Drivel:  This is an interesting letter as it so acutely illustrates the fundamental shift that has occurred on the Internet in the past two years from free to for fee, or advertising sponsored, services.  Email and hosting services such as those provided by Sourceforge.net are not free, despite how they are offered to the users of the service.  This is also a great illustration of the infamous battle between the developer and the businessman.  The developer thinks that if I don't like what my "free" service is doing I can just switch.  OK, sure, but at what cost?  The cost of switching can be calculated by totally the time it takes to perform the switch and multiplying by the person's hourly rate of compensation.  If the person performs the switch on his or her "own time" then they decided to do the switch instead of something else, which also has a monetary value.  The businessman understands this plods forward.  This is economics 101, which, after almost eight years, the Internet community as a whole is just starting to grasp even after the down turn.  Everything operates according to some basic rule set that can not be changed; economics, law, and programming are not as different as one might think at their core.  This letter is like reverse of Dilbert in that Dilbert is asking the less intelligent question and the end user has the answer.  In a sense, we are all Dilbert from our own perspectives.

##Open Letter to SourceForge. Upset by some SourceForge advertising policies, David Sugar, Bayonne Project leader, writes an open letter to the SourceForge staff and receives a response. [Linux Journal]  11:30:54 PM   comments ()  

Drivel:  The "lock box" idea for monitoring Internet data is a horrible idea.  There are much more cost effective and targeted ways to approach the issue of monitoring Internet traffic.  The concept of storing everything that exists out there on the Internet is impractical if not impossible.  Using the technology that exists today to hunt done specific documents, emails, and transactions, such as I described in my last post, is a much better approach.  Halfway intelligent agents or spiders should be doing the work of analyzing the documents and files they encounter to determine their potential threat or legality.  Laws are a set of rules that can be written into software along with all of their various interpretations.  Threat levels are determined based on a formula that can also be written into software.  Building a lexicon or dictionary of phrases and words that can be used to categorize and inspect these files is very straightforward to create.  Taking a targeted approach will save time, money, and a lot of debating over the politics involved.

So what if we miss  something?  That would be nearly impossible as all of the file types that you can encounter on the Internet are known and can be interpreted using the correct protocol and then analyzed.  Furthermore, all of the domains and IP addresses are known and can be scanned at will by anyone.  The organizations and information that the U.S. government would want to target have neither the time nor the resources, human and financial, to invest in the sophisticated technologies that businesses use to safeguard their data.  Terrorist organizations need to be loose and mobile.  These are characteristics that today's technology does not easily support; meaning that the level of decentralization and obscurity these organization require is not easily implemented.

##Forbes: Beware the Cyber Cops. Jonathan Zittrain. We should resist the notion that such heightened scrutiny, especially if inconspicuous to the public, carries no significant cost to law-abiding citizens. Consider the range of proposals for unobtrusive but sweeping Internet monitoring. [Tomalak's Realm]  11:06:17 PM   comments ()