Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:27:40 -0500On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future. Here's how you can do that. - EFF
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:22:29 -0500This proposal extends HTMLMediaElement to enable playback of protected content. The proposed API supports use cases ranging from simple clear key decryption to high value video (given an appropriate user agent implementation). License/key exchange is controlled by the application, facilitating the development of robust playback applications supporting a range of content decryption and protection technologies. No "DRM" is added to the HTML5 specification, and only simple clear key decryption is required as a common baseline. - W3C
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:43:52 -0500Vice President Biden met with first responders to thank them for their
service and to discuss the new nationwide public safety broadband network
included in the Payroll Tax Extension legislation. In addition, he
announced the release of a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers
(CEA), The Economic Benefits of New Spectrum for Wireless Broadband,
describing the substantial economic value of aggressively pursuing
President Obama's goal of nearly doubling the amount of spectrum available
for wireless broadband over ten years and deploying a nationwide
interoperable wireless network for public safety. - The White House
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:45:17 -0500The Apache Foudation has released Apache 2.4, the first major revision of its popular web server in six years.
Apache is the most popular web server and runs an estimated 400 million web sites, with major releases usually occurring at a snail's pace due to its huge impact. Apache 2.4 offers performance improvements, with the foundation citing lower memory usage and better concurrency. - Lawrence Latif, The Inquirer
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:42:32 -0500Microsoft filed a complaint Wednesday with European Union antitrust authorities accusing Motorola Mobility of making patents too expensive, marking a new stage in a long-running feud between Microsoft and Google, which owns the cellphone maker.
"We have taken this step because Motorola is attempting to block sales of Windows PCs, our Xbox game console and other products," Dave Heiner, a senior Microsoft lawyer, said in a blog post on Wednesday....
In his blog posting, Mr. Heiner said Motorola was unfairly trying to block Microsoft and other companies from using technology that devices needed to connect wirelessly to the Internet.
"Motorola is on a path to use standard essential patents to kill video on the Web, and Google as its new owner doesn't seem to be willing to change course," Mr. Heiner wrote.
[PJ: Hahahahahaha. Your moment of Zen, as the expression goes. See, this is why customers, given freedom to choose, don't buy Microsoft phones. No one admires a hypocrite. And "kill video on the web"? Puh lease. Why would Google want that to happen? I sincerely hope EU antitrust regulators ask Microsoft precisely what they meant by that.] - N.Y. Times
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:31:19 -0500The hearing adjourned after a fractious four-hour session which saw the judge repeatedly admonishing both sides to observe proper court protocol as they argued across the courtroom. No date was announced for a judgment or further hearings. - Washington Post
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:01:27 -0500First, we saw a request from the institute that all media organisations who'd covered the story should take their articles down and issue retractions, with a vague threat of legal action.
As far as I can see, few complied - and why would they?
As the old saying goes, "news is something that someone somewhere doesn't want you to know" - and here was information about a significant player in climate politics that it certainly didn't want you to have.
In saying one of the documents was a fake, the institute also signified that the rest were genuine....
Perhaps, though, the most revealing documents in this whole affair do not lie in the tranche obtained by Dr Gleick.
One is the email exchange Heartland chief Joe Bast had with Gary Wamsley, a 71-year-old war veteran who took exception to institute's tactics. Follow-up pieces on the same site are also interesting.
The second is the piece Mr Bast posted on his own site lambasting a New York Times article on the leaked documents.
It's a must read. - Richard Black, BBC News
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:41:59 -0500[So pretty] - Jakob Schiller, Wired
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:37:13 -0500The European Commission is referring the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to the European Union's top court for legal guidance on whether it clashes with the regional bloc's fundamental rights, EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht said Wednesday....
Wednesday's decision means the treaty's ratification could be delayed for months. - WSJ
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:25:02 -0500Adding value to the new free-flow of news requires a new news organization.
Our journalism tied to the power of participatory journalism is in my opinion an unbeatable combination as we help communities make sense of the river of information on the web.
In New Haven, CT we have created what we believe is a local newsroom that adds value.
It has four key components: Breaking News; Investigative Reporting; Audience Engagement and Widgets.
Audience Engagement and Widgets are the new no-brainers. Newsrooms must share content and they must engage their audience as demanded through the new digital tools that are powering social media.
No social media connection. No news organization.
While the crowd can be as fast or even faster on breaking news, adding the context we have through our community connection and professional newsrooms is both vital and additive to brand value.
However, it is the re-establishment of an investigative reporting unit - a victim of cutbacks in local newsrooms a long time ago - which can add the greatest value. ...
If it is not core to your business- and in newspapers core means content and sales - then reduce it, stop it, sell it or outsource it.
And for God's sake stop listening to newspaper people. We have had since the mid-90s to get this right and clearly we are no good at it.
Put the digital people in charge - of everything.
