Wikipedia founder advocates online censorship

Posted in causes on 01/18/2010 10:00 pm by novakyu

Jimmy Wales writes in an opinion:

Keep a Civil Cybertongue
Rude and abusive online behavior should not be met with silence.
…
Fourth, adult targets of online hostility deserve a national support network. This should be a safe place where they can congregate online to receive emotional support, practical advice on how to deal with transgressors, and information on whom to contact for legal advice when appropriate.

Finally, it’s time to re-examine the current legal system. Online hostility is cross-jurisdictional. We might need laws that directly address this challenge. There is currently no uniformity of definition among states in the definition of cyberbullying and cyberharassment. Perhaps federal input is needed.

On his first three points (you can read it on WSJ.com if you want; I mostly agree with it, as long as no coercion is involved), I don’t find anything specific to find faults with, although I might argue that silence is exactly what rude and abusive persons should be met with: Don’t feed the trolls.

It’s his last two points I find alarmingly … deletionist, shall we say. Just as, with his support, Wikipedia has deleted articles and sections some cabal decided shouldn’t exist (I don’t have particular problem with it; although this is the reason I will never donate to Wikipedia again), he now wishes to delete unwanted dialogs from Internet discourse.

Take his “national support network” for example. Is would this be a support network like Alcoholics Anonymous, a voluntary organization with no legal power of enforcement, or would it be like the disastrous 18th Amendment? Both aim at the same worthwhile goal—one does it without infringing on anyone else’s liberty or property, the other produced huge backlash. Mr. Wales does not make it clear which path this “national support network” take, but the fact that he brings up “national” at all makes me think he means the latter. Nothing prevents local state advocacy and support groups from forming and advertising their services; they can pool their resources later, if their work appears effective and valuable.

And his advocacy of legal action specific for the Internet puts him off the deep end. This is as stupid as specific legislations for hate crimes, or many other unnecessary legislations Congress manages on passing. There are enough laws already regarding criminal harassments. For individual situations, you can always get restraining orders tailored to your situation, no one-size-fits-all laws needed.

Besides, can we trust our tech-illiterate legislators (who care little about the Internet beyond the fact that it’s great for fundraising) to consider the differences between online interaction and personal interaction as they write down their wisdom into a law?

For that matter, it’s misleading to draw direct comparison between online messages and personal interactions (under which I would even include phones). Personal interactions are difficult to ignore, and when there is actual bullying or harassment, it is physically onerous on the victim. On the other hand, online interaction seldom impose itself on the “victim”. Is someone sending you harassing email? Block him. Is someone posting vicious attacks? Don’t read it. It takes an active action—i.e. click on a link and read—for you to take offense and get hurt. Grow up and take up responsibility for your own action. If someone is actually being really malicious, we already have libel laws for situations like that.

No new laws are needed to specifically cover online interactions. Since, by rules of courtesy, I am not permitted to question Mr. Wales’ motives in advocating for this government intrusion into the Internet, let me simply question his judgment—and in particular, has he exercised good judgment over which he does have authority, i.e. Wikipedia’s deletionist decisions?

 

Tempting: Google offers DNS service

Posted in security on 12/03/2009 07:39 pm by novakyu

Google offers DNS service:

“Google has announced the launch of their free DNS resolution service, called Google Public DNS. According to their blog post, Google Public DNS uses continuous record prefetching to avoid cache misses — hopefully making the service faster — and implements a variety of techniques to block spoofing attempts. They also say that (unlike an increasing number of ISPs), Google Public DNS behaves exactly according to the DNS standard, and will not redirect you to advertising in the event of a failed lookup. Very cool, but of course there are questions about Google’s true motivations behind knowing every site you visit.”

Oh, this is tempting. I have some routers configured to use OpenDNS (mainly for their supposed fast response, not for the redirect to search), and I am rather tempted to re-configure them to use Google’s DNS servers.

But, frankly, I think Google already has enough of my private information. I don’t need them to know every site I visit (and no, I don’t put much stock in ToS; as much as I trust Google more than other companies, once they have the information, it’s safer to assume that they’ll have it for-ever).

Well, I guess for now, Google’s DNS servers do not offer anything beyond what OpenDNS or my local DNS servers do … so at least the decision is a no-brainer for the time being.

 

Scary: SSL not quite secure any more

Posted in security on 11/17/2009 02:15 am by novakyu

This is scary:

“A Turkish grad student has devised a serious, real-world attack on Twitter that targeted a recently discovered vulnerability in the SSL protocol. The exploit by Anil Kurmus is significant because it successfully targeted the so-called SSL renegotiation bug to steal Twitter login credentials that passed through encrypted data streams. All in all, a man in the middle is able to steal the credentials of a user authenticating himself through HTTPS to a trusted website.”

What’s next? PGP? Can we trust anything other than OTPs any more?

