taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Dabble DB : looks like a web-based version of good old Filemaker
  (tags: dabble-db databases web db spreadsheets analytics groupware)

• retrocomputing hackers reminisce about the 1541 diskette drive : skip to the comment thread, it’s fantastic. I used to know lots of this stuff (via Donncha)
  (tags: via:donncha commodore-64 hacks 1541 disks copy-protection drm hardware hacking history retro c64)

• MPLC racketeering Irish playschools : the ‘Motion Picture Licensing Company’ sent a letter to 2,500 Irish playschools, demanding a fee of EUR3 per child to cover license fees for the kids watching DVDs. However, it seems they themselves hadn’t registered as required by law, so were acting illegally in issuing demands… oh the irony
  (tags: mplc racketeering law ireland dvds movies mpaa licensing copyright legal children kindergarten playschools)

• Komplett’s new Dublin pick-up point is open : routing around the Irish couriers and An Post’s brokenness by allowing customers to pick up their items directly. a shame this is necessary
  (tags: an-post delivery couriers dublin ireland komplett components pc hardware)

Tags: 1541, an-post, analytics, c64, children, commodore-64, components, copy-protection, copyright, couriers, dabble-db, databases, db, delivery, disks, drm, dublin, dvds, groupware, hacking, hacks, hardware, history, ireland, kindergarten, komplett, law, legal, licensing, movies, mpaa, mplc, pc, playschools, racketeering, retro, spreadsheets, via:donncha, web

• Groklaw – Anonymous Speech in Email Upheld in Spammer Case : Groklaw goes into the detail of how and why the Virginia anti-spam law could be overturned. Ugh. I strongly believe that spam = UBE, not UCE, and political spam is still spam, so this is particularly disappointing for me
  (tags: ube uce spam law legal virginia jeremy-jaynes groklaw anti-spam)

• VMware server tweaks : ugh. quite a lot of voodoo here, need to investigate to see if any of these improve performance on our little build farm vmware server
  (tags: vmware performance linux tweaks kernel)

• consumer tips in response to the XL Airlines collapse : tour operator/airline went bust, leaving its customers well in the lurch. Those who booked flights directly on their website, using a debit card, have lost their money. Most travel insurance doesn’t cover airline collapse. Moral: use a credit card
  (tags: credit-cards safety consumer xl-airlines travel-agents atol flights travel)

Tags: anti-spam, atol, consumer, credit-cards, flights, groklaw, jeremy-jaynes, kernel, law, legal, linux, performance, safety, spam, travel, travel-agents, tweaks, ube, uce, virginia, vmware, xl-airlines

• Va. Supreme Court Strikes Down State’s Anti-Spam Law : argh! IMO the judge has confused misleading forged headers with anonymous speech
  (tags: anonymity legal law jeremy-jaynes spam anti-spam virginia)

• Watch out for that Dropbox Public Folder : Joe has a good point: ‘you hereby grant all other Dropbox users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder.’ wtf
  (tags: dropbox ip backup legal terms-and-conditions legalese)

• Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome : namely the Windows Template Library, now distributed under the (OSI-approved) Microsoft Public License. strange days (via reddit)
  (tags: microsoft open-source osi google chrome wtl windows)

• Irishmen buy up island of England : ‘an Irish consortium has emerged as the buyer of the island of England in The World development, a man-made scheme off the coast of Dubai.’ hahaha!
  (tags: funny ireland england dubai unintended-consequences property the-world)

Tags: anonymity, anti-spam, backup, chrome, dropbox, dubai, england, funny, google, ip, ireland, jeremy-jaynes, law, legal, legalese, microsoft, open-source, osi, property, spam, terms-and-conditions, the-world, unintended-consequences, virginia, windows, wtl

• Federal Circuit Says Open Source License Conditions are Enforceable as Copyright Conditions : ‘the conditions of the Artistic License are “enforceable copyright conditions.”‘ hooray (via Nat Friedman)
  (tags: via:natfriedman open-source artistic license licensing software law us-law)

• joshua confirms the “Yahoo dropped the del.icio.us ball with a pointless 3 year rewrite” story : ‘The writer is accidentally correct – we were told that it had to be in PHP to get ops support.’ Incredibly stupid mistake by Y!; I’m thankful we in Deersoft fended off the same potential disaster
  (tags: yahoo rewrites coding c++ php mod_perl perl ops timewasting waste del.icio.us via:dare)

• “Anatomy of a Subway Hack” [PDF presentation, 87 slides] : a fantastic prez by 3 MIT students working under Ron Rivest, successfully hacking the Boston subway system’s stored-value magstripe cards and MIFARE Classic RFID cards; really fantastic walkthrough of the process. I’m glad to see that my smartcard work on other systems a few years back would have defeated many of these attacks ;)
  (tags: mifare rfid smartcards security pen-tests hacking defcon presentations mbta magstripe)

