Category Archives: Internet

Via Boing Boing, via Dan Gilmore, a link to How to Opt-Out of email from that horrible Plaxto's email.

Who ever would have imagined that the same IETF which, in the RAVEN process, fought off a proposal to make the Internet wiretap standards compliant, would turn around only a few short years later and adopt the innocously titled RFC3751: Omniscience Protocol Requirements. S. Bradner:

There have been a number of legislative initiatives in the U.S. and elsewhere over the past few years to use the Internet to actively interfere with allegedly illegal activities of Internet users. This memo proposes a number of requirements for a new protocol, the Omniscience Protocol, that could be used to enable such efforts.

In RFC 3751, issued this very day, we have nothing less than a standard that would determine, as the author so crudely puts it, who is a “bad guy” on the Internet, thus enabling those so labeled to be targeted for the treatment proposed by none other than Senator Hatch (“destroying their machines”). Sounds like a compensible Taking to me…at least so long as the parties doing it can be shown to be state actors (not always simple these days).

And it gets worse: the programs defined by this standard will run invisibily in the background, and will be secretly downloaded to all machines that touch the Internet. And they will need to know an awful lot about you to work.

Of course, compliant programs will have to be optimzed for local law, creating a lot of work for tech-savvy lawyers, so this isn't all bad.

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Here's a Really Cheerful Thought:

the Web may actually be helping to keep some dictatorships in power. Asian dissidents have told me that the Web has made it easier for authoritarian regimes to monitor citizens. In Singapore, Gomez says, the government previously had to employ many security agents and spend a lot of time to monitor activists who were meeting with each other in person. But, with the advent of the Web, security agents can easily use government-linked servers to track the activities of activists and dissidents. In fact, Gomez says, in recent years opposition groups in Singapore have moved away from communicating online and returned to exchanging information face-to-face, in order to avoid surveillance.

More generally the article argues that dictatorships have been able to neuter the 'net through a combination of intimidation, monitoring, and blocking foreign sites.

Fundrace.org isn't reachable right now because the whole world is trying to get to it, but according to this morning's paper it not only lists everyone who gave more than $200 to a Presidential campaign, but allows you to display all the contributions by your neighbors on a nice clickable map.

Sorta like Miami-Dade's map of sexual predators.

I learn a lot from reading Ed Felton. In A Spoonful of Sugar he describes an absolutely brilliant method being used at Carnegie-Mellon to “label all the images on the web”.

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In Get thee behind me, Plaxo, veteran web journalist and generally great person Wendy Grossman explains why Plaxto and services like it are so #%^#$!!~##!@# horrible.

Of course, as usual Australian privacy guru Roger Clarke was there first, but Wendy, being a journalist, offers an explanation that is shorter and more pungent.