What happens when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer behavior and desires?
What indeed? Thoughtful Salon article about the impending collision between the corporate and public interests.

“Hollywood is on the march. Adding copy protection to CDs is just one tactic in a comprehensive onslaught. Media behemoths like Disney, Sony and AOL Time Warner are seeking full control of all methods of entertainment distribution; if their vision is realized, digital television sets, hard drives, personal video-recorders and wireless devices will all have some form of copy protection. In the most dire incarnation of the digital entertainment future, consumers of music and movies won’t be able to make any copies at all without explicit permission; you might not even be able to move, for example, a recorded version of “The Simpsons” from the digital VCR in your den to the one in your bedroom.

Many critics are convinced that copy-protection technologies are doomed to failure. No system is perfectly secure, and anything that works too well is bound to annoy consumers. Veterans of the consumer industry recall the late 1980s, when many software manufacturers abandoned various copy-protection schemes as bad for business. That cycle, they argue, is set to repeat itself.

But there are signs that the digital future will not resemble the past. Not only do the content companies enjoy access to much more sophisticated technology, but they also have a new tool at their disposal: Congress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it illegal to distribute or even discuss anything that circumvents digital copyright control. And last month, Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-S.C., threatened to launch another bill — the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) — that will mandate the inclusion of copy-protection technology in all digital devices.

Computer-savvy geeks will likely find a way around every technological advance delivered by state-of-the-art copy protection. But what happens when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer behavior and desires? As the content companies accelerate the deployment of every legal, political and technological weapon in their arsenal, that is precisely the showdown that looms.”

A note from Dave Winer: “BTW, another reason I blog is patents. My weblog is my “lab notebook.” I keep track of my art here, lest someone someday take a patent out on an idea I came up with. I also try to point to other people’s innovations so they get on the record too. Keeping a public weblog helps protect our power to innovate.”  [Scripting News]

The UK music industry has been told it must rethink the way it tackles digital music or face long-term decline.
BBC Online report.

“If record companies do not make their own digital music services more attractive to fans, they could continue to lose out to music piracy over the internet, a DTI report has said. ”

Scientific American: Tragedy of the Cyber Commons. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. This freedom is increasingly under threat. The danger is that one class of property owners will use the legal system to veto certain kinds of innovation that no longer accord with its business interests. These owners will have the power to choose what kind of innovation is permitted–and that’s inconsistent with the innovation commons. [Tomalak’s Realm]

There’s a bug in the idea that the govt could require the computer hacks that the entertainment industry wants. At some point the govt will realize that it would render its own computers unusable. Of course they could put exemptions on their computers. Then we could all get government jobs. We’ll need them, because there won’t be any computer industry jobs except to make computers for the government.   [Scripting News]

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined — again. Having enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, I found a link on Quentin’s weblog to John Hiler’s article on how the Blogging phenomenon provides daily examples of tipping points in action, which mentioned the Robot Wisdom site, and also to Seth Godin’s and Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and thence to some really insightful ideas about advertising. For example:

“The most successful ideas are those that spread and grow because of the customer’s relationship to other customers — not the marketer’s to the customer.”

And:

“The future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.”

Which of course is spot on for my work on RAB-eye. And also explains how I came to spend 45 minutes browsing and thinking as a result of a single link.

Gunpowder was invented by Chinese researchers looking for a way of prolonging life. Edison thought the phonograph was going to eliminated written correspondence. Viagra was developed as a therapy for angina…. Lovely Wired piece on inventions which surprise their inventors.

First 802.11g chip launched
NEWS.com story.

Missing Observer column from March 3

The New York Times’ was broken into recently. In a two-minute scan performed on a whim, a 21-year old hacker named Adrian Lamo — who also works as an offbeat security consultant — discovered no fewer than seven mis-configured proxy servers acting as doorways between the public Internet and the newspaper’s private intranet, making the latter accessible to anyone capable of properly configuring their Web browser.

Once on the Times’ network, Lamo exploited weaknesses in its password policies to broaden his access, eventually reaching confidential data such as the names and Social Security numbers of the paper’s employees, logs of stop and start orders for home delivery customers, computer dial-up instructions for stringers to file stories and lists of contacts used by the Metro and Business desks.

More interestingly, Lamo gained access to a database of 3,000 contributors to the Times op-ed page — the bully pulpit of America’s elite. This gave him Social Security numbers for, inter alia, former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler, Democratic spin-doctor James Carville, ex-NSA chief Bobby Inman, former secretary of state James Baker, Stanford professor Larry Lessig and actor Robert Redford. He also obtained the home phone numbers of people like William F. Buckley Jr., Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Rush Limbaugh, Vint Cerf, Warren Beatty and former president Jimmy Carter, plus fascinating information on contributors’ areas of expertise , what books they’ve written and the odd note on how easily they succumb to editing or how much they were paid.

No lasting harm was done — save to the Times’s substantial dignity — because Mr. Lamo notified the newspaper’s managers through a reporter. (As it happens, he has done things like this before [^] and indeed has built an unusual reputation exposing security holes at large corporations, then voluntarily helping them fix the vulnerabilities he exploited. According to a leading online security journal, he was praised last December by communications giant WorldCom after he discovered security holes in their intranet that threatened to expose the private networks of Bank of America, CitiCorp, JP Morgan, and others.)

So Mr. Lamo is thus a Good Egg. His little exploit, however, ought to make us pause. What if he’d been differently motivated? For example: what if instead of rummaging around on the paper’s intranet, he’d actually got to the paper’s published website and made some subtle alterations to the copy. (It’s not as though it couldn’t happen: the Times’ site was hacked once before in 1998, but the intruders contented themselves then with vulgar defacement.) We live, remember, in an age where news and comment flashes around the globe at the speed of light and where, in particular, stock markets are incredibly (and often irrationally) sensitive to bad news. Our world is one in which information published in an organ like the ‘Times’ is taken seriously — and acted upon.

We’ve had some dry runs for these ‘semantic attacks’ — as security expert Bruce Schneier calls them. On 25 August 2000, for example, the press release distribution service Internet Wire received a forged e-mail that appeared to come from the Emulex corporation. reporting that the company’s CEO had resigned and its earnings would be restated. Internet Wire posted the press release, not bothering to verify either its origin or contents. Several financial news services and Web sites further distributed the false information, and the stock dropped 61% (from $113 to $43) before the hoax was exposed.

“Despite its amateurish execution”, writes Schneier, (the perpetrator, trying to make money on the stock movements, was caught in less than 24 hours), “$2.54 billion in market capitalisation disappeared, only to reappear hours later. With better planning a similar attack could do more damage and be more difficult to detect”. The only question is when will it materialise. And whether it will be covered by the Times.

45% of UK homes now online
New figures from Oftel indicate that 11 million homes, or 45 percent of all homes, are now online, up from 30 percent last year.