• Anti-Virus Products Still Fail on Fresh Viruses : shocking — the malware distributed by the Storm “CNN headlines” campaign, which has been ongoing for weeks, remains undetected by F-Prot, F-Secure, McAfee, Panda, Symantec and Trend, along with 16 other antivirus products. reactive AV simply doesn’t work anymore
  (tags: antivirus fail mcafee f-prot f-secure panda symantec trend security worrying av broken)

• removing outdated ssh fingerprints from known_hosts : avoiding the annoying “REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!” warning, using “ssh-keygen -R hostname”
  (tags: ssh tips unix scp known_hosts)

Tags: antivirus, artistic, av, broken, c++, coding, defcon, del.icio.us, f-prot, f-secure, fail, hacking, known_hosts, law, license, licensing, magstripe, mbta, mcafee, mifare, mod_perl, open-source, ops, panda, pen-tests, perl, php, presentations, rewrites, rfid, scp, security, smartcards, software, ssh, symantec, timewasting, tips, trend, unix, us-law, via:dare, via:natfriedman, waste, worrying, yahoo

RTE reports that 4 record companies, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music, have brought a High Court action to compel Eircom — Ireland’s largest ISP — to prevent its networks being used for the illegal downloading of music:

Willie Kavanagh, Managing Director of EMI Ireland and chairman of IRMA, said because of illegal downloading and other factors, the Irish music industry was experiencing a “dramatic and accelerating decline” in income. He said sales in the Irish market dropped 30% in the six years up to 2007.

EMI and the other companies are challenging Eircom’s refusal to use filtering technology or other measures to voluntarily block or filter illegally downloaded material. Last October Eircom told the companies it was not in a position to use the filtering software.

(I wonder if those dropping sales in the Irish market comprise only CDs sold by Irish shops? 2001 to 2007 is also the time period when physical sales have given way to online shopping on a gigantic scale, especially for music.)

The Irish Times coverage includes another interesting factoid, which appears in a lot of press regarding this case:

Latest figures available, for 2006, indicate that 20 billion music files were illegally downloaded worldwide that year. The music industry estimates that for every single legal download, there are 20 illegal ones.

A little research reveals that that figure comes from the IFPI Digital Music Report 2008. I’d have a totally different take on it, however. In my opinion, the figure is probably correct, but not for the reasons the IFPI want them to be. There are a number of factors:

• it’s bloody hard to buy legit MP3s online. You can buy all sorts of shitty DRM-laden formats, or rent access to files that “expire”, or buy MP3s in certain jurisdictions but not in others, or on certain platforms. So this is the main reason, in my opinion, why legit music downloads are a lot lower than they could be – because it’s tricky to get a legit download!

  By contrast it’s a lot easier to log in to a filesharing service and download high-quality, DRM-free MP3s. Consumers have indicated that DRM frustrations drive them to filesharing sites, and no less than the Executive Vice President of the MPAA recognises this. (It looks like the IFPI dispute this, however.)

• people, given the opportunity, tend to download free music, whether or not they plan to listen to it. It could be called the “radio effect”; they might listen to it, or they might not, there’s no pressure. If they have to pay for it, however, they’ll only download the stuff they really want. I definitely noticed this when the legal download site EMusic switched from an “all you can eat” model to a certain number of files per month; I immediately stopped downloading tunes speculatively, and restricted myself just to the ones I had already decided I wanted.

• on BitTorrent filesharing sites, downloaders need to maintain high sharing ratios — so they download files just in order to re-upload them, regardless of whether they want them or not. (so I’m told. ;)

There’s more commentary on the 20-to-1 figure here.

The IFPI Digital Music Report 2008 also notes:

“2007 was the year ISP responsibility started to become an accepted principle. 2008 must be the year it becomes reality”

Governments are starting to accept that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should take a far bigger role in protecting music on the internet, but urgent action is needed to translate this into reality, a new report from the international music industry says today.

ISP cooperation, via systematic disconnection of infringers and the use of filtering technologies, is the most effective way copyright theft can be controlled. Independent estimates say up to 80 per cent of ISP traffic comprises distribution of copyright-infringing files.

The IFPI Digital Music Report 2008 points to French President Sarkozy’s November 2007 plan for ISP cooperation in fighting piracy as a groundbreaking example internationally. Momentum is also gathering in the UK, Sweden and Belgium. The report calls for legislative action by the European Union and other governments where existing discussions between the music industry and record companies fail to progress.

So it seems Ireland is the vanguard of an international effort by IFPI members to force ISPs to install filtering, worldwide. It seems the same happened in Belgium last year — and I reckon there’ll be similar cases elsewhere soon.

Either way, I doubt this will be good for Irish internet users.

(PS: while I’m talking about buying MP3s online — a quick plug for 7digital. Last time I used them, I had a pretty crappy experience, but the situation is a lot better nowadays. They now have a great website that works perfectly in Firefox on Linux; they sell brand new releases like the Hercules and Love Affair album as 320kbps DRM-free MP3s; they support PayPal payments; and downloads are fast and simple — right click, “Save As”. hooray!)

