company that registers Internet domain names for customers. Under agreements with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit corporation known as ICANN that runs cyberspace's domain name system, all registrars, including Register.com, must provide the public access to an on- line, interactive "Whois" database containing the names and contact information for their domain name customers. According to legal papers, Vario Inc., a Web site hosting and Internet access company, began using a software robot in 1999 to automatically search Register.com's customer database for sales leads. Register.com filed a lawsuit last August, claiming that Verio's use of the automated search robot and its end use of the Whois data was unauthorized and in any case violated its "terms of use," which prohibit third parties from using the contact-information for mass marketing purposes. The company charged Verio with trespass to chattels, breach of contract and other claims. Last month, Judge Barbara S. Jones of federal district court in Manhattan issued a preliminary injunction barring Verio from using robots to harvest data from Register.com's computers for mass marketing purposes. The court found that it was likely Register.com would prevail on its trespass, contract and other claims. The court's trespass analysis warrants some scrutiny. Trespass to chattels occurs when there is an intentional and unauthorized interference with the personal property of another that causes the victim to suffer a degree of harm. How much harm? That's the key question. In the eBay case, which Judge Jones relied upon, eBay offered evidence that the burden on its computer servers from Bidder's Edge's web crawler represented between 1.11 percent and 1.53 percent of the total load. However slight, that degree of interference was harm enough, the judge said, because eBay in effect was prevented from using that portion of its personal property for its own use. The court also reasoned that if it did not grant an order stopping the Bidder's Edge robot, there would be a green light for other robots from other companies to invade eBay's servers -- risking a crash or substantial impairment of eBay's computers. The eBay case is on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Oral arguments are scheduled for next month. The harm in the New York case was arguably less than that demonstrated in the eBay case. Register.com offered evidence that its computer system's resources were diminished by about 2.3 percent owing to Verio's robot. In her opinion, Judge Jones said that the harm estimate was "thoroughly undercut" by Vario in pretrial discovery, however. She added that Register.com's evidence of harm was "imprecise." Nevertheless, Judge Jones concluded that Verio's search robot occupied "some" of Register.com's system capacity. And because some unmeasured portion of Register.com's computer property was not available to the company, that was harm enough, she said -- especially when combined with the eBay notion that the failure to issue an injunction risks a pile-on from other robots in the wings. Vario is appealing the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan. It has also filed a petition with ICANN to terminate Register.com's accreditation. Michael A. Jacobs, a lawyer for Vario, said in an interview that Judge Jones, in effect, said that a showing of present harm was no longer a necessary requirement for trespassing on a computer web site. "In eBay, they showed a 1 or 2 percent" crunch on eBay's system capacity, he said. In his case, even though Register.com's allegation of 2 percent "blew up," he added, "the judge found a sufficient risk of harm. It was literally unprecedented." William F. Patry, a lawyer for Register.com, said that it was reasonable for Judge Jones to rule that a sufficient showing of harm was made. "If your property is the computer system and somebody comes in and uses it in a way that violates the terms of use," he asserted, the owner can say, " 'Wait, you're using my system under conditions that I said you couldn't.' " It may be true that the particular use "won't crash my system," Patry said, but any use of the personal property diminishes the owner's rights to a degree. He added that it was not "so crazy" for the court to rule that Register.com's computer response time might be significantly slowed if other companies began to use robots to hammer on Register.com's database. Professor Burk, who has written about trespass and the Internet, and who co-wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in the eBay case, said that the trend of the cases seems to be that less and less a showing of harm is required to get an injunction against an unauthorized robot. Under the reasoning in the Register.com case, "you don't have to prove harm or show any evidence of harm," he said. "Harm will be presumed." He said that he fears the Register.com case will "spread like Kudzu" through the court system. The neutering of the harm element had important implications, warned Burk. "The way the Net works is by moving electrons around and sharing processing capacity," he said, adding that trespass to chattels in cyberspace has now been defined "in such a way that everything that goes on in the Net is a possible trespass." He added: "If I don't like your linking to my site, or searching my site, even though it is open to the public, and I say, 'Stop,' you have to stop . . . whether you are actually hurting me or not." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Fri Jan 12 16:59:32 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 16:59:32 -0800 Subject: SCN: Net freedom Message-ID: <3A5F37F4.15755.38A86B1@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================== The Internet was supposed to be all about freedom. It is far from certain whether freedom, or government control, will win the day. (Economist)---In 1967 Roy Bates, a retired British army major, occupied an island fortress six miles off the English coast and declared it a sovereign nation. He was never sure what to do with his Principality of Sealand. Now, however, the fortress may have found its calling. For several months, a firm called HavenCo has been operating a data centre there. Anyone who wants to keep a website or other data out of the reach of national governments can rent space on the servers that hum in one of the concrete pillars. In the mid-1990s, Sealand would have been seen as yet more proof that the Internet cannot be regulated. If a country tried to censor digital content, the data would simply hop to a more liberal jurisdiction. These days, the data principality symbolises just the opposite: the days of unrestricted freedom on the Internet are numbered, except, perhaps, in odd places like Sealand. It seems likely that 2000 will be remembered as the year when governments started to regulate cyberspace in earnest; and forgot, in the process, that the reason the worldwide network became such an innovative force at all was a healthy mix of self-regulation and no regulation. In Britain, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act now gives the police broad access to e-mail and other online communications. South Korea has outlawed access to gambling websites. The United States has passed a law requiring schools and libraries that receive federal funds for Internet connections to install software on their computers to block material harmful to the young. This year, governments are turning their attention to the many jurisdictional problems created by the Internet. These have been emphasised by a French ruling against Yahoo! on November 20th. The French court ordered the Internet portal firm to find some way of banning French users from seeing the Nazi memorabilia posted on its American sites, or face a daily fine of FFr100,000 ($13,000) from the end of February. Yahoo! is fighting the case, even though it has now stopped sales of Nazi memorabilia. The case could be a taste of things to come. Under a new EU law, for example, European consumers may now sue EU-based Internet sites in their own countries, and the rule may well be extended internationally. The United States has just endorsed the gist of the Council of Europe's cybercrime treaty, which aims to harmonise laws against hacking, Internet fraud and child pornography. All this is a far cry from what leading Internet thinkers prophesied only five years ago. "You [governments] have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear," proclaimed John Perry Barlow in his 1996 "Declaration of Independence of cyberspace". Libertarian thinking also ran through early Internet scholarship. David Post and David Johnson, law professors at Temple University in Philadelphia and Georgetown University respectively, argued in that same year that cyberspace was a distinct place that needed laws and legal institutions entirely of its own. To treat cyberspace differently seemed logical. Because data are sent around the Internet in small packets, each of which can take a different route, the flow of information is hard to stop, even if much of the network is destroyed. It was this built-in resilience that appealed to the Internet's original sponsor, America's Defence Department, and made it the medium of choice for civil libertarians. "The Internet", runs their favourite motto, "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Many online experts argue that, since the Internet does away with geographical boundaries, it also does away with territorially based laws. The transmission of data is almost instant, regardless of where sender and receiver are. Today individuals, as well as multinational companies, can decide in which country to base their websites, thus creating competition between jurisdictions. For example, the United States, thanks to its constitutional guarantee of the right to free speech, has become a safe haven for hundreds of German neo-Nazi sites that are illegal under German law. Yet, for all that, governments are not completely helpless in cyberspace. They have some potentially powerful tools at their disposal. Filtering is one. Software installed on a PC, in an Internet service provider's equipment or in gateways that link one country with the rest of the online world, can block access to certain sites. Less well known, but potentially more important, is the fact that websites themselves can block users. They do so by employing the same technology that serves up tailored banner advertisements to visitors from another country. They track the Internet service provider's "IP address", the number that identifies computers on the Internet and, in many cases, reveals where a user is. This technology was the basis for the French ruling against Yahoo! The firm had argued that it was technically impossible to prevent French users from reaching auctions of illegal Nazi memorabilia on its sites. But a panel of three technical experts argued that IP- address tracking could spot more than 60% of French surfers. Both filtering and IP-address tracking are far from perfect. Filters generally block too much-and too little. And surfers can block IP- address tracking by using services such as Zero Knowledge's Freedom or anonymizer.com. In any case, knowing where a user is is only part of the solution. In the case of Yahoo!, the firm would still have to work out which auctions to block. But do these shortcomings matter? Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at the University of Chicago, argues that the real world is full of imperfect filtering and identification techniques: criminals crack safes, 15-year-olds visit bars with fake IDs, secret information is leaked to the press. To Mr Goldsmith, there is little doubt that filtering and identification technologies will help to make cyberspace more regulated, because they will allow governments to raise the cost of getting certain information. China, for instance, has essentially covered its territory with an Intranet isolated from the rest of the online world by software that blocks access to sites with unwanted content. Although clever surfers can find ways to tunnel through the "Great Firewall", it keeps the majority from straying too far online. Most Chinese, in any case, get on to the Internet from work or a public place, where the state can control the software and track what users do, and where they risk being seen if they go to an illegal site. These technologies are likely to become more efficient. The demands of e-commerce, rather than governments, are driving improvements. Akamai, an Internet firm which speeds up delivery by using a network of computers to store online content closer to consumers, recently started offering a new service called EdgeScape. This allows websites to determine exactly where a visitor is, at the time he visits, in order to customise content by region or country. Online companies will certainly also make use in future of a controversial feature called IPv6, designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). At present, the anonymity of most Internet users is more or less protected because service providers generally assign a different IP address each time someone logs on. But IPv6 includes a new, expanded IP address, part of which is the unique serial number of each computer's network-connection hardware. Every data packet sent will carry a user's electronic fingerprints. The holy grail for e-commerce, however, would be a system in which users had permanent digital certificates on their computers containing details of age, citizenship, sex, professional credentials, and so on. Such technology would not only allow websites to aim their services at individuals, but would let governments reclaim their authority. These solutions to Internet regulation are far off, if they fly at all. But Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, warns that e-commerce firms will push for such certificates and that governments may one day require them. Nor do governments always need new technology to impose their regulatory muscle. They can also rely on human intervention, just as Yahoo! now intends to do in order to ban auctions of Nazi and Ku Klux Klan items on its site. Although it is coy about details, the company says it will use software to filter out objectionable material and human reviewers to decide borderline cases. Indirect regulation can also do the job. In Myanmar, formerly Burma, access to the web is banned. To enforce this, the country's military regime imposes jail terms of up to 15 years for unauthorised use of a modem. China recently published sweeping new rules that require Internet companies to apply for a licence and hold them responsible for illegal content carried on their websites. And democratic governments are learning that illegal commercial activity, such as online gambling, can be regulated by controlling credit-card companies and other financial intermediaries. Perhaps the most promising approach, from the governments' point of view, is co-ordinated action to gain some control