They can take what we have built and make it better. - John Paton, Digital First
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Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:56:27 -0500Kim Dotcom has been released from prison after a New Zealand judge granted him bail. The Megaupload founder will be the subject of strict conditions including no Internet access after the prosecution expressed fears he might reopen the site. Dotcom will now continue his fight against extradition to the United States on copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering charges. - TorrentFreak
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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:12:47 -0500Whetstone went on to say that ... Microsoft itself had recommended using invalid P3P codes as a work-around for a problem in IE. "This recommendation was a major reason that many of the 11,176 websites provided different code to the one requested by Microsoft," she said.
The study referenced by Whetstone was conducted by a team at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab and published in September 2010 (download PDF).
In the report, the researchers noted the widespread circumvention -- some apparently purposeful, some accidental -- of IE's cookie-blocking with malformed P3P compact policies. Among the companies involved, the report named Amazon, Facebook and Google.
"I think there is plenty of blame to go around," said Lorrie Faith Cranor, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, the director of its CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory and the faculty member who led the team that produced the 2010 report.
She said Microsoft was partly to blame for not complaining about companies circumventing its privacy policy and not taking steps to modify IE....
He [Hachamovitch] also confirmed that Microsoft is re-considering its use of P3P.
"Privacy advocates involved in the original [P3P] specification have recently suggested that IE ignore the specification and block cookies with unrecognized tokens. We are actively investigating that course of action." - Gregg Keizer, ComputerWorld
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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:01:31 -0500The Supreme Court rejected on Tuesday an appeal by South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc to take up the question of whether chip designer Rambus Inc illegally sued for patent infringement.
Hynix and others have accused Rambus of failing to tell the standard-setting organization JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) about its patented technologies, while advocating those technologies as the new standard for computer chips. - Reuters
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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:19:00 -0500NOTE: the following piece is heavily opinionated - that said, it's my set of opinions, so you can take them or leave them. Having also tried out the Kindle Fire, I can easily guarantee you you'll be more satisfied with the NOOK Tablet or even the much cheaper NOOK Color when it comes to how great the device feels to work with and how nice the display is. These tablets sit next to one another at Target and you can see the quality difference from an aisle away. - Chris Burns, SlashGear
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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:50:41 -0500Lawyers involved in the Delaware case say the state is the only jurisdiction in which companies bring cases for arbitration before a sitting judge. The Delaware Coalition for Open Government, which filed the lawsuit in October, says under the Delaware system, there are no public records that say how many cases are being arbitrated, what subjects are being decided or how much of the court's resources are being used in arbitration. The lawsuit claims the arbitration violate the public's constitutional right of access to judicial proceedings....
Paul Kirgis, a professor of alternative dispute resolution at St. John's University School of Law, said the process steps "toward a two-tier court system, in which the wealthy get secret justice on a fast track, while others [get] messy public processes," says Paul Kirgis, a professor of alternative dispute resolution at St. John's University School of Law. - WSJ Law Blog
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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:42:57 -0500In a new blog posting today [20th], Microsoft piled onto the false "Evil
Google is purposely bypassing browser privacy directives" meme:
[ IEBlog ] ).
Microsoft's complaint revolves around what are called "P3P" (Platform
for Privacy Preferences) Compact Policy Statements.
If you've never ever heard of P3P don't feel bad. P3P was (and
remains) a little known and rarely implemented attempt to "simplify"
Web privacy policies that had the real world effect of actually making
these matters even more complicated for pretty much everyone. I've
been critical of this approach since its beginning (for example, see
my 2001 comments in: "P3P browser technology interprets privacy
policies": (AP / Lubbock Online).
And back in 2010, the New York Times noted the essential
uselessness of invoking (as Microsoft is doing today) P3P
issues in the context of cookie controls for Internet
Explorer -- "A Loophole Big Enough for a Cookie to Fit
Through": (New York Times).
So for Microsoft to start complaining about their IE P3P problems
today as if they were revelatory strikes me as notably bizarre.
As I explained a couple of days ago in "Google, Safari, and a Clamor
of Cookie Confusion" [Lauren's Blog], the
reality of browser, site, and cookie interactions are complex from
both technical and policy standpoints. P3P has never actually been
more than a relative footnote all along, and has only served to make
matters more confusing, not less.
In any case, Microsoft's posting today, given what was already long
known about IE and P3P deficiencies in these regards, seems
disingenuous at best, and certainly is not helping to move the ball
usefully forward regarding these complex issues.
[PJ: After this incident, I'm going to assume when I see another "Google is evil" story that it's part of a Microsoft campaign. At least I will research to see if it is, as I can't see how any responsible journalist can ever again take this as anything but suspicious. That includes "investigations" by Congress, regulatory bodies, etc. Something isn't right in this picture.] - Lauren Weinstein, Google+
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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:38:14 -0500In a new lawsuit filed in federal court in Nashville, Tennessee, singer Kenny Rogers has filed suit [PDF] against Capitol Records, accusing it, among other things, of failing to properly account for royalties owed to him from digital music sales. - Recording Industry vs. The People
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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:09:39 -0500The European Parliament Consumer Committee is on the verge to reform the standardisation process in Europe. The reform recognises patented interface specifications which discriminate Free Software implementations. Royalties over standards create an unavoidable barrier of entry in the market for small software companies and independent developers.