Some other blog coverage: Lex Ferenda with some details about the legal situation, and Jim Carroll.

Update: EMI Ireland seem to be singing from a different hymn-sheet than their head office… interesting.

Update 2: I’ve taken a look at the Copysense filtering technology, and how it can be evaded.

Tags: eircom, filesharing, ifpi, ireland, isps, law, mp3, music

This is very bad news for North Dakota-based anti-spammers — a guy called David Ritz is being sued there by alleged porn spammer Jerry Reynolds, for performing DNS lookups, a DNS zone transfer and a Whois lookup. It appears the judge has found Ritz guilty.

This is astonishingly bad lawmaking by the judge. These are entirely innocuous tools, part of every network administrator’s toolkit for debugging and examining internet traffic legitimately. There’s nothing remotely criminal or malicious in their use, and the judge has allowed himself to be misled.

North Dakota Judge Gets it Wrong:

‘Ritz’s behavior in conducting a zone transfer was unauthorized within the meaning of the North Dakota Computer Crime Law. A zone transfer is simply asking a DNS server for all the particular public info it provides about a given domain. This is a common task performed by system administrators for many purposes. The judge is saying that DNS zone transfers are now illegal in North Dakota.’

More details from Ed Falk

David’s legal defense fund

Tags: cases, david-ritz, dns, ed-falk, fargo, law, north-dakota, spam

Last week, I received an odd-looking mail from “Claims Administration Center” ClaimsAdministrationCenter /at/ enotice.info, sent to my private email address — the one listed in an image on http://jmason.org/ (it never gets spam).

The mail reads:

Mittlholtz v . International Medical Research, Inc., Sophie Chen, John Chen, and Allan Wang (”IMR Defendants”), aka Meco, et al. v. IMR, et al., case No. GIC846200.

We are requesting by order of the Court filed with the Superior Court for the County of San Diego, CA, that you post the attached Summary notice as a Public Service Announcement on your web-site.

Below is a link to the PDF Summary Notice (Note: The document is in the .PDF format. To view the documents you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader)

http://echo.bluehornet.com/ct/ct.php?t=….

This message was intended for: webaddress@jmason.org You were added to the system January 17, 2007. For more information please follow the URL below: http://echo.bluehornet.com/subscribe/source.htm?c=…

Follow the URL below to update your preferences or opt-out: http://echo.bluehornet.com/phase2/survey1/survey.htm?CID=…

Googling for GIC846200, I find it on a cached “civil new filed cases index” page at sandiego.courts.ca.gov:

CASE NUMBER FILE DATE CATEGORY LOCATION

GIC846200 04/21/2005 A72120 – Personal Injury (Other) San Diego MECO vs INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL RESEARCH INCORPORATED

So the case exists. I have no idea who either of the parties are, however.

The URLs in the message were all web-bugged; but bluehornet seem legit in general.

The URL http://www.enotice.info/ times out. Seems to have no spam-related Google Groups hits, although there are a lot of discussions about some iffy-looking class-action suit about Google Adsense.

After quite a bit of discomfort and asking around about the reputation of both bluehornet.com and enotice.info, I eventually succumbed and clicked through. The Summary URL above, after logging my click, redirects to this PDF file, which reads:

This case, called Mittleholtz v . International Medical Research, Inc., Sophie Chen, John Chen, and Allan Wang (’IMR Defendants’), et al., case No. GIC846200, is a class action lawsuit that alleges that the IMR Defendants unlawfully distributed a product containing synthetic chemicals, the presence of which was also concealed from the public as a result of the IMR Defendants’ alleged failure to conduct any testing for adulteration by synthetic chemicals, including but not limited to diethylstilbestrol (DES) and warfarin (or coumadin), which is the active chemical in bloodthinners. Defendants deny the allegations. The Court has not formed any opinions concerning the merits of the lawsuit nor has it ruled for or against the Plaintiffs as to any of their claims. The sole purpose of this notice is to inform you of the lawsuit so that you may make an informed decision as to whether you wish to remain in or opt out of this class action.

You have legal rights and choices in this case. You can:

• Join the case. You do not have to do or pay anything to be part of this case. And, you have to accept the final result in the case.

• Exclude yourself and file your own lawsuit. If you want your own lawyer, you will have to exclude yourself as set forth below and pay your lawyer’s fees and costs.

• Exclude yourself and not sue. If you do not wish to be part of this case and do not want to bring your own lawsuit, please mail a first class letter stating that you want to be excluded from the Mittleholtz v IMR class action (Case No. GIC846200), or you may fill out the letter available at www.gilardi.com/mittleholtzsettlement. Make sure the letter has your full name, address and signature. Mail it to: PC-SPES Litigation, Class Administrator, c/o Gilardi & Co. LLC, P O Box 8060 San Rafael, CA 94912-8060 by March 23, 2007.

