] Diebold filed papers with the Court today indicating that
] it "has decided not to take the additional step of suing
] for copyright infringement for the materials at issue.
] Given the widespread availability of the stolen materials,
] Diebold has further decided to withdraw its existing DMCA
] notifications and not to issue any further ones for those
] materials.”

Bowing to pressure from the EFF as well as Congress, Diebold has blinked. They are stepping back from a fight without admitting their arguements are wrong. I don't think the EFF wants the judge to allow them to do this. They're in court now and the EFF wants a precident rather then a weasleout as occured in the Felton case.

Diebold blinks

] Unquestionably, the solutions to many current problems,
] the treatments for many illnesses, and the pathways to
] new businesses have already been invented, but they are
] waiting on the sidelines.

...

] it's not only innovation that
] matters, it's the rate at which innovations are
] improved and brought to market. And this has declined
] precipitously since the bust. The result is a surplus of
] innovations, with vast numbers of potentially important
] advances being warehoused or shelved. This situation is
] alarming enough in itself, but even more worrisome is the
] fact that innovations don't have an unlimited shelf
] life: they are perishable and risk becoming unusable when
] the people associated with them move on to other
] endeavors. Another reason for concern is that warehoused
] innovations remain untested and deprived of the iterative
] improvements so critical to their journey from inception
] to implementation.

you have to register for this, but it's a great article on how innovation has accelerated but the conduit for commercializing it has essentially collapsed. This has validated my thinking on the subject, but changed my perceptions on it quite a bit. Upto now, I had considered it a purely supply-demand problem, but it is more complex than that as the system that transforms innovation into the mainstream has matured and atrophied to some degree. The system is irrevocably changing.

Our Innovation Backlog

] Like the babbling psychics who predict future crimes in
] Minority Report, Dick was a precog. Lurking within his
] amphetamine-fueled fictions are truths that have only to
] be found and decoded. In a 1978 essay he wrote: "We live
] in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured
] by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by
] religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing,
] What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with
] pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people
] using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not
] distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an
] astonishing power: that of creating whole universes,
] universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same
] thing."

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick

] Diebold's actions are representative of a growing body of
] abuses through which large and powerful parties unfairly
] intimidate ISPs to remove information those parties do
] not like. In other examples, the claims are not really
] about copyright, but about not showing the parties in a
] negative light, or not allowing consumers to compare
] prices, or quieting religious critics. Powerful parties
] should not be permitted to misuse copyright as a tool for
] limiting bad press and barring access to legitimate
] consumer information.

Hear! Hear!

Kucinich Calls for Hearing on Diebold DMCA Abuse

inignoct wrote:
] ] "Every time we checked, some were gone and others had
] ] moved," said Dellavalle, who is on the faculty at the
] ] University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. "We
] ] thought, 'This is an interesting phenomenon itself. We
] ] should look at this.' "
]
] This is a problem indeed. I imagine Tom, at least, would have
] some opinions on building the web into a great, big,
] persistent trust/reputation network. Whats the answer?

Its both a blessing and a pox.

On the one hand, the web is very much the human knowledge system. Often people who are maintaining parts of it don't respect that, and aren't economically incented to respect it. People delete pages and change their urls. Companies and domains go in and out of existence. Companies take content and put it up behind subscription barriers. George Bush Sr. asks Time Magazine to delete an editorial he wrote...

Dead links are a constant problem on MemeStreams. Dynamic links are even worse. We have some strategies to combat these problems in the future.

On the other hand, the human memory is imperfect for good reason. People forget because if we remembered everything perfectly people would be constantly held accountable for things that they did years and years ago when they were very different people. People forgive and forget because people learn and mature.

I fear we are heading for a world that is the worst of both. The information that really matters, the stuff that is well researched and important, may be the most ephemeral. It will be locked up behind pay sites because good content is worth money. It's url will change because important documents are maintained by dynamic organizations. It will be removed if needed because powerful people will have the ability to clean up their pasts. On the other hand, the information that is most destructive will be archived for ever. Your personal opinions expressed on mailing lists and usenet never go away. Your credit report never gets cleared, nor your criminal record. Your old website will be sucked into the Internet Wayback machine and you won't be in a position to tell them to take it down. Your best hope for a future will be that no one will care enough about you to consider your past.

Unfortunately, the only thing that I can see standing in the way of all of this is conciousness. Conciousness on the part of the people who maintain important documents to make those documents available to the people who need them. Conciousness on the part of all of us to allow people to escape their pasts. Social maturity.

This is the sort of thing that the social movements of the future will be made of.