 

Good news: Cato Institute opposes software patent, too

Posted in causes on 08/30/2009 09:02 pm by novakyu

Well, maybe not quite:

binarybits writes “I’ve written an article for the free-market Cato Institute about how patents impede innovation in the software industry. It points out that people tend not to realize how vast the software industry is. It’s not just Google and Microsoft; virtually every organization has an IT department producing potentially-infringing software. Organizations as diverse as J. Crew and the Green Bay Packers have been sued for patent infringement. It’s crazy to expect all these organizations to worry about potential patent infringement. Hopefully the Supreme Court’s Bilski decision will lead to new limits on software patents.”

I’m sure that there is a diversity of opinion even among the objectivists. But I think it’s a good thing that an adjunct scholar for Cato Institute has come out against software patent. Given that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged views patents in general as being favorable (and the government making a “gift” of them to themselves as monstrous), I was worried for a while where objectivists would stand on the whole “intellectual property” issue.

But if they can oppose software patents (which is clearly harmful to entrepreneurs, and by extension, to the society), I think I can hope that their general approach towards other issues, such as patents in other areas (such as business methods) and role of copyright, would be a reasoned, rational approach.

 

Netbooks down to $100 level

Posted in causes on 08/25/2009 09:22 pm by novakyu

Granted, it’s an old model, but that takes nothing away from the fact that this laptop is, within 10% of margin, a $100 laptop, i.e. at the price level originally promised by Negroponte.

A lot of people said that this wouldn’t be possible. Well, it turns out they were wrong. If I had to guess, even at this steep discount, this price for the old netbook must include the “usual profits”, or the reseller wouldn’t bother selling. So, it’s very possible that someone producing this at cost (i.e. substantial amount of labor by volunteers so the “usual profits” is smaller than usual) could have sold it even cheaper.

Of course, this was possible only because of the wild popularity and wide spread of the Eee PC. They didn’t sell this 7-inch model at $100 originally, and given the risks involved, I don’t think they could have. In this way, Negroponte was seriously wrong: by refusing to sell to the general market, his OLPC project lost momentum (as shown by the dismal failure of last year’s G1G1 program) and couldn’t put a $100 laptop out there before the “greedy capitalists” beat him to it.

Negroponte should have started out by marketing the XO laptop in the U.S. and Europe (I believe a lot of people would’ve bought it even at $200 or $300, if they weren’t forced to make a substantial donation in the form of G1G1) and use the proceeds to aggressively pursue R&D of future generations of XO, as well as lowering costs. At the moment, XO is at least 2 years behind in development compared to other netbooks, and with the “greedy capitalists” in the way, I don’t think the “philanthropist” has any chance: capitalism and market economy is the most efficient means of producing goods, after all.

 

Coming revolution in steganography?

Posted in security on 08/14/2009 09:05 pm by novakyu

There are now a group of people with huge incentive to hide secret in plain sight: the hackers who control botnets with Twitter.

I, for one, am excited. Here are a group of people with a profit motive (it’s the illegal kind, but, oh well) who can make a real contribution to steganography. Imagine the coming advances in the next year or so!

 

Linux local privilege escalation bug; clock’s ticking

Posted in gnu/linux, security on 08/13/2009 11:09 pm by novakyu

Slashdot has a story on newly discovered (but ever-present) Linux bug which could allow local users to gain root privileges.

I guess it’s re-install time for many of my servers, or at least one of them. I am currently keeping … a vigilant log to check that nothing out of ordinary is happening, but I am considering the machine compromised and in line for re-install as soon as I can find the time.

 

Is this a play for jury nullification?

Posted in causes on 07/31/2009 01:56 am by novakyu

Mr. Tenenbaum appears to concede a lot of grounds even when he could make RIAA work for it:

“This is me. I’m here to answer,” said Tenenbaum. “I used the computer. I uploaded and downloaded music. This is how it is. I did it,” he testified before a packed courtroom, whose spectators included an all-star cast of Harvard Law School copyright scholars: Lawrence Lessig, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain.

“Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings” on which the record labels brought suit, asked the plaintiffs’ attorney Tim Reynolds.

“Yes,” said Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum then admitted that he “lied” in his written discovery responses, the ones in which he denied responsibility.

“Why did you lie at that point?” asked Tenenbaum’s attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson. “It was kind of something I rushed through,” responded Tenenbaum. “It’s what seemed the best response to give.” At the time he gave the admittedly false discovery responses, Tenenbaum testified that he was being advised by his mother Judith, a family law attorney who works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It probably can’t be said that Mr. Tenenbaum’s attorney is ignorant of the law, or even that he is negligent (given that he’s volunteered to take the case and has given unusual attention to it). And given that this is his attorney’s question, it is quite clear that the questions and the responses were planned.

So, what’s their plan here?

If I had to take a guess, I am guessing their strategy is the exact opposite of Jammie Thomas, who was seen by two different juries as lying in the face of plain evidences (which could only imply that she thought the jury was stupid) and got hit with huge, punitive damages. That is, they are trying to say Mr. Tenenbaum is an honest guy. He might have given false representation earlier (not under oath), but that was a moment of weakness, and on the whole, he is an honest, average American who is being asked to pay $4,000 (if he settled) or upwards to $1 million (if the jury goes for maximum damage, like in the Jammie Thomas case). Now, does he really deserve to get punished like that for doing what an average American does?

