San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned Texas Instruments (TI) today not to pursue its baseless legal threats against calculator hobbyists who blogged about potential modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators....

"The DMCA should not be abused to censor online discussion by people who are behaving perfectly legally," said Tom Cross, who blogs at memestreams.net. "It's legal to engage in reverse engineering, and its legal to talk about reverse engineering."

Coverage on Slashdot, CNET, Ars, BoingBoing.

EFF Warns Texas Instruments to Stop Harassing Calculator Hobbyists | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"For three weeks only, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering his entire catalog in MP3 format completely free, including his latest album, Whiskey Rebellion."

All of Mojo Nixon in free, legal MP3 - Boing Boing

This whole situation is truly mind boggling. It's ironic that the person to drive this into the limelight is the Senator that everyone likes to think is a joke. Nothing about rape is a laughing matter.

Decius writes:

This is absolutely mind boggling.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad... Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Seriously!? In my time I've seen many examples of lawyers abusing the imbalanced negotiating position present in employment contacts but this takes the cake. An agreement not to press charges for rape? Are you fucking kidding me?!

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.” In the end, Franken won the debate. His amendment passed by a 68-30 vote, earning the support of 10 Republican senators including that of newly-minted Florida Sen. George LeMieux.

30 United States Senators voted against this? What could the basis of their opposition possibly be? Al Franken is not above political grandstanding at all, but when push comes to shove, why would you oppose this? I've searched on Google for an alternative perspective to no avail. Does anyone know a source where these people have articulated their position? As LeMieux put it:

"I can't see in any circumstance that a woman who was a victim of sexual assault shouldn't have her right to go to court."

If anything Franken's amendment does not go far enough. This is prima facie evidence that there is a serious structural problem with employment contracts. No contract clause of this sort ought to be respected in any context relevant to US law and major reform of rules surrounding US employment contracts is needed.

People who voted against this amendment include:
Alexander (R-TN)
Bond (R-MO)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Corker (R-TN)
Isakson (R-GA)

More on this from ThinkProgress, including video of Franken's speech on the floor.

The Halliburton/KBR employment contract rape clause.

Decius wrote:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has graciously offered to provide me with pro bono legal representation regarding the threat I received from Texas Instruments. The EFF is also representing some other individuals who were served. There are some important principals at stake here and we may be fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take a stand on them. Stay tuned...

The EFF is representing Decius vis-a-vis TI

TI’s response has been to target programmers and bloggers with cease and desist letters telling them that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act require them to take down the keys, remove links to forum discussions, and delete blog posts.

The law, however, is not on TI's side.

EFF on the DMCA takedown MemeStreams received.

Hey, TI, Leave Those Kids Alone | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Hackers identifying themselves as “Anonymous” launched a denial-of-service attack Wednesday against a web site for Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to protest a government proposal to filter internet content, according to the Australian Associated Press.

Decius's comments:

This seems like a stupid stunt, but then again, the news reports caused me to notice the issue. I'm dismayed that the UK has allowed this kind of filtering scheme to be deployed with hardly a whimper of protest, at least as far as I heard over here. That success has emboldened censors in numerous western countries who want to deploy similar systems. I have the impression that the filter list that is running in the UK is fairly carefully managed such that most Internet users don't know its there. The only controversy that I've heard of was over that Scorpions album, which is obviously an edge case. The Australian filter list was leaked, and reports seem to indicate that it contains material that should not have been listed. Making matters worse, the Australian government has tried to censor the list.

I don't think goverments should filter the internet. If they insist, there is something to be said for doing it transparently.

‘Anonymous’ Declares War on Australia Over Internet Filtering | Threat Level | Wired.com

Decius wrote:
Apparently if you haven't already seen this you aren't very good at teh Internet.

Apparently, I fail the Internets. I good at the webs now. I has fixed it.

