Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Cruel and Probably Usual

Posted on September 25, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Perhaps after the recent wave of heat-related deaths in Paris it will be clear just how evil this alleged conduct at the Krome immigrant detention center is: Worker claims 'day after day' he was ordered to turn off AC. We're not talking just making people sweat here:

'I don't know how someone didn't die in there because of the heat,'' Novoa said Wednesday in a telephone interview. 'Imagine 110 people in a room. There are no windows, only a door, locked with no air conditioning. Those poor Haitians… . When they saw me, they said `Please don't do that to us. You are killing us.' You have no idea how it made me feel.''

When he entered one of the buildings, Novoa said it had a stench of human feces and body odor.

Krome—perched on the very southern edge of settled greater Miami, nestled right up near the last of the open land and the Everglades—is a notorious facility in this community, one we like to pretend isn't there. It is the site of repeated human rights violations (e.g. sexual abuse, attempts to deny detainees access to counsel, and general evil). It is amazing that in this community, more than most of America a cauldron of immigrants, we tolerate this. But of course, we're mostly powerless, as Krome is not run by the locals but by the feds, and not just any feds but one of the two or three most loathsome bureaucracies in the US federal government, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

Stories like this—and even if this one turns out to be exaggerated or false, it's only one of many—strain my general belief that evil institutions can turn good people bad. Perhaps a refinement is in order: could it be that one of the reasons that certain evil institutions are so evil is because they drive out the good people and attract those who either cannot find work elsewhere or who positively enjoy the evil?

Nor is this a story of a heroic whistle-blower: the matter is public only because a worker objected to being disciplined for failing to go along with it.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment

Sitefinder: The Biggest Internet Crisis You May Never Have Heard Of

Posted on September 25, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Last week, VeriSign, the people who run the .com registry (the big data file that has all the .com registration data in it), unilaterally decided to change the way the most-traveled portion of the Internet works for most people. Until then, if you typed in a .com domain name that didn't exist, you would get an error message. Unless, of course, you were an MSN or AOL subscriber, in which case you would get a custom web page they each designed, and which included some ads from folks who thought that they might profit from common misspellings.

Well, VeriSign saw a profit opportunity, and it decided to eat AOL's and MSN's and everyone else's lunch by introducing its “Sitefinder” service. In the new .com, every browser typo, every attempt to load up (the technical term is “resolve”) a domain that didn't actually exist, leads you to special pages designed and owned by VeriSign…and on which we are all invited to buy tailored advertising. [Sitefinder, incidentally, has the most unintentionally hilarious terms of service I have ever seen : a web page you go to by accident, and only because VeriSign made you, links to the adhesive assertion that “By using the service(s) provided by VeriSign under these Terms of Use, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions here in and documents incorporated by reference.” But I digress.]

Naturally, MSN and AOL are unhappy. But the technical community is furious. The web is not the whole Internet, and there are many other Internet tools that rely on getting the standard error message when a domain does not resolve properly. VeriSign's change threatened to break all those applications. [There are a lot of ccTLDs (national top-level domains like .ph) and one gTLD (.museum) that already do the same thing. But they are almost all very low volume, and their users were—in the main—forewarned before they registered their domains.]

The technical community responded by coding up changes to BIND, the dominant software for translating domain names into the Internet Protocol numbers that actually do the real work of identifying where the content you want is to be found, and telling the computer that has it how to find you. These changes essentially overtrump the VeriSign change. But fixes like this take time to deploy and propagate. It would be much tidier if VeriSign could be persuaded to put the cat back in the bag.

Continue reading →

Posted in Internet, Law: Internet Law | 3 Comments

Is This Why the New York Times Seems Less Interesting These Days?

Posted on September 24, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I thought it was because I was getting more of my news from the Internet, but articles like Miller's Latest Tale Questioned, which recounts the behavior of a New York Times reporter who apparently shilled for the Iraq-is-full-of-WMD crowd, make me wonder if maybe the problem isn't simply that the NYT just isn't as good as it used to be.

Maybe they should bring back the old 8-column layout?

Posted in Politics: US | 1 Comment

An Unexpectedly Weird and Slightly Guilty Pleasure

Posted on September 24, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

There is obviously something slightly egotistical about starting a blog—the assumption that someone, somewhere, maybe with luck a number of someones all over, might care about what I have to say. I was prepared to plead guilty to that one. In my defense I'd say that the primary purpose was more to join what seems to be an ongoing conversation rather than simply to climb a soap box.

That said, at least in these early and little-travelled days, it's weirdly interesting and pleasurable to see who is linking to this site .

And one link in particular is just inscrutably odd and tantalizing. It reads, in its entirety, as follows:

"Prof. Michael Froomkin has a blog.
I will link to it
for reasons I cannot say."
Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

Not For the Easily Queasy

Posted on September 24, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

This picture bothers me. In fact, this whole web site is disturbing.

I do not like it when my senses report things to me that are clearly false. I do not like it when staring at a picture induces seasickness. I do not like it one little bit.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Not For the Easily Queasy

9/11 Panel Seeks More Documents From White House

Posted on September 24, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

While popular attention is focused on whether (or, rather, how much) George W. Bush lied to stampede the country into invading Iraq, and blogging elites are comparing notes on the Administration's bald-faced attempts to deny they ever, ever said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a much less-heralded commission is quietly fighting a bureaucratic war with the Administration. The outcome of that struggle will shape the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States —AKA the 9/11 commission, which has just issued its second interim report .

As the Washington Post reports, the Administration is stonewalling the 9/11 Commission for all it's worth. It is not at all obvious how this one will play out, and some of the early signs are not good—according to the Post,

The slow pace in acquiring documents and testimony — along with the commission's decision to refrain from issuing findings until it is closer to completing a report — has angered many families of victims of the terrorist attacks. Representatives from one group, the Family Steering Committee, issued a “report card” yesterday awarding the commission a “D” in most areas and urging it to better inform the public.

The 9/11 commission is co-chaired by former representative Lee Hamilton, a man of integrity, so there's still hope for a fair and informative report. One to watch.

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on 9/11 Panel Seeks More Documents From White House