  *This is only a summary. For complete notice and further information go to: www.gilardi.com/mittleholtzsettlement or call the toll-free number 1-877-800-7853.

So in other words, it’s hand-targeted unsolicited, but probably not bulk, email, flogging a class-action suit about ’synthetic chemicals’ (presumably as opposed to the ‘organic’ variety). I suspect, given the phrasing in the initial mail, they probably googled for a keyword or company name, and found a hit somewhere in taint.org’s 5 years of archives — hence the PSA request.

In fact, I bet this forwarded story is what they found through Googling. Pity they didn’t include a URL for that!

Does sending legal notices like this through email not seem particularly risky, given the lack of reliability of the medium?

An odd situation, all told…

Tags: bluehornet.com, class-action, enotice.info, law, mail, smtp

[This is a copy of an article I submitted to ICANNWatch.]

Spamhaus, the UK-based non-profit that runs the SBL and XBL anti-spam DNS blocklists, is reportedly facing serious legal trouble in the US.

A US-based spam gang has started legal action to have Spamhaus’ domain name confiscated by ICANN, and reportedly, Spamhaus may have been advised badly by their US legal people; so there is now a danger that they *may* indeed lose their domain, and possibly worse.

Note that Spamhaus is entirely UK-based, bar some mirrors; however, the proposed order is aimed at ICANN, which is US-based. This is the really tricky part; can a US company kill the domain of a non-US group?

According to anti-spam lawyer Matthew Prince, ‘there may be some time before ICANN is formally ordered to shut down the Spamhaus domain, but make no mistake that ICANN’s lawyers will be considering their options beginning first thing Monday, if they haven’t already begun the conference calls tonight’ … ‘In the end, [ICANN's] decision is likely to be much more about setting a general policy than the specific details of who Spamhaus is or why they are critical for the Internet. ICANN will desperately want to stay out of this dispute, but they are subject to U.S. law and they will probably have attorneys who will argue they need to follow it. All it will take for this to end badly for Spamhaus is one lawyer at ICANN getting a little bit spooked and Spamhaus could lose not only it’s .org but potentially any other TLD that ICANN controls.’

This is interesting — if Spamhaus is forced to close down its domains and US-based mirrors, that will mean that the SBL and XBL blocklists will be down for a while, too. Typically those are used for up-front blocking, and if my servers are any indication, they take care of 75% of incoming spam before it hits any more CPU-intensive filtering.

Without those, there’ll be a lot of sites around the net suddenly dealing with quadrupled spam volumes hitting their MTAs.

Tags: anti-spam, e360, icann, jurisdiction, law, spamhaus

I’ve just finished Sir John Sulston’s inspiring book about the Human Genome Project, The Common Thread, in which he discusses how he found himself on one front line of the battle between intellectual ‘property’ maximalism attempting to grab ‘property rights’ over the human genome, and the common good, preserving such rights for all humanity and unfettered research. (Thankfully, he — and therefore the latter side — won.)

I’ve been meaning to post a few choice quotes here about it at some stage, but haven’t had the time — I’ve had to just limit myself to correcting the Wikipedia entry for the Human Genome Project instead. ;)

Anyway, Sir John is in the news again, as part of a new international initiative — the Adelphi Charter:

Called the Adelphi charter, it is an attempt to lay out those principles. Central among them are the ideas that policy should be evidence-based and that it should respect the balance between property and the public domain, not eliminate the latter to maximise the former.

Coverage:

• The Economist
• BBC
• The Guardian
• raw notes from Suw Charman of the ORG

Very encouraging to see something taking off at this level. I hope it does well, and I hope Ireland and the EU’s lawmakers take note, since I’ve been hearing a lot of IP maximalist party-line from there recently…

Tags: adelphi-charter, ip, law, patents, politics, sir-john-sulston, uk

Patents: This has come up twice recently in discussions of software patenting, so it’s worth posting a blog entry as a note.

There’s a common misconception that a patenter does not necessarily need to enforce a patent in the courts, for it to remain valid. This isn’t true in the US at least, where there is the legal doctrine of ‘laches’, defined as follows in the Law.com dictionary:

Laches – the legal doctrine that a legal right or claim will not be enforced or allowed if a long delay in asserting the right or claim has prejudiced the adverse party (hurt the opponent) as a sort of ‘legal ambush’.

The Bohan Mathers law firm have a good paragraph explaining this:

…the patent holder has an obligation to protect and defend the rights granted under patent law. Just as permitting the public to freely cross one’s property may lead to the permanent establishment of a public right of way and the diminishment of one’s property rights, so the knowing failure to enforce one’s patent rights (one legal term for this is laches) against infringement by others may result in the forfeiture of some or all of the rights granted in a particular patent.

See also this and this page for discussion of cases where it was relevant. It seems by no means clear-cut, but the doctrine is there.

