] Lobbyists for some of the nation's largest technology
] companies will argue under the new agreement against
] efforts in Congress to amend U.S. laws to broaden the
] rights of consumers, such as explicitly permitting
] viewers to make backup copies of DVDs for personal use or
] copy songs onto handheld listening devices.

More information is starting to leak out about this mornings deal between the RIAA and the tech industry. According to the AP, the RIAA agrees to drop support for the (unworkable and extremely unpopular) Fritz Chip legislation, and in exchange the technology industry agrees to lobby AGAINST consumer fair use rights. I certaily don't wish to take the AP's analysis as the word of god, but they are spinning this as a positive compromise. It sounds to me like the RIAA got a hell of a lot more then they gave.

RIAA, Technology Industry deal looking dirty...

Take your $20 from the recording industry and give it to the EFF.

SendItToTheEFF.org

] "First came the fuss over double compensation for the
] radio-commercial actors. Then the flap over royalties for
] recording artists. Now the slap-happy Internet radio
] business is reeling from another hit, this time from the
] nation's most popular network of online stations."

DMCA royalties kill Clear Channel. Never thought you'd hear that one, did you?

Wired News: Radio Ditches Webcasts En Masse

] "GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will
] allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given
] location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web
] page of the restaurants near you."

This site is slashdoted to hell, but I think that ultimately this sort of thing will be extremely important. Espeically with respect to mobile devices. You will want to be able to attach a blog entry to a geographic location, and the reputation system will find blog entries of interest to you as you walk around town... This will allow you to share information about businesses in the area, history, etc...

GeoURL ICBM Address Server

] "The people are now the arbiters of the truth. And this
] is as it should be. The only people who are purely
] interested in the truth are the citizens at large. They
] are, therefore, the only people who can be trusted to
] find it."

A short rant Decius wrote about the impact that weblogs will have on the media.

Weblogs and Democracy

I guess I should make some comments about these, considering I made them.. :)

Before anyone sends me any feedback, please keep in mind, whats posted here is my proof of concept. Infact, if you look at the second graph, you notice its datasource is labeled "yeah.stat". That should indicate the half-assed mannor in which they came together. I must admit, I hope these don't make it out to a large audience (just watch, this is what gets us Slashdotted), because they are not up to my standards. I know, I know.. Release early, release often.. I heard you Eric..

I'm working on a new version of my graphing scripts that will do a number of things these didn't, such as using colors to convey link properties and topic information. I'm backed up with a bunch of work, so it may take a while.

There is one minor error in Decius's description. This graph does not take topics into account at all. I threw out all that information when generating these. The links do convey direction, so thats why some nodes have two links between them. If I wasn't throwing out topic information, there would be a number of nodes with over 6 links connecting them. [Update: Little unclear here. The dot graph dosen't take into account topics, other one does. My error..]

Expect the next set of graphs to look very different.

I would like to see people discuss the privacy ramifications of these graphs, as they see them. Since these graphs are generated using the most private of information, users reputation tables, I would like to see a discussion about this. Everyone involved with MemeStreams can easily be described as a "privacy zealot", so we are concerned, and we are listening.

In particular.. In this format, when private information is aggerated, does it become statistical information that can be desiminated without infringing on user's privacy? And can anyone think of a way that an individual user's reputation information could be mined from this graph?

Visualizing MemeStreams

] "Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television channel known
] to broadcast statements from Osama bin Laden (news - web
] sites), will reach out to the West starting in February
] with an English-language Web site. "

Yes!

I've been craving the opportunity to read the Al-Jazeera news stories directly, and not just be limited to excerpted bits from BBC and CNN. I have yet to find a good online translator that would convert Arabic websites into something English-readable. So it'll be great to get Arabic news from the source (or at least closer to the source).

In the past, I have attempted to read Al-Jazeera stories via several web translators. It never translates well. I am very happy about this.

Al-Jazeera to provide English-language Web site

] People in the genetics industy claim that it is a hoax.
] Nobody has seen pictures of the baby yet and there's been no
] scientific proof yet that they've cloned anything, but yet the
] media is jumping on this shit like it's proof.

According to the Washington Post, the Raelians claimed a similar cloning success back in 1978, but further investigation proved it to be a hoax.

The story is also interesting because it comments on the reputation of the ABC Science Correspondent, Michael Guillen, who's going to be conducting the DNA testing of the mother and baby to determine if the cloning is real or not. Evidently a few years back, the James Randi Foundation (http://www.randi.org) gave Guillen its annual "Pigasus" award, for his "indiscriminate promotion of pseudoscience and quackery."

Stay tuned...

Cloning a Previous Hoax?

These folks are linking me right now. I read this site every day, and I often recommend articles from it. However, I have never bothered to link it directly.

This is one of the best web logs on the internet. Much cooler then Slashdot. I highly recommend it.

Its an outcropping from a strange Austin cyberpunk zine that was around in the early 90's. A good source of art, technology, and futurism.

Boing Boing :: A Directory of Wonderful Things

If you are an ISP, big or small, you have dealt with issues tracking attacks. Its fustrating as hell. It usually takes hours to get talking to someone with clue sitting on top of the network the attack is coming from. Sometimes it takes hours for someone to talk to you.. :) When language barriers or large time differences come into play, it gets even harder. Attackers can use this to their advantage, especially if they are limiting themselves to a small time window for their attack. Everyone who has spent time working at ISPs has dealt with this, myself included.

A solution to this problem _is_ necessary. Its a "facilitation of communication" problem at its heart, not a "monitoring" problem. At the molment, I still have the taste in my mouth given by the Barlow articles I blogged earlier, so I have my doubts as to the intelligence community ability to solve this problem for us given their past record and methods of operations. The better route may be for the ISP/communication providers to come up with a cross-communication strategy themselves.

As long as the intelligence people have a way to request/demand information from the ISPs/comm providers (given some sort of thumbs up from a judge) about activity of a given user/ip/whatever, and get it fast, then they will most likely be happy. If they cannot achieve their end goals, they will create a solution for us. They would be very happy if the commercial sector solved the problem for them. It would remove their incentive to turn the screws.

If there was some central US NOC structure.. And it had a staff that rotated between people working in all the ISPs that parcticipated, the government had its folks there, and it was open for review.. And it acted as a communication center between ISPs and not just the ISPs and the TLAs. That would be sweet! Now, on the other hand, if there was some NOC in Langley connected to a bunch of sniffers sitting in every ISP, that was clouded in secrecy, that would not be nice. That would suck. If the latter would up happening, I picture people like Decius, Renka, and myself standing between racks of core/access routers and a bunch of spooks with black boxes going "No! No! Fuck you! This is bullshit!" and getting arrested cognitive dissident style, and being proud of it. I have no fear of that happening really. Not only would be be completely unconstutitional, but I am confident there are more then enough people in the ISP community willing to take a personal blow to keep it from happening.

So, while the users get pissed about this.. The ISPs should be communicating with each other, about how to communicate with each other. I'm sure there are a bunch of NANOG people coming to the same conclusions.

All the comments below are from Decius. They are in line with my views, and they point several things I don't, so I'm just going to leave them appended to this.

This is where I would normally put a page break.. :)... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

Draft of National Stratedy To Security Cyperspace (RE: Bush Administration Propose System for Monitoring Internet)