over the online world. Faster than might be expected, countries have banded together to fight the threat of jurisdictional arbitrage and to solve conflicts of law. The most straightforward way for governments to do that is to devise a uniform international standard. One early example is the World Intellectual Property Organisation's copyright treaty of 1996, which strengthened international copyright rules. The Council of Europe-a group of 41 countries which includes all 15 members of the European Union-is putting the finishing touches to the world's first international treaty on cybercrime. The United States, which has also been involved in the negotiations, supports the treaty's main points. Signatories to the agreement, which will probably be presented for ratification this summer, must have laws on their books that allow, for instance, quick seizure of incriminating computer data and its distribution to authorities in other countries. Such harmonisation is most likely in areas of interest to big multinational corporations (copyright) or where the interests of countries are closely aligned (crime and taxation). On January 9th, the OECD countries announced that they had agreed on a series of rules determining what kind of e-commerce activities made a company liable to taxation: doing business through a website, they concluded, would not leave a company liable to tax in the country from which the website had been accessed. But even most democratic countries are unlikely to agree on standards for more controversial issues, above all freedom of speech. As a result, in many areas, governments are trying "softer" approaches. In the case of privacy, for instance, the United States and the EU have agreed to disagree. America so far favours self-regulation and sectoral laws, for example for the health-care industry, in order to protect the personal data of its citizens. In contrast, the EU relies on comprehensive privacy legislation enforced by data-protection agencies. The EU's privacy directive also authorises member states to cut off the data flow to other countries, including the United States, which do not have (by its lights) adequate privacy laws. To avoid a trade war over personal data, both sides devised a "safe- harbour" agreement that went into effect on November 1st. This protects companies from having their data flow severed, as long as their privacy policies comply with certain principles (such as letting consumers choose how data are used, and allowing access to that data). So far, however, only a dozen companies and organisations have registered with America's Department of Commerce, not least because many firms first want to see whether and how the agreement will be enforced. The provisions of the Hague Convention could prove more popular. This treaty, which is due to be adopted at a diplomatic conference in June, was first proposed by the American government in the early 1990s to formalise worldwide what American courts already often do: enforce foreign judgments in matters such as intellectual- property claims, contractual disputes and libel. American citizens would thus also be able to collect awards abroad. Under the treaty, an online store could be liable under laws in any of the 48 member-countries of the Hague conference. That is why the American government is opposing, among other things, a clause that would ensure that consumers could sue businesses in the courts of the country where the consumer lives. Instead, the Department of Commerce and e-commerce firms are pushing for a different solution: in effect, a new system of private laws, which would avoid the requirement to abide by the laws of the countries where their customers live. As in the Safe Harbour agreement, web firms could seek a certification that they follow certain minimum rules of consumer protection and privacy. Conflicts would be resolved by so-called "alternative dispute resolution". Will these trends turn cyberspace into a place stuffed with even more rules than the real world, as online companies worry? Or, as free-speech advocates predict, will litigants and governments pursue service providers they don't like, leading to an ever-tighter standard for protected speech? For now, these fears seem exaggerated. But much depends on how the legal and political battles of the next few years are settled, and how technology evolves. There have been some attempts to steer a middle course. The Brussels Convention, for instance, lets consumers sue a foreign website in their home country only if the site can be proved to have aimed at that country's market. Many courts are likely to refuse to enforce foreign judgments on matters of widely differing practice, especially where free speech is concerned. For example, Yahoo! will probably successfully defend itself in the American courts, on first amendment grounds, against the French judgment. And yet this may not be enough. The company plans to go on fighting the legal case. On December 22nd it asked a federal court for a ruling stating that a French court cannot hold an American- based company accountable for breaking French law. Nevertheless, the company has already, in effect, caved in by banning Nazi memorabilia from its auction sites. So whatever the American courts decide, the outcome will be new restrictions on Yahoo!'s American operations. The firms that will be easiest to regulate and restrict, and which will be subject to multiple jurisdictions, will be those with assets in several countries: big websites such as Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay. But this is nothing new, Mr Goldsmith argues: multinational companies have always faced multiple regulatory burdens. In addition, new technology will make it much easier to comply. Several start-ups such as Mercury2, MyCustoms.com and tariffic.com already offer services that automate the process of making sure that cross-border trade complies with all the various rules. For Michael Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami, all this represents a great irony about the Internet. What was supposed to be an anarchistic and liberating technology may in fact make the world less democratic, by forcing a huge increase in legal harmonisation. This will mostly be pursued by governments and vested interests banding together to enact multilateral treaties, which are difficult for national parliaments to scrutinise or change. The Hague convention and the cybercrime treaty are cases in point. If the online industry creates its own way of resolving disputes, this could take away jurisdiction from courts worldwide and eliminate existing legal rights. And the fact that the American government let a relatively unknown European organisation develop such an important agreement as the cybercrime treaty is a sign that Washington did not want it widely discussed. Although negotiations began three years ago, the treaty was made public only last April, in its 22nd draft. Only recently, therefore, were Internet advocacy groups able to get involved. To them, the treaty is a document that "threatens the rights of the individual while extending the power of police authorities." The treaty also exemplifies the risk that governments, especially democratic ones, run when they try to assert their authority in the online world. The legal tools and technologies they develop, though useful in that context, may well be abused not only by them but also by authoritarian governments. The means used by France to fight anti-Semitism on the web could also be used to prevent people living in less democratic countries from getting the information they need to strive for basic freedoms. Those aiming to preserve the Internet's freedom-loving character also have new technologies to deploy in their battle with government regulators. So-called peer-to-peer networks could make it more difficult to control content on the Internet. FreeNet, for instance, automatically spreads copies of documents all over the web, so that they no longer belong to one place. And SafeWeb will soon launch a service called "Triangle Boy" that allows netizens in democratic countries to turn their PCs into so-called proxy servers. These can then be used by surfers in China, Saudi Arabia or Vietnam to pierce through their countries' firewalls. On the Internet, the struggle between freedom and state control will rage for some time. But if recent trends in online regulation prove anything, it is that technology is being used by both sides in this battle and that freedom is by no means certain to win. The Internet could indeed become the most liberating technology since the printing press- but only if governments let it. Copyright 1995-2001 The Economist Newspaper Group Ltd. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From douglas Sun Jan 14 16:48:16 2001 From: douglas (Doug Schuler) Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 16:48:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: "High-Tech Snooping All in Day's Work" Message-ID: <200101150048.QAA09322@scn.org> "High-Tech Snooping All in Day's Work" Los Angeles Times (10/29/00) P. A1; Miller, Greg Many major companies are taking workplace surveillance to the next level by using computer forensics experts and software to uncover everything an employee has done on a workplace PC. Employers argue that the tools help them catch workers who use their office PCs for nefarious activities such as stealing sensitive company data and downloading pornography. Meanwhile, privacy experts worry that computer forensics will help companies pry into their workers' private lives. Computer forensics investigators, who replicate and scrutinize everything on a user's hard drive, admit that these searches often reveal information about workers' marital difficulties, health problems, and financial troubles. New programs such as Guidance Software's Encase are making it easier for forensics experts to quickly find incriminating material on hard drives. Encase copies a hard drive without any alterations and restores deleted files. The software then searches for illicit material and generates a report of its findings. Encase initially drew most of its business from law enforcement agencies, but private sector companies have increasingly embraced the software over the past year. Although privacy advocates object to monitoring employees in the workplace, companies have a nearly unrestricted right to do so. Monitoring now takes place at 45 percent of major U.S. companies, compared to 35 percent two years ago. Microsoft, Boeing, and Disney are among those using powerful computer forensics tools that were originally designed for law enforcement. http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20001029/t000103426.html For information regarding ACM's activities on behalf of privacy matters, visit http://www.acm.org/usacm/privacy. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From douglas Mon Jan 15 08:45:56 2001 From: douglas (Doug Schuler) Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 08:45:56 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Ooops Message-ID: <200101151645.IAA19198@scn.org> I wanted to let people on this list know that the abstract from the Los Anglese Time article on "High Tech Snooping" was from the ACM Tech News. I'm very sorry that I forgot to include the attribution! -- Doug * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Tue Jan 16 08:24:20 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 08:24:20 -0800 Subject: SCN: IM Message-ID: <3A640534.28870.198A4B8@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ========================= Why the FCC Failed Us by Giving AOL a Free Pass (Patrick Houston, ZDNet AnchorDesk)---Let me begin this debate by posing a hypothetical situation: You pick up the phone and dial long- distance -- only to encounter a fast busy signal. You try and try again. Finally, frustrated, you call the operator and ask, "What's wrong?" "Sorry," the operator replies. "But our service no longer works with any other carrier. You're only able to dial the customers on this system." Be honest now. What would you do? Let me guess. You'd rail and curse. You'd cancel the service right then and there. You'd phone your state's public utility commission, your Congressional representative and, no doubt, the Federal Communications Commission. So let me ask you this: What aren't you similarly up in arms about the FCC's failure to allow you to use the instant messaging service of your choice to communicate to your family, friends or associates who happen to be using an instant messaging service of their choice? This is precisely the situation we have right now. The reason for it is clear and concrete: AOL, which dominates the market with some 148 million registered IM users, steadfastly refuses to allow other services to interoperate with its own. It doesn't have to be this way. Or it didn't. The FCC had the opportunity to rectify this situation as part of process toward granting AOL approval to consummate its $106 billion merger with Time Warner. But it didn't. Instead it gave its thumb's up to the mega-deal last Friday in a quid pro quo that's all quid and no quo. Yes, it mandated interoperability - sort of. Under the FCC ruling AOL will indeed be required to open its service -- when, that is, the time comes for AOL to launch "advanced, IM-based high-speed services," a broadband-based form of IM that will make for a form of video- conferencing. The catch, however, is that AOL, by its own admission, has no plans for any such service. And I take scant comfort from the FCC's reasoning that it didn't want to take away AOL's "earned monopoly" in instant messaging. But that logic, the government had no right either to revoke the monopoly that AT&T "earned" in telecommunications. Please, someone -- anyone -- tell me the difference. For my part, I want instant messaging to work -- period -- without consideration to the software or service provider. And I take this stand for two reasons: Practicality. For me -- and a growing legion of users -- instant messaging isn't just another form of "chat." I use IM to communicate with colleagues every day whether they're down a floor or Down Under. In the swift-moving world of my work, one in which geography and distance have little meaning, IM has become an essential form of business communications, second only to e-mail. Principle. I would have sided with the FCC if AOL had "earned" instant messaging as its sole monopoly, and one upon which its entire fortune rested. But nothing could be further from the truth. As I pointed out in my Monday column, AOL Time Warner is a financial behemoth. It owns an unsurpassed wealth of content in the Information Age. And it holds, in the form of its cable and online assets, the golden geese to distribution. If this doesn't represent a frightening concentration of wealth and power that shouldn't be checked in more than a meager way, then what does? So I concur with Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Seamus McAteer when he told reporters Paul Festa and Stefanie Olsen that the FCC "gifted" AOL the IM market. The FCC caved. And we'll regret the day that it did. Copyright 2001 ZD Inc. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From douglas Wed Jan 17 11:13:17 2001 From: douglas (Doug Schuler) Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 11:13:17 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Don't Take Liberties With Our Genes! Free Public Lecture!!! Message-ID: <200101171913.LAA20449@scn.org> This event is next week in Olympia. Please pass around. Hope to see you there! -- Doug --- snip -------------------- ************************************************************** Please forward to interested people or lists -- particularly those in the health or legal fields. Thanks!! ************************************************************** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JANUARY 24TH, 2001 Contact: Doug Schuler, (206) (206) 634-0752 Free Public Lecture Don't Take Liberties With Our Genes! Wednesday January 24, 2001 6:00 - 7:30 PM Lecture Hall 5 The Evergreen State College Olympia, Washingon We are pleased to announce the next lecture in the 2001 Plato Lecture Series "Tech Threats: Exploring New Computer Enabled Challenges" which brings to light some of the possible downsides to the computer revolution. On January 24th 6-7:30 PM, Dr. Phil Bereano, Professor of Technology and Public Policy: College of Engineering, University of Washington, Board member of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), will lecture at The Evergreen State College on current threats to civil liberties due to genetic surveillance and data-banking. * Do computer systems threaten important values at the same time that they provide us with lots of goodies? Despite the dominant ideology in Western society, technologies are not value neutral. They usually facilitate the power of dominant classes and groups. Four views about technologies and social change will be presented and current US society ("corporate liberalism") will be analyzed in terms of its relationship to technological phenomena. The development of genetic technologies will be subjected to this view, especially as regards threats to civil liberties due to genetic surveillance and data-banking. * Research for the Human Genome Project while promising medical benefits, is sacrificing our privacy, and making eugenics more acceptable. The Plato Lecture series is made possible by royalties from Evergreen student and faculty software development. This lecture is sponsored by the "Community Information Systems" program at TESC. For more information on this program or the lecture, please contact Doug Schuler at (206) 634-0752 or via e-mail at dschuler at evergreen.edu. Upcoming Plato Lectures: Langdon Winner, starring in the Autonomous Professor Machine (tm) and Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish, an expose of cyber-libertarianism and dot-com greed. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Thu Jan 18 08:12:07 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 08:12:07 -0800 Subject: SCN: Self-organizing web sites Message-ID: <3A66A557.14405.6E2A83A@localhost> x-no-archive: yes =========================== Web Sites Begin to Self Organize (Katie Hafner, NY Times, excerpts)---Suzanne Cross, a 49-year-old paralegal in New Orleans with a passion for history, is a prolific writer for a Web site called The VinesNetwork, which bills itself as "the Encyclopedia of Everything, Built by Everyone." Articles on the site, covering dozens of different topics, are all written by members. Ms. Cross knows her writing is valued highly by other members of The Vines (www.thevines.com). In fact, she knows exactly how highly she is prized, because they give her grades. They rate each of her articles on a scale of 1 to 10. Ms. Cross consistently scores above 9.5, which puts her articles at the top of their category. As a result, she is featured more prominently on the site than lower- scoring writers. The Vines and similar sites for writers operate not as conventional publications might, with dozens of editors deciding what to publish. Everything that is submitted is published, and then the members' tastes determine what articles you can actually find without burrowing into the site in search of that 0.5 article on someone's theory about other universes. "It's really hard to find the really bad stuff on The Vines, said Eden Muir, a founder of the site. "It's designed to make the bad stuff disappear. It will be up for a little while, then it will sink like a stone." On the other hand, articles with the highest ratings bubble to the top, and aspiring writers like Ms. Cross, whose articles have also attracted notice from the outside world, are enjoying a level of recognition that might not have been possible without the Web. The Vines is an example of an emerging class of what are called self-organizing Web sites. Such sites are demonstrating that with a dab or two of well-written code and a bit of careful planning, a site can take a random collection of links or posts and turn them into a sophisticated, adaptive system. Articles submitted to The Vines are read and rated by members. Software handles the rest, putting the highest-rated articles at the top of their respective categories. Royalties are based on the popularity of the article. The Vines also holds periodic contests and awards cash prizes to the writers with the highest standing, using the automated ranking system. "The Web in 1996 didn't need to organize itself," said Joey Anuff, who is editor in chief of a new self-organizing site called Plastic.com. "But we have a Web now that's measured in billions of pages and millions of users, so any kind of mechanism that automatically imposes order becomes more useful and important." Most efforts at self-organization so far have been fairly simple, but effective. Several features on Amazon.com, like the list of authors with books similar to the one being viewed, take what could be a random database and develop relationships within it. The search site Google, which ranks a site depending on how many other sites have linked to it, is yet another example of self- organization at work. Sites for writers, like The Vines and others, are growing quickly, largely because of people's pent-up urge to pepper the world with their prose. The writers certainly aren't driven by money. Contributors to The Vines and other self-publishing sites are paid a nominal fee. Ms. Cross has been paid $50 so far for roughly 40,000 words. "Maybe someday it will amount to something," she said, "but I'm not planning retirement. I'm not even planning a dinner." More gratifying than the small payments is recognition from the outside world. On the strength of her articles on The Vines, Ms. Cross was recently asked to contribute a chapter to a book on ancient Rome, to be published in the spring by ibooks, a new imprint of Simon & Schuster. There is also plenty of potential for abuse on the writers' sites. Recruit a group of friends to award your writing four stars every 20 minutes or so for a few days, and your work is bound to drift to the top of the heap. But Themestream and other sites have developed methods for identifying so-called click circles, which consist of people who work to inflate one another's ratings. "We look for people who exhibit certain characteristics," said Bill Turpin, a founder of ThemeStream. "We measure the time between when you load the page and when you rate it, and if you rate everything good, with no variability in your ratings." The reverse can happen, too. Richard Bossi, a 42-year-old freelance writer and former chef in Folsom, Calif., contributes food-related articles to The Vines under the name ChefCayenne. His ratings are consistently high, but once in a while he will see one of his articles come under attack by what some Web writers call retalirators. "People will sink me to the bottom," Mr. Bossi said. "There's a lot of jealousy." Another form of adaptive Web site assigns ratings not to submissions themselves but to members' comments about the submissions. Slashdot, a three-year-old site for computer buffs that uses such a system, is the model for the new site Plastic.com. Slashdot operates with a minimum of human intervention yet gives visitors the opposite impression. Articles sent to Slashdot (slashdot.org) are culled from the Web. After passing an initial test of suitability, administered by a Slashdot editor, a contribution is posted, followed by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of comments from the site's 305,000 users. Once you have established yourself as a seasoned Slashdot user, the system will periodically assign you "moderator" status, a temporary position that carries with it the right to rate other members' comments on a scale of 0 to 5. Users can then browse through Slashdot using a quality filter. With the filter set to 3, for example, a visitor will see only those comments with a rating of 3 or higher. Slashdot members who receive high ratings also earn special privileges: their posts start out at a higher rating than usual, and they are more likely to be chosen as a moderator in the future. "This last privilege is a brilliant example of metafeedback at work," said Steven Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, 2001) and a vice president of Automatic Media, Plastic.com's parent company. "It's the ratings snake devouring its own tail," Mr. Johnson said. "Moderators rate posts, and those ratings are used to select future moderators." The most impressive aspect of the Slashdot system, Mr. Johnson said, is that it not only encourages high quality in submissions to the site, but it also sets up an environment where community leaders can naturally rise to the top. "It's interesting and powerful and it really works," Mr. Johnson said, adding that only the Internet could give rise to such a system. "It allows large groups of minds to get together and interact in a way they could never do before, in any other medium." Another self-organizing aspect of Slashdot is the fact that because nearly all of the site's content comes from its readers, its emphasis changes according to contributors' interests. "The subject matter we cover has changed over the last couple of years because what our readers are interested in has changed," said Jeff Bates, a Slashdot founder. Now, for instance, Mr. Bates said, the site carries far more articles about civil liberties than it did two years ago. "It's not a decision we made by sitting down in a smoky room and saying, `All right, we're going to be all about civil liberties now,' " Mr. Bates said. "But we all agreed, in some kind of Jungian collective unconscious way, that that topic was a big deal." Plastic.com, which made its official debut earlier this week, is very similar to Slashdot, but with a more general audience in mind. While Slashdot advertises itself as "News for Nerds," Plastic.com will cover politics, movies, technology, games, music and other topics. "We're trying to develop a system that can take the whole concept of news and figure out a way where the people who use the system can themselves decide what's interesting or not," said Mr. Anuff, who is also co-founder of Suck.com, a popular online magazine. "The end result will be a community-defined front page." A still purer example of a self-organizing site is Everything2.com, created a year ago by Nathan Oostendorp, 22, a Slashdot founder. Unlike Slashdot and Plastic.com, which draw heavily on news stories found on the Web, Everything2 more closely resembles writers' sites like The Vines, because it links only to other links within the site. Yet Everything2 works far more autonomously than sites like The Vines. The Everything2 software monitors traffic patterns and modifies itself accordingly, assigning higher status to the more popular links. Users can also collect "experience points" and vote on one another's posts. "It's this soup where people can drop in any little bit of information they want, like their favorite movies or directors or any other ideas," Mr. Anuff said, "and the only things they can link it to is other people's ideas in the same soup." At first glance, Everything2 appears to be a chaotic jumble of random discourse. Look a little more closely, however, and you will see an intricately interconnected conversation, touching on topics as diverse as the languages of India, MTV and melanoma treatments. "It's not really about anything in particular," said Mr. Oostendorp, whose site has about 2,000 users a day. "The only thing that's there is the system. Here's an open database with these rules functioning, and if you come in and spend time on it, you can gain prestige and reputation within the system, and that's an attractor to a lot of people." Web sites with mechanisms for self-filtering, self-ranking and self- organization are very likely to continue to grow in number. "This is a fundamental shift in the Web's evolution," said Mr. Johnson, at Automatic Media. "The first generation of the Web was individual interactivity. And now, after a period of distraction, it's getting back to the roots of the idea of interactivity." But this time, he added, the interactivity is collective. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Thu Jan 18 08:58:59 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 08:58:59 -0800 Subject: SCN: Copy protection Message-ID: <3A66B053.24077.70D94F3@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================== by David Coursey, Executive Editor, ZDNet AnchorDesk To: Steve Ballmer, President/CEO, Microsoft Re: Stupid Copy Protection Schemes Let me make sure I understand this: Now that Microsoft has beaten back all the competition -- using what a U.S. District Court judge says are monopoly tactics -- the company is pressing ahead with an anti-piracy scheme aimed at casual copying? Like people buying a new PC for their home and wanting to run Office on it? Brace yourself, Steve. People are already kicking up. And if there hasn't been a bigger outcry it's only because most people haven't run into your new Product Activation technology, currently only shipping on the current retail release of Office2000 (SR-1) in the United States and six other countries. But as more programs -- and your next-generation "Whistler" operating system -- get copy protection, the screaming will rapidly take on the tenor of the Napster users vs. the recording industry fight (i.e. "Aren't you pigs rich enough already?"). Especially when Microsoft revenue goes through the roof, as I would expect it to do if even a moderate percentage of pirated software goes legit. Of course, the real criminals will find a way around this -- they always seem to -- meaning it's the little guys who will bear the brunt of your anti-piracy campaign. Don't get me wrong. People should pay for software and if Microsoft didn't charge a small fortune for a new copy of Office we might not be having this discussion. Individuals, companies and countries that are illegally copying software -- for profit -- should be stopped. But with the Office Standard Edition selling for $450, I wonder how many families will purchase one to go with their third PC? My understanding is that since your license only allows two installations -- intended for a single owner's PC and laptop -- that additional installations require purchase of a new copy of the software. So while I fully support Microsoft's right to copy protect, I think wide- scale copy protection looks better on paper than it will in the marketplace. Never mind the bellyaching from users like me. Doesn't this play right into the government's argument that Microsoft needs to be broken up? People have been making copies of Microsoft Office for as long as the product suite has existed. These illegal copies -- in homes, offices, and on portables -- doubtless make up a significant part of the installed base. But the equation has worked to Microsoft's advantage. They may also have been responsible for making Office the standard it has become. Let me explain: If Microsoft had instituted copy protection before WordPerfect and Lotus were effectively eliminated from the marketplace, your penetration would have been limited or a price war would have ensued. My bet is MS Office would still have emerged on top, but with a significantly smaller share of the marketplace. And you'd still have Lotus and WordPerfect to factor into your plans. Having earned your market dominance atop illegal copies, and then having used that position to quash competitors, it strikes me as a tad disingenuous for Microsoft to bring on copy protection at such a late date. The only way you will get away with this is by drastically lowering prices. It is easy to justify the illegal copies of Office that exist today -- especially in homes -- because the program is so expensive. If Office cost $99-a-copy people would feel a lot better about paying up. At that price a yearly subscription with better customer support options probably becomes viable. BUT IF YOU leave the price alone and just make it impossible for people to make copies they feel they need, people will perceive you as even more of a "bad guy" company than they already do. It will also give competitors like WordPerfect, Lotus, and Sun's StarOffice freeware a real lift. Since you will also copy protect operating systems, and given my almost universally bad experience upgrading from the old OS to the next-big-thing, I'd imagine customers will just learn to live with the OS they have. Likewise the application upgrades, which will have to meet an even tougher standard if people really have to pay for all the copies they need. Is Microsoft really ready to stagnate the market in exchange for copy protection? Logic tells me this is just the first stage in a plan that's hatching in Redmond. Is this supposed to make us happy software subscribers once your Microsoft.Net software-as-a-service program becomes real? Does this mean Microsoft is giving up on upgrade revenue because it's too hard to create upgrades people will really pay for? Is this some sort of positioning for a post-break-up Microsoft? Anyway, I'd love to hear from you on this. I'm sure AnchorDesk readers would like an explanation, too. By the way, feel free to make as many copies of this as you wish to pass around. Copyright 2001 ZD Inc. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Fri Jan 19 09:48:00 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 09:48:00 -0800 Subject: SCN: Filter fight Message-ID: <3A680D50.25956.352173@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ====================== Free-Speech Advocates Fight Filtering Software in Public Schools (Carl S. Kaplan, NY Times)---One month after Congress passed a law pressuring public schools and libraries to install blocking or filtering software on computer terminals to screen out Internet smut, three free-speech powerhouses are gearing up to slay the measure in federal court. "This law requires, for the first time in the nation's history, that local libraries censor speech for every adult and every child. That's got to present First Amendment problems," said Chris Hansen, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to the new federal statute, known as the "Children's Internet Protection Act." Hansen said that the A.C.L.U. will file a lawsuit within two months attacking the constitutionality of the law, possibly in federal district court in Philadelphia. He said the lawsuit's named plaintiffs will include several libraries, library patrons (adults and possibly children) and Web site publishers. Philadelphia is a charmed city for the civil liberties union. In recent years, the group successfully challenged in federal court there two other laws aimed at restricting online sexual content: the Communications Decency Act and the Children's Online Protection Act. Portions of the decency act were ultimately struck down in 1997 by the United States Supreme Court in a landmark cyberlaw case, Reno v. A.C.L.U. More recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, affirmed a lower court ruling that Children's Online Protectgion Act violated the First Amendment. The government is weighing an appeal to the Supreme Court in that case. In addition to the A.C.L.U.'s planned legal campaign, the executive board of the American Library Association gave the green light earlier this week to a lawsuit against the new filtering law, according Judith Krug, director of the library group's office for intellectual freedom. The library association, which strongly opposes library filtering schemes, participated in the widely-publicized legal challenge to the Communications Decency Act. Krug said the library group's suit would likely be separate from the A.C.L.U.'s, although the two lawsuits could later be consolidated by the courts. Meanwhile, the People for the American Way Foundation, another civil liberties group, is planning a legal attack on the new law as well, according to Larry Ottinger, a senior staff attorney for the organization. The group, along with the A.C.L.U., successfully defeated a mandatory library filtering policy in Loudoun, Va., in 1998. The law in question, spearheaded through Congress by Senator John McCain and signed by President Clinton last month, is complex. But in simple terms it requires public libraries that receive E-rate funds -- money from a federal program that subsidizes Internet and other telecommunications expenses -- to install some sort of technology on computer terminals used by adults to block Internet access to visual images that are obscene or depict child pornography. For library computer terminals used by children under age 17, libraries have to screen out these two categories of material plus a third one: visual material that is "harmful to minors," such as sexually-explicit images without social or educational value that are obscene for children but legally protected for adults. Under the new law, a library staff member has authority to unblock any computer for a patron's legitimate research purposes. The law imposes an identical scheme of Internet blocking requirements and exceptions for public schools that use E-rate funds. School and library administrators are free to decide which filtering or blocking system best fits their community standards and local needs. Backers of the law point to the increased use of the Internet by children and the corresponding need for schools and libraries to embrace front-line protection policies. "While schools and libraries across the country increasingly use the Internet as a learning tool, we need to ensure that pervasive obscene and violent material is screened out and that our children are protected," Senator McCain said in a prepared statement last month after the law was passed. "This legislation allows local communities to decide what technology they want to use and what to filter out so that our children's minds aren't polluted." Opponents say that although the law's intentions may be laudable, it nonetheless tramples on important constitutional rights. The American Civil Liberties Union seems to be furthest along in its legal preparation for the lawsuit. In an interview, Hansen sketched out the lines of his group's planned legal assault, which will focus on the law's filtering scheme for libraries. He said the said the A.C.L.U. has not yet decided whether to challenge the school-based filtering program. Schools, he conceded, have a legally recognized teaching function and quasi-parental function that public libraries don't have. Working with Hansen on the brief will be Ann Beeson, staff counsel for the A.C.L.U. and a veteran of past Internet speech cases, and possibly some private lawyers participating on a pro bono basis. In Hansen's eyes, the law is flawed for many reasons. For one thing, he said, it is subject to the high standard of "strict scrutiny" under the First Amendment and thus can only survive if it is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and is narrowly drawn to achieve that end. Even assuming that there is a compelling and real state interest at stake -- which Hansen said he doubts -- he asserted that the law is not narrowly tailored. Filtering software by its nature will always "over block" protected speech that is "not even in the ballpark" of sexually explicit material, he said, recalling that in the Loudoun library filtering case of 1998 the court found that the software program used by the library blocked such innocuous sites as the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy and a Quaker home page. There's a different type of over blocking that Hansen is worried about as well. Obscene speech is speech that has been declared obscene by a court, he said. "A policeman can't walk into a bookstore and seize all the books he thinks are obscene. The cop has to buy one book, take it to court and get the judge to declare it obscene," Hansen said. Yet no filtering software is designed to block out sites that local courts have declared to be obscene. Another First Amendment problem with the law is that it relies on "automatic censorship" by software filters, which are programmed by employees at commercial companies, Hansen said. "We think these kind of judgments need to be made by judges," he said. Because filtering lists maintained by companies are secret and there are no adequate procedures for appealing blocking decisions, the law is an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech, Hansen said. Beyond the First Amendment issues, Hansen sees other flaws. Many people who use libraries for Internet access are those not rich enough to own a home computer, he observed. The law's effect would therefore be to create a kind of second- class passport to the Internet for these citizens, many of whom may be minorities. "That may be a violation of the equal protection clause" of the Constitution, he said. Finally, although the new law "pays lip service" to local control of filtering decisions, Hansen said, the statue in essence "requires a uniform, national book-removal policy." That creates a "federalism problem," he explained, adding that there are certain situations where the federal government does not have the authority to impose requirements on local communities. David Crane, a staffer at the Senate Commerce Committee who helped shepherd the new law through Congress, is quick to predict that the statute will pass constitutional muster. As a general matter, he took issue with those who characterize the law as a form of government censorship. He maintained that it is a lawful funding statute that places reasonable conditions on those who accept E-rate monies. "If the government passes a criminal statute, it is mandating that people behave in a certain way," he said. "In this case, it's a voluntary program. The school or library can choose not to take the money" and not be part of the program, he said. Rebutting the A.C.L.U. charge that filtering software blocks more than it should, Crane said that "to make that categorical statement is reckless and irresponsible." He said that the Commerce Committee heard testimony from software manufacturers that pinpoint filtering was feasible. Crane also disagreed with the claim that the law gives rise to automated blocking. He said that under the law, local school and library administrators were responsible for putting a filtering policy into place, based on local standards, and for choosing the appropriate software tools. "The community is making all these decisions," he said. "There is no prior restraint." One thing the opposing sides agree upon is that any lawsuit filed in Philadelphia won't end there. "We anticipated a legal challenge and the law itself provides for expedited review," said Crane. "The final arbiter on this will be the Supreme Court." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Fri Jan 19 13:58:31 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 13:58:31 -0800 Subject: SCN: Hotmail Message-ID: <3A684807.20286.11A8632@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================== Hotmail trashes users' e-mail: Microsoft defends its aggressive efforts to curb spam, even when it means filtering messages sent by ordinary Hotmail users. (Lisa M. Bowman, ZDNet News)---Ben Johnson has been sending e- mail for months from his Hotmail account. But he just discovered that some of his messages were diverted to the trash before arriving at their destination. Johnson, 24, is among the millions of customers caught in the crossfire of a battle over spam. For at least five months, some Hotmail customers' outgoing mail has been blocked. In an apparently overzealous attempt to prevent spam, Microsoft's Hotmail has been discarding e-mail sent to and from sites hosted by controversial Internet service providers--even if the sites themselves were not controversial. What's more, Hotmail didn't tell people that some outgoing mail was being discarded. Instead, it said the error was because of a problem connecting to the recipient--a practice that has particularly alarmed some customers. "If Microsoft, one of the largest technology companies, can say who we send e-mail to, that really puts constraints on freedom of speech in the U.S." said Johnson, an information technology worker at a major Illinois hospital. Microsoft defended its actions, saying it's only trying to prevent spam. "MSN has been very aggressive and proactive in protecting our MSN Hotmail users from spam," Sarah Lefko, MSN product manager, said in an e-mail, noting that the company will review blocked sites on a case-by-case basis if a complaint is filed. The quagmire illustrates the challenges of trying to prevent spam while preserving free speech. After all, no one wants an in-box crammed with unsolicited porn and bogus plans to work from home for millions of dollars. E-mail services are struggling to find a fair way to prevent that from happening. Still, to subscribers such as Johnson, the practice of blocking outgoing mail is extreme. "It's like killing a fly with a shotgun," he said. The controversy stems from Hotmail's membership in the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), an organization formed to crack down on spam. MAPS is the keeper of the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), a list of ISPs known to host some major spammers. However, many of those ISPs also host sites that don't send spam, and those sites often are blocked, too. MAPS hopes the practice will convince legitimate sites to abandon hosts that cater to spammers. For example, ISP Media3 Technologies is listed on the RBL because it hosts half a dozen spammers. However, it also hosts sites such as Peacefire.org, which alerted members this week that Hotmail users have been unable to reach it for five months. After Peacefire protested, mail to the organization was allowed to continue earlier this week. Other companies besides Hotmail also may be blocking outgoing mail, but because they don't always notify customers, it's difficult to determine whether it's happening unless someone complains. When a company signs onto MAPS, it has several options to control spam. It can use a method that compares each incoming message with a list of ISPs on the RBL. Or it can choose another, more sweeping approach that blocks e-mail, both incoming and outgoing, at the network borders. Companies also can tailor their systems to block only certain sites or just incoming mail. Hotmail apparently chose the most restrictive method. Kelly Thompson, MAPS' RBL project manager, said most companies choose the least severe technique. Thompson acknowledged that blocking outgoing mail might be a little extreme, but given the huge load of spam that major services such as Hotmail must deal with, "they have the right to be as strict as they want." Angry e-mail users The idea behind blocking outgoing mail is to ensure that people don't reply to spammers, who often offer recipients a fake option of unsubscribing from their list. Instead of removing people, spammers use the incoming messages as a signal that an e-mail address is an active one where they can send more spam. Still, Web-based e-mail users are angry. Kyle McCowin, a 21-year-old student, first learned of the blocks when he was alerted by Peacefire earlier this week. He said he could understand blocking incoming mail, but the move to block outgoing mail disturbed him. "I was caught completely by surprise," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, there's no need to block outgoing mail." McCowin also wishes Hotmail had made it more clear that it was discarding some of the messages he sent. "They just sort of pocket the e-mail and don't even tell you about it," he said. Microsoft ran into a similar spam-related problem three years ago when it tried to block unwanted e-mails by filtering out incoming messages from Outlock 98 that contained certain phrases or grammar, such as a string of exclamation points or the words "for free." As a result, many people found that they never received messages from friends who were fond of multiple punctuation marks. MAPS already has stirred plenty of controversy in its attempt to balance free speech rights with spam control. In August, the organization was sued by Harris Interactive, which claimed it was being unjustly blocked. The suit was later dismissed. ISPs Exactis and Media3, which hosts Peacefire, have filed similar suits. Media3 lost the first round in its court battle Jan. 2, when a federal judge in Boston denied the company's request to be taken off the list. Copyright 2001 ZD Inc. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From xi11101 at address.com Sat Jan 20 20:50:19 2001 From: xi11101 at address.com (XVA International) Date: 20 Jan 01 20:50:19 PST Subject: No subject Message-ID: <20010121045019.16931.qmail@twdvg004.cms.usa.net> WOULD YOU STUFF ENVELOPES FOR $1,000'S WEEKLY? $2 For Each Envelope You Stuff SIMPLE, PLEASANT WORK YOU CAN DO AT HOME!!! HELP SOLVE YOUR MONEY PROBLEMS. No more worries over inflation, recession, bills, rising gasoline and other costs. If you are looking for easy extra income, to relieve financial pressures, you owe it to yourself to investigate our offer. HERE IS YOUR CHANCE to earn extra money working at home by becoming an active participant of our successful mailing association. 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Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery of your starter kit. This message is sent in compliance of the new e-mail bill: SECTION 301. Per Section 301, Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S. 1618. Further transmissions to you by the sender of this email may be stopped at no cost to you by sending a reply to this email with the word "remove" in the subject line. ____________________________________________________________________ Get Free Internet Access and WebEmail at http://www.address.com Click on this link http://www.address.com/giveaways/free.asp for great offers. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Mon Jan 22 11:33:46 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 11:33:46 -0800 Subject: SCN: Spam Message-ID: <3A6C1A9A.19017.2BC0A79@localhost> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 5091 bytes Desc: not available URL: From david.keyes at ci.seattle.wa.us Mon Jan 22 13:25:40 2001 From: david.keyes at ci.seattle.wa.us (David Keyes) Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 13:25:40 -0800 Subject: SCN: New Seattle Cable Franchise hearing Wed.- Internet testimony taken Message-ID: (Please forward to others who may be interested - David) HEARING ON NEW CITY-WIDE CABLE FRANCHISE ACCEPTING TESTIMONY LIVE OVER INTERNET THIS WEDNESDAY 1/24/01 When: Wednesday, January 24, 5:30 p.m. Where: Council Chambers, 600 - 4th Avenue, 11th Floor http://www.cityofseattle.net/cable http://www.cityofseattle.net/tvsea/live.ram Email: george.allen at ci.seattle.wa.us Councilmember Jim Compton, Chair of the Seattle City Council Public Safety and Technology Committee, will preside at a public hearing on the application of Western Integrated Networks for a city-wide cable television franchise. In addition to taking comments from those who attend the hearing, testimony will be taken live over the internet via personal computer. The hearing will also be aired live over the internet via streamed television. Some discussion of the issues associated with the Council's decision will occur, before testimony is taken, by Councilmembers, a representative of the Citizen's Technology Advisory Board, staff from the City's Cable Office, and representatives of Western Integrated Networks. Those attending the hearing - in person or via the internet - will be invited to submit questions to the panelists. About the opportunity for a new cable franchise in Seattle, Compton observed, "The issue here is that competition should improve service and get costs down for Seattle's many cable users. The addition of a new cable franchise - perhaps this one - will open the door wider for Seattle to stride into leadership in the whole arena of communications technology." The hearing will be broadcast live over TVSea on Channel 21, and can also be viewed live on the internet at http://www.cityofseattle.net/tvsea/live.ram Testimony can be given in person at the hearing or via e-mail during its broadcast. E-mails should be directed to george.allen at ci.seattle.wa.us Copies of Western Integrated Networks' draft franchise agreement may be viewed on the internet at http://cityofseattle.net/cable Copies may also be reviewed at the City's Office of Cable Communications, 810 Third Avenue, Suite 442, Seattle. Written comments will be accepted up until 5:00 p.m., January 31, 2001, and should be addressed to Jim Compton, Chair, Public Safety and Technology Committee, 11th Floor Municipal Building, 600 Fourth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104, or via e-mail to George Allen at george.allen at ci.seattle.wa.us David Keyes Community Technology Planner City of Seattle Department of Information Technology (206) 386-9759 david.keyes at ci.seattle.wa.us 710 Second Ave. #450 Seattle, WA 98104 USA Fax (206) 684-0911 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From douglas Mon Jan 22 14:12:34 2001 From: douglas (Doug Schuler) Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 14:12:34 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Know anybody suitable? Message-ID: <200101222212.OAA01635@scn.org> -- I can't remember whether I sent this last (final?!) query out If I did, please accept my apologies! -- Please excuse this mailing which may not be directly relevant to your interests. I'm helping The Evergreen State College find some extraordinary people to teach in what I consider to be an exciting environment. (Yes I am a booster -- unabashed!) YOU CAN HELP EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT PERSONALLY INTERESTED! Please send this note on to any person (or e-list) whom you think might be interested. I know that there are people out there who would be perfect for these positions and you might be able to help find them. The pay -- I'll be the first to admit -- is less than jobs in the software industry but the teaching jobs are REWARDING and FUN. Really! (Also please excuse the caps -- the keys seem to be stickingI ) If you think that YOU might be interested please call or e-mail. Also please check the Evergreen web site -- http://www.evergreen.edu. Evergreen is a public, non-traditional liberal arts college in Olympia, Washington, south of Seattle, that is consistently is named by US News and World Report as the best public, liberal arts college in the west. Evergreen emphasizes intensive interdisciplinary study and collaborative team teaching. There is a lot of room to be creative! (further information is available at http://www.evergreen.edu/facultyhiring or from me, Doug Schuler, at dschuler at evergreen.edu) ------------------------------------- REGULAR HALF TIME POSITIONS IN PART-TIME STUDIES This is a for a person who will be a regular faculty member but work half-time (evenings and weekends). They will receive 100% health insurance. One Half-time Position in software engineering / computer science in Part-Time Studies. We seek a software engineer, developer, or computer scientist to teach the systematic development of software in half-time interdisciplinary programs. Ability to teach all aspects of software development -- including requirements, specification, analysis, design (including rapid prototyping), programming, testing, communication and documentation is required. Candidates able to teach participatory design techniques are highly desirable. Knowledge about the history and social context of computing and the theoretical issues related to software engineering is highly desirable. Candidates must be able to teach databases, programming languages, and operating systems. Candidates must be able to teach and design half-time (8 credit) interdisciplinary offerings for a wide population of undergraduate part-time students in the evenings and/or on weekends. VISITING FACULTY POSITIONS We are looking for a person who can teach Foundations of Computing for the academic year 2001-2002. This position is half-time (weekends and evenings). If you are willing to teach for one or two quarters of this sequence we still would like to hear from you. One Full-time Position in computer science for the academic year 2001-02 to co-teach the Student Originated Software program. SOS is a full-time (16 credit) program that focuses on the development of software for a client in the "real world." The candidate should be a practitioner who has had experience writing applications beyond academia. A Ph.D. OR at least 5 years experience as a programmer and system developer is required. Someone who has experience designing and producing systems written in object-oriented languages is preferred. A liberal arts background in addition to technical skills is preferred. APPLICATION PROCEDURES -- the not so fine print To apply for visiting or adjunct positions, send the following materials: * curriculum vitae, chronologically ordered * letter of application that highlights qualifications for the position * evaluations by students (if available) To apply for the half-time regular position, please contact the Faculty Hiring Coordinator as we will need additional materials. Please indicate clearly, which position you are applying for. Finalists may be asked to submit additional materials. Address application and inquiries to Faculty Hiring Coordinator, The Evergreen State College, L-2211, Olympia, WA 98505, call (360) 866-6000, ext. 6861 (voice) or TDD line at (360) 866-6834, or email blodgetd@ evergreen.edu. Review of completed applications has begun and will continue until finalists are selected. The College reserves the right to extend searches or not offer positions advertised. All position offers are contingent on funding. Persons with disabilities can receive accommodations in the hiring process by contacting the Hiring Coordinator. Committed to equal opportunity and affirmative action, TESC is working to build a diverse, broadly-trained faculty and particularly encourages applications from candidates whose race, national origin, sex, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status or physical disability will contribute to our diversity. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From bf229 at scn.org Tue Jan 23 13:43:32 2001 From: bf229 at scn.org (SCN User) Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 13:43:32 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: recalled medicine containing PPA* Message-ID: [always double check this stuff] Praying "that getting from one place to another leaves you smiling and that laughter is constant companion to physical serenity. Truly, M.R. --------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 17:02:53 -0800 Subject: Fwd: FW: Medicines Message-ID: <128821480.1.334 at fe03.goplay.com> >> >> CVS has removed all products containing this >>chemical from their shelves. >>Stop taking anything containing this ingredient. It has been >>linked to increased hemorrhagic stroke(bleeding in brain) among women ages 18-49 in the three days after starting use of medication. Problems were not found in men, but the FDA recommended that everyone (even children>seek alternative medicine. >> >>The following medications contain (*) Phenylpropanolamine: >> > * Alka-Seltzer Plus Children's Cold Medicine Effervescent >> > * Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold medicine (cherry or orange) >> > * Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Medicine Original >> > * Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold & Cough Medicine Effervescent >> > * Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold & Flu Medicine Effervescent >> > * Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold & Sinus Effervescent >> > * Alka Seltzer Plus Night-Time cold Medicine Effervescent >> > * BC Allergy Sinus Cold Powder >> > * BC Sinus Cold Powder >> > * Comtrex Deep Chest Cold & Congestion Relief >> > * Comtrex Flu Therapy & Fever Relief Day & Night >> > * Contac 12-Hour Cold Capsules >> > * Contac 12 Hour Caplets >> > * Coricidin D Cold, Flu & Sinus >> > * Dimetapp Cold & Allergy Chewable Tablets >> > * Dimetapp Cold & Cough Liqui-Gels >> > * Dimetapp DM cold & Cough Elixir >> > * Dimetapp Elixir >> > * Dimetapp 4 Hour Liqui Gels >> > * Dimetapp 4 Hour Tablets >> > * Dimetapp 12 Hour Extentabs Tablets >> > * Naldecon DX Pediatric Drops >> > * Permathene Mega-16 >> > * Robitussin CF >> > * Tavist-D 12 Hour Relief of Sinus & Nasal Congestion >> > * Triaminic DM Cough Relief >> > * Triaminic Expectorant Chest & Head Congestion >> > * Triaminic Syrup Cold & Allergy >> > * Triaminic Triaminicol Cold & Cough >> > * Acutrim Diet Gum Appetite Suppressant Plus Diary Supplements >> > * Acutrim Maximum Strength Appetite Control >> > * Dexatrim Caffeine Free >> > * Dexatrim Extended Duration >> > * Dexatrim Gelcaps >> > * Dexatrim Vitamin C/Caffeine Free >> >> Please discard any of these medications as soon as possible! >> >>Especially relevant re children: >>Subject: Triaminic Is being pulled off store shelves >> >>In a call to the 800# for Triaminic, they are voluntarily recalling the following medicines because of a certain ingredient that is causing strokes and seizures in children. >> > Orange = Cold & Allergy >> > Cherry (Pink) = Cold & Cough >> > Berry = Cough Relief >> > Yellow = Expectorant >> >>They are asking you to call them at 800-548-3708 with the lot number on the box so they can send you postage for you to send it back to them, and they will also issue you a refund. If you know of anyone else with small children, please pass this on. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From sharma at aa.net Wed Jan 24 18:18:33 2001 From: sharma at aa.net (Sharma) Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 18:18:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: (misc.) The Crackdown on Dissent, etc. (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 17:52:54 -0800 From: "getmelissa at uswest.net" To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: (misc.) The Crackdown on Dissent, etc. message #1: ============================= The Nation, Friday, January 19, 2001. The Crackdown on Dissent by Abby Scher Over the past year, the US government has intensified its crackdown on political dissidents opposing corporate globalization, and it is using the same intimidating and probably unconstitutional tactics against demonstrators at the presidential inauguration. With the Secret Service taking on extraordinary powers designed to combat terrorism, undercover operatives are spying on protesters' planning meetings, while police are restricting who is allowed on the parade route and are planning a massive search effort of visitors. One activist who has had experience with how the DC police handle demonstrators is Rob Fish, a cheerful young man with the Student Environmental Action Coalition profiled in a recent Sierra magazine cover story on the new generation of environmentalists. If you were watching CNN during the protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, in April, you would have seen Fish, 22, beaten, bloody and bandaged after an attack by an enraged plainclothes officer who also tried to destroy the camera with which Fish was documenting police harassment. Fish is a plaintiff in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for Civil Justice against the DC police and a long list of federal agencies including the FBI. This suit--along with others in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, where the party conventions were held in August; in Detroit, which declared a civil emergency during the June Organization of American States meeting across the border in Windsor, Ontario; and in Seattle--is exposing a level of surveillance and disruption of political activities not seen on the left since the FBI deployed its dirty tricks against the Central American solidarity movement during the 1980s. Among police agencies themselves this is something of an open secret. In the spring the US Attorney's office bestowed an award on members of the Washington, DC, police department for their "unparalleled" coordination with other police agencies during the IMF protests. "The FBI provided valuable background on the individuals who were intent on committing criminal acts and were able to impart the valuable lessons learned from Seattle," the US Attorney declared. Civil liberties lawyers say the level of repression--in the form of unwarranted searches and surveillance, unprovoked shootings and beatings, and pre-emptive mass arrests criminalizing peaceful demonstrators--violates protesters' rights of free-speech and association. "It's political profiling," said Jim Lafferty, director of the National Lawyers Guild's Los Angeles office, which is backing lawsuits coming out of the Los Angeles protests. "They target organizers. It's a new level of crackdown on dissent." In Washington in April and at the Republican National Convention protest in Philadelphia last summer, the police rounded up hundreds of activists in pre-emptive arrests and targeted and arrested on trumped-up charges those they had identified as leaders. Once many of those cases appeared in Philadelphia court, they were dismissed because the police could offer no reason for the arrests. In December the courts dismissed all charges against sixty-four puppet-making activists arrested at a warehouse. A month before, prosecutors had told the judge they were withdrawing all fourteen misdemeanor charges against Ruckus Society head John Sellers for lack of evidence. These were the same charges--including possession of an instrument of a crime, his cell phone--that police leveled against Sellers to argue for his imprisonment on $1 million bail this past August. A major question posed by the lawsuits is whether the federal government trained local police to violate the free-speech rights of protesters like Sellers and Fish. The FBI held seminars for local police in the protest cities on the lessons of the Seattle disorders to help them prepare for the demonstrations. It has also formed "joint terrorism task forces" in twenty-seven of its fifty-six divisions, composed of local, state and federal law-enforcement officers, aimed at suppressing what it sees as domestic terrorism on the left and on the right. "We want to be proactive and keep these things from happening," Gordon Compton, an FBI spokesman, told the Oregonian in early December after public-interest groups called for the city to withdraw from that region's task force. The collaboration of federal and local police harks back to the height of the municipal Red Squads, renamed "intelligence units" in the postwar period. During the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover and his illegal Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the FBI relied on these local police units and even private right-wing spy groups for information about antiwar and other activists. The FBI then used the information and its own agents provocateurs to disrupt the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Puerto Rican nationalists and others during the dark days of COINTELPRO and after that program was exposed in 1971. Local citizen action won curbs on Red Squad activity throughout the country in the seventies and eighties after scandals revealed political surveillance of the ACLU, antiwar and civil rights activists, among others. While Chicago police recently won a court case to resume their spying, elsewhere police are evading restrictions by having other police agencies spy for them. In Philadelphia four state police officers who claimed they were construction workers from Wilkes-Barre infiltrated the "convergence" space where the activists were making puppets and otherwise preparing for demonstrations against the Republican convention. State police (who also monitored activists' Internet organizing) initially said they were working with the Philadelphia police department, which was barred in 1987 from political spying without special permission. And in New York last spring, police apparently violated a 1985 ban on sharing intelligence when it helped Philadelphia police monitor and photograph NYC anarchists at a May Day demonstration. "We have local Washington, DC, authorities in Philadelphia--I see no role for them there except fingering people who were in lawful demonstrations in DC," says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of Partnership for Civil Justice, who is representing the activists in the DC lawsuit. Environmental activist Fish ran into a sergeant from the Morristown, New Jersey, police department at demonstration after demonstration. The sergeant had helped the neighboring Florham Park, New Jersey, police handle a small protest against a Brookings Institution session with the World Bank on April 1, where Fish had assisted in a dramatic banner hanging. At the May Day protest in New York, "much to my surprise," he ran into not just the Morristown officer but "the whole crew" he had seen in DC a few weeks before, including officers from DC and Philadelphia, and now even someone from the Drug Enforcement Administration. "They knew all about me being beat up in DC and that my camera was lost," he said. In DC they had revealed that they knew he'd been to a Ruckus Society training in Florida during spring break. They were very open about who they were, some handing Fish their business cards. Capt. Peter Demitz, the Morristown police officer, explained in a recent interview that he traveled to demonstrations using funds from a program set up by the Justice Department after the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Attorney General Janet Reno "felt that civil disorder and demonstrations would be the most active since the Vietnam War. She said police officers should learn from each other, so there's more money for observing," said Demitz. According to Verheyden-Hilliard, the coordination among police agencies "becomes a problem when it's being used to chill people's political speech--it's being used in a way to silence people." Letting activists know they are under surveillance is also a time-honored tactic of local intelligence units and the FBI. "I see several different components of COINTELPRO, from conspicuous surveillance, spreading fear of infiltration, preventive detention and false stories to the press," says Brian Glick, a Fordham University law professor and author of War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It. Among the police actions that worry civil libertarians: *Police raids of demonstrators' gathering spaces. In DC, saying there was a fire threat, the police, fire department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms kicked everyone out of the convergence space, arrested the "leaders" and seized puppets and political materials. The ACLU prevented a similar raid on the convergence center in Los Angeles during the Democratic convention by winning an injunction from a federal judge, who warned the police that they could not even investigate building or fire-code violations without federal court approval. *False stories to the press. In statements later proved to be false, police in Washington and Philadelphia said they found the makings of dangerous weapons in convergence centers. DC police announced they had found a Molotov cocktail but later admitted it was a plastic soda bottle stuffed with rags. Similarly, the makings of "pepper spray," police admitted later, were actually peppers, onions and other vegetables found in the kitchen area, while "ammunition" seized in an activist's home consisted of empty shells on a Mexican ornament. Philadelphia police also reported "dangerous" items in activists' puppet-making material. Such false statements were intended to discredit the protesters and discourage people from supporting them, civil liberties lawyers argue. *Rounding up demonstrators on trumped-up charges. In Philadelphia on August 1, police arrested seventy activists working in the convergence space called the puppet warehouse on conspiracy and obstruction-of-traffic charges. They justified the raid, which the ACLU called one of the largest instances of preventive detention in US history, in a warrant that drew on an obscure far-right newsletter funded by millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife claiming that the young people were funded by communist groups and therefore dangerous. On April 15, Washington police rounded up 600 demonstrators marching against the prison-industrial complex, picking up tourists in the process. Police held them on buses for sixteen hours. *List-making. The BBC reported that the Czech government received from the FBI a list of activists that it used in stopping Americans from entering for anti-IMF demonstrations in Prague in September. A journalist interviewed two such Americans who said they had no criminal record but had been briefly held and released in Seattle during the 1999 anti-WTO protests. MacDonald Scott, a Canadian paralegal doing legal support, estimates from border-crossing records that Canada turned away about 500 people during the OAS meetings last June. *Political profiling. On May 1 the NYPD rounded up peacefully demonstrating anarchists with covered faces under a nineteenth-century anti-Klan law, in addition to a few other barefaced anarchist-looking activists. *Unconstitutional bail amounts. Philadelphia law enforcement sought what lawyers are calling unconstitutionally high bail, most famously the $1 million bail against John Sellers of the Ruckus Society (which a judge lowered to a still-high $100,000). *Brutal treatment. In Philadelphia and Washington, activists were held for excessive lengths of time, not informed of their full rights or given access to their lawyers, and were hogtied with plastic handcuffs attaching their wrists to their ankles. Philadelphia activists in particular reported brutal treatment while in police custody, but in every city demonstrators suffered from police assault on the streets. Whether and how the Justice Department or the FBI plotted strategies for cracking down on protesters is the type of information that is often only revealed by chance or long after the fact. COINTELPRO was famously exposed in 1971 when activists liberated documents from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The process of uncovering the government's recent attempts to suppress dissent has just begun. An FBI agent told the Philadelphia Inquirer the government was focusing on the antiglobalization activists in much the same way they pursued Christian antiabortion bombers "after the Atlanta Olympics." By expressing such urgent concern, federal agencies may provide tacit permission to local police to use heavy-handed tactics stored in the institutional memories of police departments from the most active days of the Red Squads. Philadelphia police are