Tags: blog, claim, doctrine, entry, laches, law, patent, patents, property, right, software

Mr. Justice Bradley, discussing US patent law in 1882:

The design of the patent laws is to reward those who make some substantial discovery or invention, which adds to our knowledge and makes a step in advance in the useful arts. Such inventors are worthy of all favor. It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith.

Well said that man! (via)

Tags: advance, business, design, discovery, favor, invention, knowledge, law, patent, step

Spam: some good crazy spam recently — firstly, some Seventh Day Adventist lunacy:

THE PAPACY IS THE ANTICHRIST THAT IS TRYING TO CHANGE THE LAW OF GOD. DANIEL 7:25

THIS IS THE LAST WARNING.
THE LAW OF GOD IS ETERNAL BECAUSE GOD IS ETERNAL 14:12. MT. 5:17 SATURDAY SEVENTH DAY IS THE TRUE LORD’S DAY. EXO. 20.8-11 SUNDAY IS A FALSE PAGAN DAY. IT IS NOT IN THE BIBLE. IT WAS USED TO WORSHIP SATAN

It runs on in that vein for quite a while. Interestingly, most of the text from there on in is ‘gappy’ — in other words, the spammer has inserted spaces between each character of a word — even inside link addresses. As a result, they no longer work. oops!

And a new one to me — natural-disaster spam (via Mark Pilkington):

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL WARNING!
fngva uvtt chloez

A huge 300 ft. high ocean wave is moving towards your continent. Your and many other cities are in a real danger.
Approximate wave moving speed is 700 km/h.
cmoym eaaa yypbzz

Please read more about this catastrophe here: (link)

We are strongly urging you to evacuate yourself and your family as soon as possible,
even though you may live far away from your city. The tsunami will reach the continent in approximately FOUR hours.

venbz nwvw exepmi
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

I’ve removed the link, btw — the site it links to contains a bunch of nasty malware-installing IE-bug exploits. In case you were wondering: you can tell it’s genuine because it says IT’S AN OFFICIAL WARNING at the top.

(ObSpamComment: note — this here’s a good example of why spam is unsolicited bulk email, not unsolicited commercial email; neither are selling anything. one’s religious craziness, the other one’s trying to r00t your machine.)

Tags: continent, day, eternal, god, law, link, seventh, spam, this, warning

Law: t r u t h o u t quotes this press release from Rackspace:

In the present matter regarding Indymedia, Rackspace Managed Hosting, a U.S. based company with offices in London, is acting in compliance with a court order pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace responded to a Commissioner’s subpoena, duly issued under Title 28, United States Code, Section 1782 in an investigation that did not arise in the United States. Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter.

(my emphasis.) I wonder which of those 3 Indymedia is supposed to have been infringing? It’s pretty clear how Rackspace feel about this situation, I think.

It seems MLATs have been used before to shut down Indymedia sites in the US; this cryptome mirror of Montreal IMC pages documents one such case. Here’s a summary from a quoted email there:

Heres a quite interesting story on the power of mlats and what we will have to look forward to with the COE treaty :

A cop car was broken into in Quebec and a security doc relating to measures for the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit protests was stolen and posted in the net in Seattle. At the behest of the RCMP, a magistrate judge issued an order to grab the records from a Seattle web site called the ‘independent media center’ using the US/CAN mlat. They were then visited by the FBI/Secret Service. They then had a gag order on this for several days before it was released today.

Great precedent. I wonder if when my car gets broken into again, I can use the cybercrime treaty to find my stereo again…

And snippets from the IMC press release of the time:

On the evening of Saturday, April 21, a day which saw tens of thousands demonstrate against the FTAA in the streets of Quebec City, the Independent Media Center in Seattle was served with a sealed court order by two FBI agents and an agent of the US Secret Service. The terms of the sealed order prevented IMC volunteers from publicizing its contents; volunteers immediately began discussions with legal counsel to amend the order. This morning, April 27, Magistrate Judge Monica Benton issued an amended order, freeing us to discuss the situation without the threat of being held in contempt.

The original order, also issued by Judge Benton, directed the IMC to supply the FBI with ‘all user connection logs’ for April 20 and 21st from a web server occupying an IP address which the Secret Service believed belonged to the IMC. The order stated that this was part of an ‘ongoing criminal investigation’ into acts that could constitute violations of Canadian law, specifically theft and mischief. IMC legal counsel David Sobel, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, comments: ‘As the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment protects the right to communicate anonymously with the press and for political purposes. An order compelling the disclosure of information identifying an indiscriminately large number of users of a website devoted to political discourse raises very serious constitutional issues. To provide the same protection to the press and anonymous sources in the Internet world as with more traditional media, the Government must be severely limited in its ability to demand their Internet identity–their ‘Internet Protocol addresses.’ A federal statute already requires that such efforts against the press be approved by the Attorney General, and only where essential and after alternatives have been exhausted. There is no suggestion that these standards were met here.