RE: On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral (washingtonpost.com)

] A provision of an intelligence spending bill will expand
] the power of the FBI to subpoena business documents and
] transactions from a broader range of businesses --
] everything from libraries to travel agencies to eBay --
] without first seeking approval from a judge.

More on the FBI's new powers. I had a lot of trouble finding information on this when NYT first reported it a week ago. It seems to have been kept a secret to avoid public opposition.

Wired News: Congress Expands FBI Spying Power

Jeremy wrote:
] I'll try the straightforward approach: forget "Elf" and go see
] "21 Grams."

I certainly plan on forgetting Elf baring some sort of phenominal peer recommendation, but the question is, are movies about what you think or how you feel. For most people the answer is the latter. People don't shove money at the film industry because it expands their understanding. They don't want their understanding expanded. They want to forget about their troubles for 2 hours... Increasingly, we have so much media available to us that it almost becomes like selecting a drug... Want to feel sad? Happy? Excited? Horny? Scared? Silly? Angry? (Angry... Not enough film makers do Angry...) Want to go on an adventure? Want to fall in love? Its like all the little pockets on the inside of the trench coat are filled, offering anything you want. Take a hit...

This is really where video games can fit right in if they had the guts. I don't have the attention span to play something that takes a month, and I don't like silly puzzles... We're still in the "book" stage of video game media maturity, where attention spans are long and its all about the artistry. The graphics.... We obviously want two hours of escapism, and we want to do it with friends... Can't you tell a compeling story that we can work together to move through that completes in an couple hours? I think someone can... Its all about what the experience makes the audience feel... The advantage of an interactive version is that it may have more staying power over time because its not always the same. Different versions become a topic of discussion, which is a marketing vehicle... How can the new technology assist you in desgining a better drug?

RE: How to Spread the Word When the Word Is 'Grim'

I sent this to Dave Farber in response to a post on Interesting People, but he never forwarded it on...

] I am at a total loss to see how one enforces this
] a world wide Internet. Seems to me that it forces
] the off shore of the spam industry. and does little
] to eliminate spam. Australia says 75% of their spam
] comes from China. How would this law help us again?

Although this law offers no solution to this problem that I can see, I might offer that there may be a need to enable local law enforcement agencies, who are tasked with dealing with small crimes and misdemeanors, to coordinate internationally at some point. Currently only serious cases of national importance can be raised to the level of international cooperation. If people can commit small crimes with impunity across borders then spam may only be the first popular example. A large number of small crimes can add up to a lot of money. Certainly we have the technology to enable more broad coordination between local law enforcement agencies. Will we have the need?

]] Anonymous advertising is an oxymoron. The point of ads
]] is to get people to buy stuff, so only makers or vendors
]] of the stuff that's advertised have an interest in doing
]] so, and if they can't find you, they can't to buy from you.
]] I suppose this would make "astroturf" fake grass-roots
]] campaigns harder, but I can't get too upset about that.

While I agree with John Levine's reading of the act, I think there are exceptions to this rule, which people on the Cypherpunks list have written about at length. This law does not just ban anonymous advertising. It bans any sort of anonymous business transaction via email. This means that it preemptively bans businesses which might operate behind anonymous remailers.

For example, one might imagine a time capsule service which accepts an anonymous ecash payment along with a document, and agrees to store it for a set amount of time. Once that time is up, the document is forwarded to a set email address. The service is run behind remailers so that once a document has been placed in the time capsule it cannot be removed until the time requested at the outset. This is just an example. Such a business would be illegal under this law, as it would need to send anonymous transactional email messages.

A more down to earth idea that has been explored in the past is the notion that individuals participating in an ebay style online auction might be able to rely on reputation systems rather then identification to establish trust, and engage in commerce, without compromising their personal privacy.

In short, the idea that there can be no legitimate anonymous business transaction is an over simplification. There is a question to ask here about whether we want to have a society in which people can engage in business without being traceable (which is currently possible, and always has been possible, with cash) or whether we wish to have the security associated with knowing that the police can always locate anyone we have ever done business with.

I don't wish to express any firm conclusion about this question. I
think there are interesting arguments on both sides. In any event, this has little at all to do with spam. I think it ought to be a separate policy discussion. Unfortunately, I think its too late now to do anything about it. Hopefully the courts will have the wisdom to see that such things were not envisioned by the people who crafted this act.

A very short (4 question) Myers-Briggs/Keirsey temperment test.

The "blog" connection here is silly, but there are a number of good links to more information associated with each type.

Shortest/Best Personality Test

The old hyperarchive has gone down, and many of the other archives out there have recently stopped keeping up. This one is up to date and spam free. It was suprisingly hard to find.

Cypherpunks Yahoo Group