American Net users ambivalent about government surveillance of the Net

“Though they demonstrate a willingness to cede power to officials over what to disclose online, a plurality of Americans believe that taking government information off the Internet will not make a difference in battling terrorists. In addition, citizens are sharply divided on the question of whether the government should be able to monitor people[base ‘]s email and online activities. The division is this: 47% of Americans believe the government should not have the right to monitor people[base ‘]s Internet use and 45% say the government should have that right. A majority of Internet users oppose government monitoring of people[base ‘]s email and Web activities.

These are among the findings in a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project taken between June 26 and July 26 of 2,501 American adults. The results are published in a report entitled [base “]One Year Later: September 11 and the Internet.[per thou] It is a wide-ranging examination of what people feel government disclosure policies should be, how Americans[base ‘] online behavior has changed since 9/11, and how the Web itself changed as producers responded to the crisis.” [More….]

Spam analysis — money and porn, mainly

“Now anti-spam outfit, Brightmail, has taken a snapshot of all the spam it intercepted over a 24 hour period from 20-21 August. The findings make interesting reading.

Around 55 per cent of all the spam it came across related to money, including how to reduce debt, get rich quick schemes and gambling giveaways.

The second biggest group was porn – accounting for around 30 per cent of all spam received during the 24 hour period.” [More…]

My Observer column about the latest AOL Time Warner survival strategy is on the Web.

Draft of UK DMCA even worse than the US original
The Register story.

“As it stands, the UK implementation of the European Copyright Directive will hinder research into cryptography (in contravention of the express intent of the Directive itself), make criminal current common practices of the music industry, give software companies unwarranted control over the creation of software products interoperable with their own, and provide an inadequate and entirely impractical mechanism for beneficiaries of the Directive’s exceptions to obtain access to copyrighted works protected by technological measures,” the report concludes.

British Telecom Hyperlink “Patent” Invalid [ Dan Gillmor’s eJournal] Yippee! As Dan says, the weird thing is that the case ever got to court. Here is The Register‘s report. And here is the “NYT” take on it.

Reinventing the wheel at AOL Time Warner
“NYT” story on new Chairman Jonathan Miller’s fantasy that the Web is really just another kind of television.

Larry’s Last Big Speech

” I have been doing this for about two years–more than 100 of these gigs. This is about the last one. One more and it’s over for me. So I figured I wanted to write a song to end it. But then I realized I don’t sing and I can’t write music. But I came up with the refrain, at least, right? This captures the point. If you understand this refrain, you’re gonna’ understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts: * Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. * The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. * Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. * Ours is less and less a free society.” [More…]

How downloading Microsoft ‘security updates’ gradually erodes your freedom

Nice piece in The Register. Includes a close reading of the Microsoft fine print, viz:

“You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management (‘Secure Content’), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.”

Useful review of David Weinberger’s Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

“Weinberger explains how the metaphors of “document” and “building” become conflated (or even mutated) into a single concept on the Web, saying “with normal documents, we read them, file them, throw them out, or send them to someone else. We do not go to them. We don’t visit them. Web documents are different. They’re places on the Web. … They’re there. With this phrase, space — or something like it — has entered the picture.” (p. 39) But this space isn’t measured by inches or miles. “On the Web, nearness is created by interest.” (p. 49) In this place, the closest distance between two points is measured by relevance.” [More…]

1984 on its way

“Tuesday, 20 August, 2002, 10:30 GMT 11:30 UK Privacy fears over EU snooping plans Your online life could be visible to a lot of organisations

The records of who you contact via phone, web, fax or mobile could soon be stored for years under a proposal drafted by European governments.

If passed, the law would force anyone providing communication services to keep records for at least a year of what customers have been doing.

The records would be available to police forces across the European Union investigating almost any crime.” [More…]