The sealed court order also directed the IMC not to disclose ‘the existence of this Application or Order, or the existence of this investigation, unless or until ordered by this court.’ Such a prior restraint on a media organization goes to the heart of the First Amendment. Ironically, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer learned about the existence of the order from ‘federal sources,’ suggesting that the purpose of the gag order was simply to allow the government to spin the issue its way.

The order did not specify what acts were being investigated, and the Secret Service agent acknowledged that the IMC itself was not suspected of criminal activity. No violation of US law was alleged.

Of course, cryptome is still chugging away as it always has been; simple HTML and no server-side dynamic scripting, means easy offshore mirroring ;)

Tags: court, imc, indymedia, law, matter, mlat, order, press, rackspace, release, treaty

Spam: CNN: First four charged under ‘can spam’ law:

Court documents in the landmark case in Detroit describe a nearly inscrutable puzzle of corporate identities, bank accounts and electronic storefronts in one alleged spam operation.

At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and passed them along to one defendant.

Detroit Free Press: 4 Oakland men cited in 1st U.S. spam case:

The four are accused of secretly commandeering computers that forward e-mail for some of the nation’s biggest corporations — including Ford Motor Co. — to send millions of junk messages advertising herbal supplements, diet patches and sexual enhancement pills and products.

Other unwitting companies and agencies whose computers were used include Unisys Corp., Amoco Corp., the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and the U.S. Army Information Center, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Wednesday. …..

Unraveling the trail of spam took four months. Berg said that because of the use of proxy servers, trying to trace the spam back to the original sender was difficult. …..

In Karlsruhe, Germany, an Internet security expert and activist named Anders Henke runs what he calls a “proxy pot,” a system that simulates a mail proxy but doesn’t actually forward mail. It sits on the Internet, looking vulnerable to the sophisticated scanning software used by spammers to sniff out open proxies.

Starting in early January, the complaint says, Henke’s proxy pot intercepted 5 million attempts from computer accounts linked to the Michigan men.

Tags: case, cnn, complaint, corp, court, internet, law, pot, proxy, spam

Politics: FFII reports that the ‘IPR Enforcement Directive’, the law proposed to deal with ‘IPR infringement’ by the wife of the CEO of Vivendi Universal, has just been approved by the EU Council.

Another glorious moment of digital cluelessness by the Irish presidency. But then, it had already been passed by the parliament. Reminder: that page lists the Irish MEPs and how they voted on a key amendment, which would have inserted safeguards so that ’surprise raids … in the middle of the night by private security firms, on the flimsiest evidence’ would not be possible.

It’s now done in Europe. Next step is to deal with it when the member state governments implement it (which has to happen by June 2006).

Tags: ceo, directive, enforcement, ffii, infringement, ipr, law, politics, the, vivendi, wife

Spam: Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an increasingly criminal lifestyle.’

Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated – such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!

Tags: article, bulk, choice, conference, guardian, incredible, law, richter, spam, the

EU: EU Reporter (PDF) thoroughly trashes the new law:

The legislation as structured is opposed by lawyers and judges, who have said that large corporations will be able to slap pre-emptive injunctions on small manufacturers and put them out of business without any fear of having to pay compensation if their action proves to be no more than to gain commercial advantage.

Music companies will get the right to demand raids merely on suspicion of a breach including on private homes.

WITHOUT PROOF factories could be closed, assets and bank accounts frozen by opportunist actions based on patents claims, Greg Perry, Director General of the Brussels-based European Generic Medicines Association told EU Reporter. …

Pressure from the current 15 Member States is being blamed by a large swathe of industry for rushing bad legislation into law. Surprisingly, one of Britain’s largest corporations has slammed both parliament and Council saying: ‘It will take many years to undo the damage that this legislation has the potential to do.’ Unsurprisingly the corporation, normally close to the British Government, refused to be named.

Tags: action, advantage, business, compensation, eu, fear, law, legislation, music, pdf, reporter

Spam: Kottke passes on news of the second coming — in spam:

It is now that blacklisting and filtering and blocking and Blocking of Port 25 and Blocking SMTP connections and filtering out email and anything related that does not allow any person in the United States of America to send email to anybody and then have opt-out or opt-in and that COMPLY with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 are doing something that is ILLEGAL and you are a CRIMINAL for doing this you have CRIMINAL LIABILITY and CIVIL LIABILITY and your company CANNOT protect you in the slightest. If your company asked you to murder somebody would you do this? Of course not for most. Then do NOT do illegal and criminal things now that are out side of the law and outside of Federal Law now with the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act of

1. The corporate veil can be pierced and board members of the corporation and officers of the corporation and executives of the corporation and managers of the corporation and employees of the corporation that are involved in the slightest in the writing of or approval of or enforcement of Terms of Service or Policies or Procedures or Business Decisions or Business Practices or Zero Tolerance Policies that would or does interrupt or cancel or block or filter or blacklist or harass or defame the character of or slander Ted Jesus Christ GOD in the slightest from sending legal email now and into the future are COMMITTING A CRIME and have CIVIL LIABILITY also and can be pursued by the US Attorney and State Attorneys and District Attorneys and the FTC and also if doing certain things also the ATF and the FBI and more. If calling TJCG a SPAMMER and then BLACKLISTING or BLOCKING or FILTERING or putting into list or putting into any Product or Service anything related to stopping the emails of TJCG you are also committing DEFAMATION OF CHARACTER and LIBEL and SLANDER and damaging the good reputation of TJCG.

