Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Tuesday's Topics: Deep Linking; Etiquette; Great Links; Historical Perspective; e-Organization; Privacy; (In) Security. Thanks to Anthony on Air Disaster Discussion Group, I got this Link to Emily Eakin's New York Times article.  It is about the Weblogging Phenomena and has a quite different take on what it is all about than my perception.  My reaction to the article posted to Anthony's thread. 11:29:14 PM

Jim Martindale's Reference Desk is the e-Organization to emulate (thanks to Search Day for finding this link), with more than 25,000 pages and I have no trouble whatsoever navigating them.  Is this guy an e-librarian?  Does Jenny Levine know about this?  This is almost better than a Search Engine. 10:24:00 PM

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE: Email turns twenty today!. Twenty years ago today, the IETF approved RFC 822, standardizing ARPANet email. Link Discuss (Thanks, Richard!) UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog] Al's earlier post on the history of e-mail, linked to Datamation interview with Ray Tomlinson who invented e-mail in 1971.  This does not compute 2002-1971 = 31 years, not 20.  Time to check out the Search Day Internet Calculator.  Calculators On-Line Center http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/RefCalculators.html More than 15,000 calculators covering virtually every specialized type of calculation imaginable. Was ARPANet (invented 1969?) the first Internet, but wasn't it based on previous technology?  I remember using computer networking in the 1970's but it wasn't e-mail.  It was BBS forums, where we would use typewriters connected to phone lines (GUI not yet invented, and computer data NOT on TV sets yet - I not remember when that started) to dial up to rent time on big computers, and connect to the relevant group, print out other people posts, and key in our posts.  It wasn't e-mail, but we were talking to people thousands of miles away, by computer.  I typically had a series of sessions, printing out stuff, then signing off to figure out my replies, because we were paying $60.00 a minute connect time, not counting the long distance phone bill. My suspicion is that Boing Boing is identifying an e-mail standard that was approved 20 years ago, but we know from the standards movement today that things happen for decades before any agreement is reached on a standard. I have been corrected by Master Communications History.  It was not 1971 but 1972, so e-mail is thirty years old this year.  9:34:47 PM

More here on the Deep Linking Controversy. Links to my earlier comments on this legal quagmire, or use the Calendar to jump to Aug 4th, July 16 or 10. The Link Controversy Page provides an overview of the legal problems of using hyperlinks, inline images and frames on the WWW, covering problems in the area of copyright, trademark, trespass law as well as unfair competition law.   The links are grouped using the national flag of the nation whose language is being used.  The organizer of this wants to be informed of any articles missing from his directory. [Ernie the Attorney] QUOTE Another article on deep linking, another heavy sigh.  Somebody call a timeout.  And motion for Congress to send some eager beaver who likes to create new laws.  Say, Berman, get over here.  You want to introduce some Internet legislation?  Okay, here's what you do.  Introduce a bill that says the law doesn't recognize any cause of action based on someone linking to another person's site (after all that's what the Web was created to allow).  But this law isn't there to protect people from their own stupidity, so if people want to use technical means to frustrate deep linking then they're allowed to do that.  Now that would be a law that makes sense.  So what are the odds of that getting passed? UNQUOTE [Ernie the Attorney] Ernie's first link, to British Register, lets us know that Europe has lots of law suits by News Media against search engines and news aggregators for linking to them.  Apparently these media do not want people finding out about their stories thanks to search engines and links based on the content of what they are doing, and they claim that deep links constitute violation of copyright.  I could understand the copyright complaint if someone reprinted their material and made it look like the reprinting person was the writer. News Club offers a search engine by news category, in which hits go directly to the articles of 100 different news sources.  The user receives the page directly from the publisher's server, with everything that is on the publisher's site, including contents, links, advertising.  But one of the publishers is suing News Club for copyright infringement.  They do not want search engines like this giving consumers access to their news paper.  Under German copyright law, the owners of content do have the right to block access by other people.  What I do not understand is why the publishers put their stuff on the Internet if they do not want people looking at it. Germany Legislators are seeking to adjust their copyright law to legalize the kind of access that is provided by Search Engines, but it is not clear whether other kinds of deep linking could be argued is something German sites may argue is a copyright that other people are violating.  German copyright law is also murky on the legality of someone viewing something on the Internet.  The act of copying it from the web site to our browser you see is something that the German Legislature never considered before.  There are meta tags on the publisher's web site declaring that they want to be found by search engines, so it sounds like the newspaper is using software in which they have no idea what their software is doing. In 2000, News Club took measures to remove this publisher from their software, so no one using their search engine would find them through News Club, after they got a cease and desist order, but the law suit for copyright infringement is still going forwards. 8:53:48 PM

e-Privacy assurances in our climate of anti-terrorism legislation is the topic of this e-week column by John Taschek.  Ernie the Attorney offers this link to Charles C. Mann Atlantic Homeland Insecurity article on security systemic problems in general, and here is Ernie's earlier post on Security in general.  Here are some examples of our general state of Insecurity thinking. The US government has several networks never connected to the Internet, accessible only withing physically secure buildings.  But they've been infected by computer viruses because humans with lap tops connect to both the Internet and the secure networks, and bypass the security.  The weakest link are the government users. Kerkhoff's Principle:  A good crypto system QUOTE should be able to fall into the enemy's hands without disadvantage.  UNQUOTE Encrypting Internet transactions, says Purdue computer scientist Eugene Spafford, QUOTE is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card info from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench.  UNQUOTE Airport Security thinks that protection against car bombings is practical by having cars park 300 feet away from the terminal, but at the same time passengers can be dropped off right in front of the terminal.  That does not compute. Airports have to be evacuated all the time because of security breaches.  There is no way to shut down just the portion of the people movement where the problem occurred. Carjacking is on the rise partly because Automobile Manufacturers have made it more difficult to hot wire an unattended vehicle. QUOTE Bank Vaults are secure because to break in takes real skill. Computers are not, because to break in takes practically no skill. Millions of credit card numbers have been stolen from computer networks.  UNQUOTE German reporters tested a face recognition system, and iris scanner, and nine fingerprint readers.  All of them could be spoofed using output from a lap top screen.  They photographed an authorized user, blew up the face, cut out the pupils, help the image before their faces like a mask, and the iris scanner was spoofed. An authorized user's fingerprints were lifted from a drinking glass, on a tape pressed against the fingerprint reader, which accepted the data as valid. A corporation replaced paper ballots with electronic shareholder voting, which was hacked into.  Now they cannot reconstruct original votes. Since 9/11, at least 40 government networks have been cracked by vandals. People have trouble with passwords so an easy way to do industrial espionage is to offer pornographic web sites to business people in which they need a password.  Odds are they would use the same password there as for everywhere else. 8:00:52 PM

I'm starting to package my thoughts on "Etiquette On-Line".  Well that link does not seem to be working, so here is the actual url http://127.0.0.1:5335/stories/2002/08/12/etiquetteOnline Aha, Radio cannot properly handle hyphen when it is in title of a story, and I may also have a problem with capitalization.  Let's see if "Etiquette Online" works. 4:06:34 PM

A Murphy's Law I recently been experiencing - there is always something that will go wrong. As soon as we get that totally resolved, something else, totally unrelated, goes wrong. 3:46:44 PM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.