Category Archives: Internet

OK, here's a question:

I suppose one answer is that people sign up for a Twitter feed….

The pseudonymous Mordaxus says, Kindle Brouhaha Isn't About DRM:

The issue is caused not by DRM, but by cloud computing. The problem is that Amazon has a cloud service in which Kindle customers can keep their e-books on Amazon's shelf, and shuffle them around to any Kindle-enable device they have (like a Kindle proper, or an iPhone running the Kindle app). Customers can even delete a book from their Kindle and get it back from the cloud at a later date.

The event is that Amazon removed the book from the cloud, not that it had DRM in it. If you are concerned by this, you should be concerned by the cloud service. The cloud service enabled Amazon to respond to a legal challenge by removing customers' data from the cloud. They didn't need DRM to do it. In contrast, if iTunes store or the Sony e-book store had improperly sold a book, they wouldn't be able to revoke it because they don't have a cloud service as part of the store. (eMusic, incidentally, regularly adds and removes music from their store with the waxing and waning of desire to sell it.)

This is why we need to look at it for what it is, a failure in a business model and in the cloud service.

Well, yes, OK. But also no: Without the DRM part, the Kindle users would have been able to copy their e-books to local storage (or to read on other devices) and wouldn't be as vulnerable to this. Plus, Amazon didn't just delete off-site copies, it deleted all local copies (which doesn't logically require DRM, but is likely enabled by it). And Amazon even delted user annotations on the deleted works — including at least one student's homework.

Who is snooping on my email? – Privacy guru Richard M. Smith explains how to tell if someone is reading your email, and perhaps even whom.

You'll need your own web page, with access to server logs. Plus you'll need to be willing to have a file on you, if you don't already. (And for the last step you'll need snoopers dumb enough to use a traceable IP number.)

Chris Brunner .com: Why You Shouldn't Run BitTorrent Over Tor

It begins:

If you didn't already know, Tor is a distributed anonymity network that allows anyone to use the Internet to both browse the web and publish information without giving away his or her identity.  It's a wonderful step in the direction of privacy and it serves an increasingly important role in today's world.  As far as usability goes, Tor clearly has more potential than any anonymity network that I've ever seen.  Tor could very easily be the most powerful tool that we as everyday people have to combat the gradual removal of our personal rights and freedom.

However, as of right now its most likely cause of death is not an organization or government, but rather its own users who in some cases, perhaps out of ignorance, take advantage of privacy the Tor network affords them by hiding behind it to steal software, movies, and music.  I'm not going to sit here and claim that I haven't pirated my fair share of all of the above; that's not what this is about.  Before you use BitTorrent on Tor, please stop and consider the effect this has on the Tor network.

And there's more….

Back in 1997 — more than a decade ago — I wrote what may be my most-influential internet law article, The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage. Here's the abstract:

The Internet is a transnational communication medium. Once connected, there is little that a single country can do to prevent citizens from communicating with the rest of the world without drastically reducing the economic and intellectual value of the medium. As a result, connection to the Internet enables regulatory arbitrage by which persons can, in certain circumstances, arrange their affairs so that they evade domestic regulations by structuring their communications or transactions to take advantage of foreign regulatory regimes. Regulatory arbitrage reduces the policy flexibility of nations by making certain types of domestic rules difficult to enforce. Citizens with access to the Internet can send and receive anonymous messages regardless of national law; both censorship and information export restrictions become nearly impossible to enforce, although governments have it in their power to impose some impediments to ease of use. The effectiveness of European-style data protection laws is reduced when personal information can be stored in offshore data havens. Ultimately, restrictions on certain types of transaction, e.g., restrictions imposed by securities laws, also may be undermined if these transactions can easily be carried out offshore. However, claims that income tax systems will be seriously undermined are, I argue, vastly overstated, at least in the medium term. On balance, therefore, I predict that the Internet's regulatory arbitrage effects will tend to promote liberal democratic values of openness and freedom more than they will detract from what most consider to be the modern states' legitimate regulatory powers.

In recent years I've started to fret that some of the assumptions on which it was based are not holding up — governments are getting better at blocking and filtering, whether it's the Great Firewall of China, or Saudi Arabia's attempts to crowdsource censorship.

Still, there's clearly some life left in the concept, as seen from this NYT article on how images from Iran are getting out to the internet

Throughout the week, supporters of the protesters around the world had been making their own computers available to Iranians who wanted to evade government censors.

These people have been publishing the IP addresses of their computers to public forums like Twitter — offering them as so-called proxy servers.

We hoped the Internet would be bad for despots; we feared it would be the Panopticon. The race is still on.