What, no divine retribution?

Tags: act, blacklisting, blocking, can-spam, company, corporation, email, law, liability, spam, tjcg

Law: Darius Whelan at UCC writes, ‘my colleague Louise Crowley and I are involved in drafting an Irish version of the Creative Commons licence‘.

If you’re interested in helping ‘port’ the Creative Commons licence to Irish law, it’s well worth a gander.

Tags: colleague, commons, creative, gander, law, licence, port, ucc, version

Spam: Federal Anti-Spam Law Passes Congress (Anne Mitchell):

This source also said that the bill in its ultimate (and by now presumably passed) version was significantly tighter and more pro-consumer than the version which passed the senate and went to the house earlier this month. That’s good. On the other hand, it still doesn’t go nearly as far as the CA law did in many ways.

Still, one must be pragmatic – it doesn’t really matter if it’s better or worse than the CA law, right now, because it is (will be) the law. If we have to have a Federal law, and if it has to pre-empt the states, then this one at least has some positive aspects to it.

Tags: anti, bill, congress, federal, law, passes, pro-consumer, source, spam, version

Federal Anti-Spam Law Passes Congress (Anne Mitchell):

This source also said that the bill in its ultimate (and by now presumably passed) version was significantly tighter and more pro-consumer than the version which passed the senate and went to the house earlier this month. That’s good. On the other hand, it still doesn’t go nearly as far as the CA law did in many ways.

Still, one must be pragmatic – it doesn’t really matter if it’s better or worse than the CA law, right now, because it is (will be) the law. If we have to have a Federal law, and if it has to pre-empt the states, then this one at least has some positive aspects to it.

Tags: anti, bill, congress, federal, law, passes, pro-consumer, source, spam, version

Spam: So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Of course, I’m sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.

BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue — it seems the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:

For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.

Which is all well and good, but I’m not going to hang around for 10 minutes of ‘what long-distance company do you use?’ in order to differentiate ‘good’ surveys from ‘bad’ ones; I’ll just hang up straight away.

Sport: Ben forwards this story — the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn’t know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.

Tags: baseball, call, consumer, ftc, history, law, part, spam, survey, take, telemarketing

So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Of course, I’m sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.

BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue — it seems the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:

For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.

Which is all well and good, but I’m not going to hang around for 10 minutes of ‘what long-distance company do you use?’ in order to differentiate ‘good’ surveys from ‘bad’ ones; I’ll just hang up straight away.

Sport: Ben forwards this story — the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn’t know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.

Tags: baseball, call, consumer, ftc, history, law, part, survey, take, telemarketing

Sounds like the pro-swpat lobby has taken an interesting tack in their PR; IDG’s Infoworld reports that:

The European Parliament is likely to support a law that permits software patents but limits their application to inventions that have a technical effect outside of just a computer program. A program could only be patented if it runs in conjunction with some sort of device such as an intelligent household appliance or a mobile phone.

But bizarrely, that’s exactly what the proposal does not suggest, and that’s exactly what the anti-swpat lobby want it to suggest! Totally, totally wierd.

Tags: application, european, idg, infoworld, law, lobby, parliament, program, software, tack

(of the phone variety). I’ve been driven mad by telemarketers; one of the more irritating local innovations (thankfully ’sales cold calls’ are pretty hard to operate with European privacy laws, so it wasn’t a problem back home).

Well, Congress over here recently passed a ‘do not call’ list, so you could ring up the maintainers and ask for your number to be added, and hey presto, no more phone spam. Well, CalPundit writes:

The federal law doesn’t cover banks, airlines or phone companies or calls made within a state.

Wow. That’s like saying ‘the law doesn’t cover calls made on a day ending in ‘y’.’ In my experience, those companies make 95% of the calls. Great.

Think I’ll stick with the tried-and-trusted ‘ring through to answerphone during the afternoon and early evening’ filter…

DMCA: IP: Using treaties to lock in DMCA enforcement:

On May 6, President Bush and Prime Minister Goh of Singapore signed the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (the ‘FTA’). President Bush has termed the FTA ‘the first of its kind’ – apparently meaning that it is the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Asian nation.

But the FTA is also the first of its kind in another sense, as well. It is the first international trade agreement to demand that the signatories implement anti-circumvention provisions similar to those of the hotly controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (’DMCA’).

It’s Naomi Klein meets Slashdot ;) Hopefully it’ll be blocked though, since it has serious domestic results too:

This step will have international, as well as domestic consequences: If Congress approves the FTA, it will not able to alter the DMCA without violating its obligations to Singapore.

