Category Archives: Internet

Cryptome is a website run by the mysterious (in the sense that we've never actually managed to meet) John Young. It has long been a cornerstone of the movement to publish government secrets that shouldn't be secret, especially about communications interceptions and cryptography.

Cryptome has done sterling service in reprinting published works that governments tried to suppress. It's been a thorn in the side of the UK government, for example, which has tried to recall and suppress published books. Every week is a small trove of interesting documents, most from public sources but some from anonymous, that have to do with spying or national security.

That's the heroic part. Now for the slightly creepy part.

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Last night I was part of a panel that spoke to undergraduates in Hecht Residential College on “Online File Sharing”. The audience was largely divided between the defiant and the possessors of guilty consciences. My suggestion that the RIAA attempts to stamp out file sharing by suing everyone in sight was likely to be as pleasant and as successful as the War on Drugs produced surprisingly little reaction.

I enjoyed meeting fellow panelist Sam Terilli, who told me he had accepted a full-time teaching job at the School of Communications, a school which just gets better and better ever year. It will be fun to have him just across the street.

But perhaps the most interesting thing I learned was this statistic, offered by a speaker from the University's IT department. Two years ago, network traffic was 80% incoming, 20% outgoing. Last year it was 20% incoming and 80% outgoing—and the difference was due to people making files available for P2P file sharing. As a result the university closed down the ports most commonly used by Kazaa and other popular file-sharing tools, and the balance is almost back to normal.

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Transfert.net, a neat-looking French techie website, has published my reply to some questions they e-mailed me. It's a fair translation, and I stand by what I said, although I have to admit that when they said they had questions they wanted to ask me, I thought it was for background for a story, and never imagined they would publish them verbatim. Had I known, I would certainly have given a longer answer to the last question….

VeriSign has just announced they will pull the SiteFinder 'service'—for now at least. See VeriSign Caves, For Now for the full text of the press release.

Astoundingly thoughtful columnist Dan Gillmor, himself a pioneer Internet user, has started Word Pirates with David Weinberger, he of Joho the Blog. Gillmor & Weinberger intend Word Pirates “to remind people how some good words in our language have been hijacked by corporate and political interests.”

In the best traditions of the Internet, they opened the site up for public contributions. Unfortunately, someone decided to mess with the site by inserting code that took users somewhere gross, an act of “pure malevolence” which made Dan sad and angry.

The exploit got fixed, the site is back in business. It's a very nice concept, although the actual content is a little hit and miss as one might expect given its openness. Many of the contributions are more of the word purist, or nicety of usage, department than “important words [that] are being taken over for selfish reasons.”

The site is built around Blosxom blogging software. Thinking about it, I started to wonder if the site might have been better as a WikiWiki Web, in which subsequent users could modify or erase the contributions of earlier ones. From what I could see on my initial visit, the Word Pirates site only lets me comment on previous entries, not change them. It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that just after the pages suffered such a nasty attack, in fact it is totally counter-intuitive, but somehow it works for Wiki's….