Hackers advocate the free pursuit and sharing of knowledge without restriction, even as they acknowledge that applying it is something else.

I wrote an article in this month's issue of Communications of the ACM. Its a typical Decius rant about freedom to tinker; really a hacker's perspective on the Bill Joy/Fukuyama argument that science needs to be centrally controlled and partially abandoned. The issue is a special issue on Computer Hackers with submissions from Greg Conti, FX, Kaminsky, Bruce Potter, Joe Grand, Stephen Bono, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Matt Green. Many folks on this site might enjoy reading the whole thing if you can get your hands on it. The articles mesh together well and there is some neat stuff in here.

Academic freedom and the hacker ethic

Well, generally the most important thing we learned is how diverse the bodies of the solar system are. Each one is unique and that's because they've had a different history, different evolution. Jupiter, with it's great red spot is just the largest of dozens of giant hurricane-like storm systems. And two of Jupiter's moons, Io, has a 100 times more volcanic activity than Earth. Europa has an ice crust probably on the liquid water ocean. On to Saturn, we've found Saturn's rings are riddled with wakes from moons, which are orbiting inside the rings and outside the rings. And there is a moon there called Enceladus, which is the whitest, brightest object in the solar system and has a very fresh surface. And there's the moon Titan, which has an atmosphere in which liquid natural gas rains on the surface.

I think many MemeStreamers will enjoy this interview with one of the Voyager scientists.

JPL.NASA.GOV: Voyager Interview

Apparently some guy at AT&T made the classic mistake of thinking that blacking text out in a PDF actually removes that text from the actual file. Apparently the information they're trying to hide is, in fact, exactly what I've been saying on this blog since information started to come out about this case:

"Although the plaintiffs ominously refer to the equipment as the 'Surveillance Configuration,' the same physical equipment could be utilized exclusively for other surveillance in full compliance with" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The only thing thats troubling is, typically, if you're accused of something you didn't do, you usually say "I wasn't doing that, I was doing this" rather then saying "The information you have indicates that I might have done that, but its also possible based on the same information that I might have been doing this, that, or the other thing... You can't prove that I was doing exactly that." For example, the redacted text also claims that this might have been an IDS system. It most certainly wasn't. They kind of sound guilty. If they just said "its for CALEA" that would be the end of the discussion, probably. CALEA is not a state secret.

AT&T leaks sensitive info in NSA suit | CNET News.com

WARRANTS: Not good enough for us, too good for you.

Congressional Quote of the Day!

The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

Associate Superintendent Prentiss Lea rebuffed that criticism. "The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

Its not the reading of the blogs that is an invasion of privacy, its the extension of your responsibility for keeping an orderly learning environment into areas of students lives which have nothing to do with their education that is an invasion of privacy. What a fucking moron.

Libertyville seems to produce a lot of people who are really pissed off at the world. I wonder why...

School District to Monitor Student Blogs - Yahoo! News

The alarm, which has been praised by
police, is highly effective because its
ultra-high sound can be heard only by
youths but not by most people over 20.

Schoolchildren have recorded the
sound, which they named Teen Buzz,
and spread it from phone to phone via
text messages and Bluetooth technology.

Now they can receive calls and texts
during lessons without teachers having
the faintest idea what is going on.

What a cool idea. A few years ago I learned that I can hear ultrasonic rodent repellers. I'll bet I can hear these just fine.

Pupils perform 'alarming' feat | Metro.co.uk

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." - Cardinal Richelieu

... who was, by the way, an authoritarian monster who likely said these words in all seriousness and not to make any point about privacy.

Schneier on Security: The Value of Privacy

Lamar Smith has a nack for writing bills that I hate, but this rule change is baddly needed and I support it.

Chairman Lamar Smith (TX-21) today introduced the “Orphan Works Act of 2006” (H.R. 5439), which creates new guidelines for use of copyrighted material when the original owner cannot be located.

©opyBites: Copyright Law Blog: Orphan Works Legislation

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Sunday that he was seeking greater consensus on the Supreme Court, adding that more consensus would be likely if controversial issues could be decided on the "narrowest possible grounds."

He said the nation would benefit if the justices could avoid 5-to-4 decisions in cases with sweeping impact, noting that many of the court's most controversial cases, including presidential wartime powers and political boundaries in Texas, would be decided in the final six weeks of the current term.

So far he seems to be delivering on this promise. The court is tossing up dramatically more unanimous decisions. Whether that trend will last as the sample size grows remains to be seen. If successful, whether this is a good or a bad thing will take me time to contemplate.

Chief Justice Says His Goal Is More Consensus on Court - New York Times

AT&T claims information in the file is proprietary and that it would suffer severe harm if it were released.

Based on what we've seen, Wired News disagrees. In addition, we believe the public's right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T's claims to secrecy.

Wired has now published ALL of the AT&T documents. I agree with Wired that this information doesn't create a competitive problem for AT&T. AT&T is playing the proprietary card for technical reasons. I also don't think that publishing this information harms national security. Basically, yawn, there is nothing here that indicates that this is anything more then a CALEA compliance room. Mind you, the problem with CALEA is that it creates all of the infrastructure needed to allow access to all of the content, and anyone who had access to the content, or possibly anyone who can guess your SNMPv3 password, can pretty much do whatever they want with it so long as they don't get caught. This is why civil libertarians opposed CALEA. However, proving that the intercepts in this case aren't lawful is going to take more evidence than this.

Wired News: Why We Published the AT&T Docs