Epic Kludges and Jury Rigs

Hadley Leggett:

Starting this fall, you'll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called "WikiTrust" will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

Called WikiTrust, the program assigns a color code to newly edited text using an algorithm that calculates author reputation from the lifespan of their past contributions. It's based on a simple concept: The longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it's likely to be.

"They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia," said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the project.

Noteworthy writes: It's pretty egregious that neither Wired nor the WikiTrust folks bothered to mention the Puppy Smoothies paper, which was published in 2006, a year before the earliest citations on the WikiTrust site. (Why didn't Virgil mention this?)

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

Decius: Noteworthy later points out that the Wikitrust people did reference my paper in their first paper. I'm really happy to see these ideas making it into practice regardless of how much credit I'm getting. I pushed the ball a little bit forward but these guys have taken it all the way and thats awesome. Congrats Wikitrust!

Wikipedia adopts Text Coloring for Trust Idea that Decius helped develop

Quoted below is Tom's reply to the DMCA take-down notice that Texas Instruments sent:

Mr. Foster,

This afternoon I received an email from you, attached below, which orders me to remove a post from my blog at www.memestreams.net about the cracking of the TI-83 OS Signing Key. Upon receiving your email I removed the post you reference from MemeStreams. However, I do not think that the post you referenced on MemeStreams violates Texas Instruments' intellectual property. Your email does not make clear what aspect of my post you object to, and because it was so vague I suspect you may have emailed me without taking the time to properly digest the context and purpose of my post.

I am a professional computer security researcher. My personal blog on MemeStreams is a place were I regularly comment on matters relevant to computer security in both the technical and policy realm. The purpose of my post about the TI-83 signing key was to report the fact that the key had been cracked, to explain why I felt that event was important and unprecedented, to discuss the implications of that event for the practice of computer security, and to consider potential events that might follow in the future.

Absolutely nothing about my post was intended to encourage or facilitate the violation of Texas Instrument's Intellectual Property. I did not include specific information, such as the numeric keys, which might have facilitated that. Frankly, I don't care about calculator operating systems and neither does anyone else who reads my blog. My interest in the subject is purely academic - its about the implications that this event has for the greater practice of computer security.

I did provide hyperlinks to the forums where the crack was discussed, but I did so only because those are the primary sources that demonstrate that the event that I was reporting on did, in fact, actually happen. While the DMCA has been used to prohibit people from providing hyperlinks in the past, this has only been done in the context where the purpose of providing those hyperlinks was to facilitate infringement. Nothing about my post encourages infringement. In my case the purpose of providing the links was to accurately report the news.

I have a constitutional right to report the news. I have a right to report that this event occurred, to explain what web forums it occurred in, and explain what implications I think it has. This is no different from a newspaper reporting that a murder occurred, reporting what street it occurred on, and explaining why their readers should care. The DMCA does not curtail these fundamental constitutional rights.

I sympathize with your position Mr. Foster. In fact, the post you asked me to remove predicted that Texas Instruments might pursue legal action against the people who are attempting to violate their intellectual property. However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you. As your email does not make clear what aspect of my post you object to, I've been forced to remove the post in its entirety. I feel this is a significant trespass upon my First Amendment rights and I presume that it could only have happened in error.

Please take a moment to carefully reconsider the position you've taken here.

Thank you,
Tom Cross

TI is seriously overreaching. Their actions in regard to Tom should not be (and may not be) legal.

TI just kicked the hornet's nest.

Response to Texas Instruments DMCA Notice

WASHINGTON - May 6 - During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) oversight, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold questioned DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano about the new administration's policy on customs officials searching travelers' laptops. Last year, Feingold introduced the Travelers Privacy Protection Act in response to a Department of Homeland Security policy allowing customs agents to seize laptops for an unspecified period of time to "review and analyze" their contents "absent individualized suspicion." Feingold has held off on reintroduction of the legislation in order to give the new administration a chance to address the privacy issues raised by the policy.

Feingold Presses DHS Secretary About Laptop Seizure Policy | CommonDreams.org