Of course, according to some correspondents, Ireland’s copyright regime (reformed in 2000) quietly inserted its own DMCA provisions. Of course, nobody noticed, except for the legal lobbyists who were hoping this would happen. Doh. Is nowhere safe for freedom-to-tinker these days?

Tags: agreement, congress, copyright, course, dmca, fta, kind, law, phone, trade

Another good trip report, from ‘babbage’ at perl.org.

• Again, and interestingly, quite a few folks agreed with one of SA’s core tenets; no single approach (stats, RBLs, rules, distributed hashes) can filter effectively on its own, as spammers will soon figure out a way to subvert that technique. However, if you combine several techniques, they cannot all be subverted at once, so your effectiveness in the face of active attacks is much better.

• Also interesting to note how everyone working with learning-based approaches commented on how hard it was to persuade ‘normal people’ to keep a corpus. Let’s hope SA’s auto-training will work well enough to avoid that problem.

• in passing — babbage noted the old canard about Hotmail selling their user database to spammers. That must really piss the Hotmail folks off ;) I think it’s much more likely that, with Moore’s Law and the modern internet, a dictionary attack *will* find your account eventually.

• Good tip on the legal angle from John Praed of The Internet Law Group: if a spam misuses the name of a trademarked product like ‘Viagra’, get a copy to Pfizer pronto. Trademark holders have a particular desire to follow up on infringements like this, as an undefended trademark loses its TM status otherwise.

• David Berlind, ZDNet executive editor: ‘They don’t want to be involved (in developing an SMTPng)’. He might say that, but I bet their folks working on sending out their bulk-mailed email newsletters might disagree ;). Legit bulk mail senders have to be involved for it to work, and they will want to be involved, too.

• Brightmail have a patent on spam honeypots? Must take a look for this sometime.

• the plural of ‘corpus’ is ‘corpora’ ;)

Great report, overall.

It’s interesting to see that Infoworld notes that reps from AOL, Yahoo! and MS were all present.

Since the conf, Paul Graham has a new paper up about ‘Better Bayesian Filtering’, and lists some new tokenization techniques he’s using:

• keep dollar signs, exclamation and most punctuation intact (we do that!)

• prepend header names to header-mined tokens (us too!)

• case is preserved (ditto!)

• keep ‘degenerate’ tokens; ‘Subject:FREE!!!’ degenerates to ‘Subject:free’, to ‘FREE!!!’, and ‘free’. (ditto! well, partly. We use degeneration of tokens, but we keep the degenerate tokens in a separate, prefixed namespace from the non-degenerate ones, as he contemplates in footnote 7. It’s worth noting that case-sensitivity didn’t work well compared to the database bloat it produced; each token needs to be duplicated into the case-insensitive namespace, but that doubled the database size, and the hit-rate didn’t go up nearly enough to make it worthwhile.)

Most of these were also discovered and verified experimentally by SpamBayes, too, BTW.

When we were working on SpamAssassin’s Bayesian-ish implementation, we took a scientific approach, and used suggestions from the SpamBayes folks and from the SpamAssassin community on tokenizer and stats-combining techniques. We then tested these experimentally on a test corpus, and posted the results. In almost all cases, our results matched up with the SpamBayes folks’ results, which is very nice, in a scientific sense.

(PS: update on the Fly UI story — ‘apis’ is not French, it’s Latin. oops! Thanks Craig…)

Tags: babbage, corpus, hotmail, internet, law, perl, report, spam, trademark, trip

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood writes a trip report. Good tidbits:

• many big players in the mail-sending side want to see an SMTPng; a new protocol which is spam-resistant.

• Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group said that ‘better spam filters make his job easier: the more contortions that a spammer goes through to make sure that the messages go through, the easier it is to convince a judge that the spammer knew it was wrong.’ Excellent!

Tags: group, internet, law, protocol, report, sherwood, side, smtpng, spammer, trip

Yahoo!: Deadline Passes for European Digital Copyright Law. ‘A deadline for adopting a new EU law on copyright protection has passed with just two member countries signing up, dealing a blow to media and software companies beset by unauthorized duplication of their works across the Internet.’ The two countries are Greece and Denmark, which is odd, considering I thought Ireland had do so too.

Other actors in the private sector, such as Internet service providers, have weighed in heavily on the issue, opposing laws that could ultimately hurt consumer rights.

Yay ISPs!

Tags: copyright, deadline, digital, european, internet, law, member, passes, protection, yahoo

According to the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Mr. D. Ahern, Ireland will “transpose into Irish law the requirements of European Parliament and Council Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector” before the end of 2003.

It will be nice to be able to point to the law, eventually — for what that’s worth. Since most spammers are USian, relaying via other countries, actually acting on the law will not be quite so simple. But it will be an improvement.

Tags: communications, council, directive, european, law, marine, minister, natural, parliament, transpose