notorious for preventively detaining black activists, illegal raids and the bombing of the MOVE house in 1985. They spied on some 600 groups well into the 1970s, and with the collusion of judges, set astronomical bails to detain people on charges that later proved without warrant. Indeed, the local police may not need encouragement from the Feds for their use of violence against largely (though not entirely) nonviolent demonstrators. "There's a militaristic pattern to policing these days, the increasing us-versus-them attitude," says Jim Lafferty of the National Lawyers Guild in LA. The treatment of protesters is an extension of the way many police treat those in poor neighborhoods, stopping pedestrians who are young, black and male without probable cause, harassing and even shooting with little provocation. "In LA, apparently they decided instead of arresting people and setting high bail like they did in Philadelphia, they'll just open fire," said Dan Takadji, the ACLU lawyer who is suing the city for civil rights violations. When police shot rubber bullets at a concert and rally of more than a thousand people outside the Democratic convention center in August, "there were a few people throwing garbage over the fence," Takadji said. "Instead of dealing with these few people, the police swept in and fired on a crowd with rubber bullets" without giving concertgoers time to file out of the small entry the police kept open. This had shades of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, when the National Guard blocked the exit of a permitted demonstration in Grant Park as police charged with tear gas and rifle butts. Also reminiscent of '68 is harassment of those calling for police reform. LA police officers shot rubber bullets into the crowd at an anti-police-brutality rally on October 22. As in other demonstrations, police also targeted a videographer who was filming. A few days earlier the NYPD raided the Bronx apartment of members of the tiny Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, which was helping to organize a similar protest. Recent legislation has all but encouraged repressive police tactics. A 1998 federal law, for example, gave federal intelligence agencies vast new powers to track suspected terrorists with "roving wiretaps" and secret court orders that allow covert tracing of phone calls and obtaining of documents. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, meanwhile, increased the authority of the FBI to investigate First Amendment activity, like donations to nonviolent political organizations deemed "terrorist" by the government. This would have criminalized those who gave money to the African National Congress during apartheid, says Kit Gage of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation. And Clinton in his last days created the post of counterintelligence czar, whose mission, the Wall Street Journal reports, includes working with corporations to maintain "economic security." It's not only antiglobalization activists who have faced crackdowns on free-speech and free-association rights. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is imprisoning and deporting people whose political views the government considers unacceptable, although its efforts to use secret evidence have suffered setbacks in the courts, with some people freed when evidence proved spurious. Still, Muslim Arab-Americans continue to be called before secret grand juries investigating ties between US residents and "terrorist" groups like the Palestinian organization Hamas. More than fifty years ago President Truman unleashed a crackdown on the left that was carried on by his Republican successor. We may face a similar crisis today. "There's been a massive violation of civil rights and constitutional rights. This decision to suspend the Constitution is one that has been made now at one event after another. It's obvious there was a conscious decision to do it," said Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "What lies behind the decision is more disturbing. The purpose of it is to prevent the public from hearing the message of the protesters." ====================== *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the source. *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe local-computer-activists END * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From sharma at aa.net Wed Jan 24 18:21:28 2001 From: sharma at aa.net (Sharma) Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 18:21:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: [Fwd: FC: Microsoft websites blacked out -- but what happened?] (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 17:29:10 -0800 Subject: [Fwd: FC: Microsoft websites blacked out -- but what happened?] -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Declan McCullagh Subject: FC: Microsoft websites blacked out -- but what happened? Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 16:30:58 -0500 Size: 4347 URL: From HotelWeb24 at aol.com Thu Jan 25 07:50:51 2001 From: HotelWeb24 at aol.com (HotelWeb24 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 10:50:51 EST Subject: SCN: Your Website. Message-ID: <6e.729a272.27a1a55b@aol.com> Hi, I like your website. It is a very nice travel-related site. Drive up to 2000 travelers per day to your site, by being included in our travel directory. Try it for FREE! For more information: http://www.hotelsontheweb.com http://www.hotelsontheweb.com Sincerely, Brett Miklich President Hotels on the Web Miklich at hotelsontheweb.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Thu Jan 25 08:25:47 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 08:25:47 -0800 Subject: SCN: Searches Message-ID: <3A6FE30B.13407.1D1EAA1@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================= Mining the "Deep Web" With Specialized Drills (Lisa Guernsey, NY Times)---Two weeks ago, online newspapers and magazines were buzzing with news about Linda Chavez, President Bush's first choice for labor secretary. But from the results coming up in most popular search engines, you would never have known it. Instead of retrieving articles about an illegal immigrant who had lived in Ms. Chavez's home, a Google search on "chavez" led to several encyclopedia entries on Cesar Chavez, the American labor leader and advocate of farmworkers' rights. Lycos turned up several Web sites with information about Eric Chavez, an Oakland A's third baseman. On Alta Vista, some of the first results linked to Ms. Chavez's old columns for an online magazine, but none of the links provided even a hint of the fact that she had become front-page news. "I don't see anything that anyone would feel is relevant to her given the context of this past week," said Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, as he typed "chavez" into other search engines. His demonstration illustrated a problem that has long been apparent longtime problem that has to anyone casting about for online news reports: search engines can be pitifully inadequate, partly because they rely on Web-page indexes that were compiled weeks before. It is not just timely material that seems to escape their reach. Pages deep within Web sites are also often missed, as are multimedia files, bibliographies, the bits of information in databases and pages that come in P.D.F., Adobe's portable document format. In fact, traditional search engines have access to only a fraction of 1 percent of what exists on the Web. As many as 500 billion pieces of content are hidden from the view of those search engines, according to BrightPlanet.com, a search company that has tried to tally them. To many search experts, this is the "invisible Web." BrightPlanet prefers the term "deep Web," an online frontier that it estimates may be 500 times larger than the surface Web that search engines try to cover. And that uncharted territory does not include Web pages that are behind firewalls or part of intranets. To dig deeper into the Web, a new breed of search engine has cropped up that takes a different approach to Web page retrieval. Instead of broadly scanning the Web by indexing pages from any links they can find, these search engines are devoted to drilling further into specialty areas - medical sites, legal documents, even Web pages dedicated to jokes and parody. Looking for timely financial data? Try FinancialFind.com. Seeking sketches of molecular structures or even scientific humor? Biolinks.com may help. "Instead of grabbing everything on the Web and then trying to deal with this big mess," Mr. Sullivan said, these boutique search engines have decided to do some filtering. "They may say, we'll pick 40 sites that we know are related to this topic," he said. "And that means you won't get these irrelevant search results." Some search engines go even further, sending out finely tuned software agents, or bots, that learn not only which pages to search, but also what information to grab from those pages. Either way, the theory is the same: The smaller the haystack, the better chance of finding the needle. Finding those smaller haystacks can be a challenge in itself. It is the same problem faced by patrons who walk into a library, said Gary Price, a librarian at George Washington University and co- author of the forthcoming book "The Invisible Web" (CyberAge Books). People may know to come to the library, but they probably do not know which reference books to pull off the shelf. Of course, in such cases, patrons can at least consult a reference librarian. On the Web, people are usually fending for themselves. "The end user should have a better idea of all the different options that exist," Mr. Price said. "But this is easier said than done." Lately, however, a few specialty search engines have been popping up on lists of most-visited Web sites - evidence that people are learning to find them. MySimon, a service that specializes in culling product prices and information across 2,500 shopping sites, is one of the most popular. In December, the site attracted 5 million unique visitors, a huge increase from its 1.9 million visitors a year before, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet research firm. FindLaw.com, a search engine and Web- based directory of legal information, has as many as 900,000 visitors a month. Moreover.com, a site that opened in 1999 with a search engine that gathers headlines from 1,800 online news sources, has also appeared on Jupiter Media Metrix's reports of Web use, which track only sites with at least 200,000 visitors a month. Last month, about 340,000 people visited Moreover.com's pages - and that is without any consumer marketing from the company, which offers the search engine free as a teaser for businesses that might buy its search software. Like most specialty search engines, Moreover manages to find those news stories because its bots have been designed to hunt for only specific pages within a specific realm of the Web. They are like sniffing dogs that have been given a whiff of a scent and are taught to disregard everything else. Font tags in the source code underlying the Web page, for example, are a giveaway. Between 6 and 18 words in large type near the top of a Web page look a lot like headlines. In most cases they are, and the site's bots retrieve them, using the headline as the link in the list of search results. Once in a while, however, those supposed headlines turn out to be something else, like a copyright disclaimer page. So to filter further, Moreover's spiderlike bots learn the structure of the Web address, noting which words and numbers show up between the slashes. If an address ends with the word "copyright," a bot may decide to disregard that page. Similar rules are used to categorize the news articles so that people can narrow their searches before even entering a search term. "Our spiders are very good readers," said Nick Denton, Moreover's chief executive. MySimon also employs bots that are designed to hunt for very specific information. But first the bots must watch the click- through routines of MySimon employees who have learned the ins and outs of particular online shops - like exactly which pages typically provide prices, sizes or shipping fees. Once trained, the bots follow those paths themselves, prowling shops for information to put into databases and then display online. For example, one bot is assigned to Amazon.com's bookshelves; another is assigned to its electronics merchandise. "What we're doing is teaching our agents to shop on behalf of consumers," said Josh Goldman, president of MySimon. Meanwhile, general search engines have also decided to offer smaller fields for foraging. Northern Light has a news search service that searches a two-week archive of articles on 56 news wires. It also offers a "geosearch" service that allows people to look for businesses based within a few miles of a given address. Google recently opened an "Uncle Sam" area, where people can search for governmental material. Services that limit searches to audio or video files - typically found under the heading "multimedia search" - are now offered on sites like Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos. And shopping search engines are linked from almost all of the major search sites. But again, many Web users do not know that the narrow searching tools exist. So reference librarians and library Web sites are now directing their patrons to those areas on the Web. Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Price and Chris Sherman, a search guide on About.com who is working with Mr. Price on the "Invisible Web" book, are among the several information- retrieval experts who have built online directories of specific search sites. Another tool is the LexiBot, a downloadable program designed by BrightPlanet to demonstrate the search technology it sells to businesses. The LexiBot, which costs $89.95 but is free for the first 30 days, gathers information simultaneously from 600 search sites and databases - including the databases that form the basis of specialty search engines. The harder part may be to change people's behavior. All the boutique search engines in the world will not alter the fact that the majority of Web surfers are still inclined to type a single keyword into a huge, general search engine and hope for the best. The thought of narrowing a search - by either going to a specialty search page or clicking through a menu of choices on a general search site - does not seem to occur to most users, Mr. Sullivan said. He poses this challenge to the major search sites: Wouldn't search engines be more helpful if they would automatically narrow a search without requiring their users to make that realization on their own? "Can you automatically detect what database to search," he asked in posing his challenge, "based on what people have typed in?" During the second week of January, for example, perhaps a search engine could have been directed to steer people to news sites whenever they typed in words that made headlines, like "chavez." A few search engines have tried to take that step, with mixed results. For example, when Mr. Sullivan typed "chavez" into the search box at Ask Jeeves earlier this month, the site pointed to a recent news story - a link provided by Ask Jeeves' editors who were assembling information about potential members of a Bush cabinet. Using the same search a few weeks later, the news reports were nowhere to be found. (Paul Stroube, the company's vice president for Web production, said that the news link disappeared because Ms. Chavez was taken off Ask Jeeves' list of President Bush's nominees.) Unless the big search engines get better at delivering timely information, searchers might be better off with Moreover.com and other news-oriented search services. With those, Mr. Sullivan has found success. Two weeks ago, in a Moreover search using the word "chavez," more than 30 relevant stories appeared, at least half of which had been posted that day. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Sat Jan 27 08:27:18 2001 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2001 08:27:18 -0800 Subject: SCN: Images Message-ID: <3A728666.14445.1A63149@localhost> x-no-archive: yes ======================== (Carl S. Kaplan, NY Times)---At the heart of a hotly debated federal child pornography law that the United States Supreme Court accepted for review this week is a simple question with implications for the digital world: May the government criminalize computer- generated images of fictitious people engaged in imaginary acts? The question is an important one, some legal thinkers say, especially because it comes at the dawn of an era of computer- created virtual environments. If Congress can lawfully stamp out certain computerized pictures of "virtual" children engaging in explicit sex, on the theory that those synthetic pictures are dangerous to society, then perhaps down the road the government will seek to ban other digital illusions that it believes may lead to acts of real violence -- such as virtual murder or virtual rape in a multi-user computer game. That Twilight Zone question and others more down to earth will be hashed out at oral argument in October, when the Supreme Court hears an appeal by the Justice Department from a 1999 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which struck down two parts of the most recent amendments to the child pornography law. In the meantime, the prospect of Supreme Court review has enlivened a sharp legal debate over the government's ability to restrict "virtual" images. Concerned about the effect of advances in computer technology on the sex industry, Congress in 1996 crafted the Child Pornography Protection Act, which greatly expanded the scope of outlawed child pornography. Under the new definitions, for example, sexually explicit material depicting a person who "appears to be" a minor is deemed child pornography. The same is true for material that "conveys the impression" that a minor is engaged in sexual acts. The new definitions are broad ones. Significantly, under them synthetic child pornography that looks real -- such as a computer- generated sexual image of a fictional cyber-child -- is illegal. Prior to the 1996 amendment, the federal ban against the production, distribution and possession of child pornography applied only to visual depictions of real children engaged in sexually explicit activities. Three federal appeals courts have upheld the new child porn law. But in a challenge brought by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group of businesses engaged in the production and distribution of sexual materials, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in San Francisco, concluded in December 1999 that the act was unconstitutional because the phrases "appears to be" and "conveys the impression" were vague and overbroad. Writing for a two-to-one majority, Judge Donald W. Molloy said that Congress and the courts have traditionally defined the problem of child pornography in terms of the harm inflicted on the "real children" who served as models for the pictures. Relying on a landmark child pornography decided by the Supreme Court in 1982, New York v. Ferber, Judge Molloy reasoned that protecting the actual children used in the creation of the repugnant sexual material is a "compelling state interest," referring to the high standard that a law must meet to survive strict First Amendment scrutiny. But Congress has no compelling interest in regulating sexually explicit materials that do not contain visual images of actual children, he said. In reaching his conclusions, Judge Molloy rejected the government's main justification for a ban on virtual child porn: that it whets the appetite of pedophiles and causes them to victimize real children. That argument is hazardous, the court said, because it "enables the criminalization of foul figments of creative technology that do not involve any human victim in their creation or presentation." Critics of the appellate court's ruling insist that the government may ban computer-generated fictional images for any number of legitimate reasons. "The Ninth Circuit restricted the state's justifications for banning child pornography to the protection of those children whose pictures were taken," said Adam J. Wasserman, a New York lawyer whose law review article supporting the constitutionality of the child porn law was cited by the dissenting justice in the appeals case. "This completely ignores the Supreme Court's decision in Osborne v. Ohio, which justified the ban on possessing child pornography partly because of the role that it plays in the cycle of child abuse." In the Osborne case, said Wasserman, the court recognized that pedophiles routinely use child pornography as a tool to seduce innocent victims. "Virtual child pornography can be used just as effectively for this insidious purpose," he said. Wasserman later added: "If a 30-year-old can't tell the difference between 'real' and 'virtual' child porn, how can we expect a six-year- old to do so?" Robert Flores, a former federal prosecutor who is currently vice president and senior counsel of the National Law Center for Children and Families, said that he believed the expanded child pornography law is a prosecutorial necessity -- a fact that Judge Molloy did not fully take into account. According to Flores, under the old law a prosecutor had the burden of proving to a jury in a child pornography prosecution that the pictures at issue depicted real children under 18 years old. "Normally, that was not a problem," Flores said. But today, publically-available software allows pedophiles to create a synthetic child by scanning in somebody's nose, another person's ears, and so on, then tweaking the resulting image. The upshot, Flores said, is that now few people can tell the difference between a "real" picture of an actual child and a computer image of a cyber-child. That places the government at risk of losing its child pornography cases. "If we didn't have the new law, every time you had a child pornography case the defendant could argue that the pictures were not of real kids but computer-generated fictional images," said Flores. "The government might not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the minor in the picture is a real minor. You'd have reasonable doubt built into every case." Flores added, however, that he was not aware of any federal prosecution for child pornography that was dismissed on that ground. He said that in a 1993 case that he prosecuted, United States v. Kimbrough, the defendant did raise the argument with the jury that the pictures at issue were virtual and did not depict actual children. But the jury rejected the point and convicted the defendant, he said. Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Law School who is a fierce critic of the new law, said that Flores's argument was deeply flawed. It used to be "an element of the crime that a real child be used in the production" of child pornography, Freedman said. It is a requirement of due process that the government prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, he added. "To pass a new law that essentially relieves the government of its burden of proof on the theory that they are unable to meet it is unconstitutional," he said. Freedman was also quick to throw darts at the other government justifications for the expanded definition of child porn. He said that if computer-generated virtual images can be outlawed because they might "entice" real children to engage in illicit sexual activities, then why not outlaw lollipops? He said, too, that the "whetting the appetite of pedophiles" argument is a variation of an old and discounted theme in law reflected in ancient statutes that criminalized imagining or discussing the death of a king. "The theory in all these cases is that the objected-to speech creates a bad tendency" that can lead to actual crime, Freedman said. He explained that after many years of struggle and oversuppression of political speech, the Supreme Court ruled in an important 1969 case that so-called bad tendency speech can be suppressed only if it is calculated to incite a reasonable person to imminent unlawful violence. "That's the rule," Freedman said. "There's no reason why the protections of the United States Constitution have to be repealed because digitization has been invented." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * * From douglas Mon Jan 29 13:08:53 2001 From: douglas (Doug Schuler) Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 13:08:53 -0800 (PST) Subject: SCN: Please think of *somebody* -- Thanks!!! Message-ID: <200101292108.NAA27471@scn.org> Please excuse this mailing which may not be directly relevant to your interests. If not you, who? Please pass on... -- Doug I'm helping The Evergreen State College find some extraordinary people to teach in what I consider to be an exciting environment. (Yes I am a booster -- unabashed!) ----------------------------------------------------------------- YOU CAN HELP EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT PERSONALLY INTERESTED! Thanks!! ----------------------------------------------------------------- Please send this note on to any person (or e-list) whom you think might be interested. I know that there are people out there who would be perfect for these positions and you might be able to help find them. The pay -- I'll be the first to admit -- is less than jobs in the software industry but the teaching jobs are REWARDING and FUN. Really! (Also please excuse the caps -- the keys seem to be stickingI ) If you think that YOU might be interested please call or e-mail. Also please check the Evergreen web site -- http://www.evergreen.edu. Evergreen is a public, non-traditional liberal arts college in Olympia, Washington, south of Seattle, that is consistently is named by US News and World Report as the best public, liberal arts college in the west. Evergreen emphasizes intensive interdisciplinary study and collaborative team teaching. There is a lot of room to be creative! (further information is available at http://www.evergreen.edu/facultyhiring or from me, Doug Schuler, at dschuler at evergreen.edu) ------------------------------------- REGULAR HALF TIME POSITIONS IN PART-TIME STUDIES This is a for a person who will be a regular faculty member but work half-time (evenings and weekends). They will receive 100% health insurance. One Half-time Position in software engineering / computer science in Part-Time Studies. We seek a software engineer, developer, or computer scientist to teach the systematic development of software in half-time interdisciplinary programs. Ability to teach all aspects of software development -- including requirements, specification, analysis, design (including rapid prototyping), programming, testing, communication and documentation is required. Candidates able to teach participatory design techniques are highly desirable. Knowledge about the history and social context of computing and the theoretical issues related to software engineering is highly desirable. Candidates must be able to teach databases, programming languages, and operating systems. Candidates must be able to teach and design half-time (8 credit) interdisciplinary offerings for a wide population of undergraduate part-time students in the evenings and/or on weekends. VISITING FACULTY POSITIONS We are looking for a person who can teach Foundations of Computing for the academic year 2001-2002. This position is half-time (weekends and evenings). If you are willing to teach for one or two quarters of this sequence we still would like to hear from you. One Full-time Position in computer science for the academic year 2001-02 to co-teach the Student Originated Software program. SOS is a full-time (16 credit) program that focuses on the development of software for a client in the "real world." The candidate should be a practitioner who has had experience writing applications beyond academia. A Ph.D. OR at least 5 years experience as a programmer and system developer is required. Someone who has experience designing and producing systems written in object-oriented languages is preferred. A liberal arts background in addition to technical skills is preferred. APPLICATION PROCEDURES -- the not so fine print To apply for visiting or adjunct positions, send the following materials: * curriculum vitae, chronologically ordered * letter of application that highlights qualifications for the position * evaluations by students (if available) To apply for the half-time regular position, please contact the Faculty Hiring Coordinator as we will need additional materials. Please indicate clearly, which position you are applying for. Finalists may be asked to submit additional materials. Address application and inquiries to Faculty Hiring Coordinator, The Evergreen State College, L-2211, Olympia, WA 98505, call (360) 866-6000, ext. 6861 (voice) or TDD line at (360) 866-6834, or email blodgetd@ evergreen.edu. Review of completed applications has begun and will continue until finalists are selected. The College reserves the right to extend searches or not offer positions advertised. All position offers are contingent on funding. Persons with disabilities can receive accommodations in the hiring process by contacting the Hiring Coordinator. Committed to equal opportunity and affirmative action, TESC is working to build a diverse, broadly-trained faculty and particularly encourages applications from candidates whose race, national origin, sex, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status or physical disability will contribute to our diversity. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From the Listowner * * * * * * * * * * * * . To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: majordomo at scn.org In the body of the message, type: unsubscribe scn ==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ==== * * * * * * * http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/ * * * * * * *