Of course, if the jury sticks to the law and finds willful infringement (which may as well be the case, because Mr. Tenenbaum probably knew the songs were copyrighted and couldn’t have been unaware that what he was downloading were not authorized copies), then the minimum damage they can award is around $24,000, which is still quite a bit.

But here’s the real reason constitution guarantees a right to trial by jury of our peers: the jury does not have to “follow the law”, if they find the law unjust. This is a check on our legislative bodies by ordinary informed citizens. They cannot pass arbitrary, clearly unfair laws and expect the citizenry to uphold them. The jury is the final arbiter of facts in any trial, and if a clearly unbiased jury finds someone innocent, the legal professionals are very unwilling to question that fact as found by the jury (appeals are usually on the basis of technicalities and how the jury might have been led toward a particular bias).

Of course, the legal counsels on either side cannot mention jury nullification during the trial (if they do, they will probably be held in contempt of the court and the judge will instruct the jury to ignore the call to ignore the law), but so many unusual things happened with this trial, so who knows how it will end up?

 

Fear-mongering has no place in the copyright debate

Posted in causes, science on 07/28/2009 05:52 am by novakyu

Perhaps we should considerably reduce the power of copyright in academic journals (via Slashdot), but we should do it through reasoned discourse, not mindless fear-mongering:

We’ve discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I’ve even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn’t even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they’re forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights.

Oh, please. Data is not copyrighted. I am fairly sure they are not even copyrightable in most cases, even though a particular presentation of the data might be, especially if it shows some evidence of creativity. One must be either fairly stupid or have a really horrible legal department to get an idea that data in a published journal article is copyrighted and cannot re-use or even cite the data (who wouldn’t want citation? citation increases the impact factor of the journal) without “re-doing the experiment”. (Say, how does one know whether the “new data” is from new experiment or the old one? Aren’t they supposed to be the same within experimental error?)

Of course, I can only speak for the situation in physics, but I am fairly sure the situation is as bleak as presented in this page, at least not in natural sciences. APS (which does retain copyright) and Nature (which does not retain copyright) both allow the author to do pretty much whatever they want with the author-formatted preprints of the article. The allowances are less on the journal-produced, professional versions of the article, but that’s understandable (that particular copy represents the combined effort of the author and editor) and does not have that much impact on open access as long as one doesn’t mind the amateurish document formatting by many scientists (just look at arXiv.org).

On the whole, I do think copyright in U.S. does need to be reformed, and particularly so in academic journal publishing (textbooks have … different goals so it’s not so clear whether academic textbooks should be treated any differently from other books). But we will gain nothing by inciting unreasonable fear in the sheeple and eroding our own credibility. After all, don’t we believe that our cause is strong enough to prevail when we present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (as well as it can be determined from data and statistics, anyway) to the public?

 

No longer a supporter of RMS

Posted in causes, random on 07/24/2009 07:48 pm by novakyu

Well, this is it. I no longer support RMS’s crusade.

According to Stallman, the Pirate Party’s proposal of a five-year limit on copyright would remove the freedom users have to gain access to source code by eventually allowing its inclusion in proprietary products. Stallman suggests requiring proprietary software to also release its code within five years to even the balance of power.”

Somehow, I had always believed that RMS and, by extension, FSF’s goal was to limit the destructive power of copyright in software business by using its own rules against itself. I had believed that, given the choice between strong, draconian copyright, with GPL taking all its power from the same law, and having no copyright at all for software (or something very short like 5 years), RMS and FSF would choose the latter.

I was wrong. I have said before (not here, ‘probably on Slashdot) that if I ever find out that RMS’s (and, by extension, FSF’s) position was pro-copyright (even if it’s for strengthening copyleft), then I would stop supporting him. This is it.

I do, in general, like free software and will continue to use it, but as a political force I am opposed to the free software movement, now that I know for sure that the movement is led by a statist liberal whose central agenda is forcing others to his will (i.e. forcing proprietary software authors to release the source code, even if they didn’t use any copyleft codes).

As one of the immediate consequences, my FSF associate membership will not be renewed at the end of this month.

P.S. I had been getting fairly annoyed with RMS’s bashing of libertarians (I count Gov. Palin as one, although she may not know that yet) and capitalists (insurance companies and banks) recently anyway. He had, before this, the merit of … being seen as having the right opinions and position on one issue I deeply care about (copyright), but apparently I was wrong about that.

Edit: After all, there is no reason to force arbitrary obligation upon proprietary software authors. Just as the way original patents worked, copyright can be a two-way street. If the authors want copyright protection, they can submit the source code along with copyright registration (as apparently they already have to do, at least for small programs), and this will be public record once the work passes into public domain. If they want to keep the source code secret, then they can do it the same way it’s done in every other industry: keep it a trade secret and don’t tell it to anyone, including the copyright office (and since it was never “published”, it won’t be under copyright protection).

The very first thing we should do with this copyright mess is probably requiring copyright registration (say, within 1 year of original publication, as is done with patents) for copyright protection. If it wasn’t worth registering, then it’s not worth protecting.

 
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