Benjamin Henrion, president of the association complains: "The payment of royalties makes it impossible to distribute free software on the web. It creates an enormous barrier of entry for small companies and independent developers. Authors of the software VideoLAN have been previously threatened by patent holders because they implemented an ETSI standard for a video decoder."
The reform recognises digital specifications which are licensed under "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions" (FRAND).
Henrion continues: "Even consortia like ECMA refuse to define what the RAND term means, because it simply does not mean anything. It is a shame that lawmakers use a term that has no clear definition." - FFII
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:36:07 -0500Update: Lorrie Faith Cranor, Director, CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, emailed me to tell me that she and her students alerted Microsoft to this potential P3P-centric privacy breach in 2010. Here's a
paper she and some of her students wrote about it. She also did a blog post on February 18 on the Microsoft-sponsored Technology/Academics/Policy site noting not just Google, but Facebook, also can track IE users via the same P3P loophole.
Update No. 2: Microsoft's response to Cranor's post from a spokesperson: "The IE team is looking into the reports about Facebook, but we have no additional information to share at this time."
Update No. 3: Google officials (eventually) had plenty to say about Microsoft's disclosure today. Here's Google's response to Microsoft's blog post from today, attributable to Rachel Whetstone, Senior Vice President of Communications and Policy:
"Microsoft omitted important information from its blog post today.
"Microsoft uses a 'self-declaration' protocol (known as 'P3P') dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form. It is well known - including by Microsoft - that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft's request while providing modern web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other websites.
"Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational. A 2010 research report indicated that over 11,000 websites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft."
Google officials noted that Microsoft, instead of fixing the P3P loophole in IE of which Facebook, Google and Amazon all are making use, Microsoft has not done so, but are complaining about it.
[PJ: So. Microsoft. Cynically. Posturing. What. A. Surprise. And how much did they care about this alleged "privacy" problem if they knew about it since 2010 and did nothing, and then when it spoke about it, it didn't tell us that its partner Facebook does it too? I'm so sick of the pretense, now when I see anti-Google headlines, I just assume it's Microsoft at work again. And the sad part it, I generally turn out to be right. I hope regulatory bodies take note of this incident.] - Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:50:34 -0500In Mountain Lion, you, the user, have three options:
1. You can let anything run on your system, whether or not it is signed. This is the Mac OS of today. It's like having a jailbroken iPhone.
2. You can allow only Mac App Store apps to run on your system. This is the most secure option, but you lose the ability to run non-App Store software, which currently includes such products as Microsoft Office and Adobe CS.
3. You can allow only Mac App Store apps or apps signed by a developer. This is the new default.
...
It is really quite a nice compromise....There remains one thing that is of concern to me. Despite these great strides forward, Apple is walking a dangerous line with regard to features that are only available to App Store distributed apps. The two most prominent examples are iCloud and Notification Center. Cabel asked Apple if, thanks to Gatekeeper and Developer ID, App Store-only features would be eventually be available to signed apps that were not distributed through the App Store. There was some shuffling of feet and a "we have nothing to announce at this time". It didn't sound particularly optimistic.
It would be a shame if this trend continues, as it creates an artificial gulf between App Store and non-App Store apps. - Panic Blog
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:30:04 -0500I have some sympathy for the app developers. They're working in an ecosystem where they have an incentive to collect as much data as possible from users, because they'd prefer to make money from advertising than by trying to charge end users for what they provide. But they don't usually give us a choice of paying in return for non-invasive data capture; I would gladly pay at least some amount of money, in many cases, if I had that option.
I'm looking for third-party products, as well, that let me lock down functions of my devices and software that transmit information to third parties. We need more countermeasures, and I am glad to pay for them if they work. - Dan Gillmor, The Guardian
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:05:18 -0500The increasingly heated debates about the traditionally dull area of computer standards is testimony to the rise of open source. For the latter absolutely requires standards to be truly open - that is, freely implementable, without any restrictions - whereas in the past standards were pretty much anything that enough powerful companies agreed upon, regardless of how restrictive they were.
In the face of the continuing move to such open standards, there has been a rearguard action by traditional proprietary software companies to push FRAND - Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory - as an acceptable default for "open" standards. Except that it is not, as I have discussed at length before.
Aside from its incompatibility with open source software - which means excluding the most vibrant part of the computer world - FRAND-based standards don't even succeed on their own terms. That can be seen in the increasing concern about the use of "standards-essential patents" to block rivals. - Glyn Moody, ComputerWorld UK
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:39:45 -0500The letter, signed by the Beijing-based firm King & Wood, concludes with a threat:
"On behalf of Apple, we formally reserve all rights to take further legal action against any individuals and entities for any damages that may result from defamatory statements and unlawful actions intended to wrongly interfere with Apple's business and business relationships." - Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:32:50 -0500In cities and towns across the U.S., a familiar story is replaying itself: Powerful companies are preventing local governments from providing an essential service to their citizens. More than 100 years ago, it was electricity. Today, it is the public provision of communications services.
The Georgia legislature is currently considering a bill that would effectively make it impossible for any city in the state to provide for high-speed Internet access networks -- even in areas in which the private sector cannot or will not. Nebraska, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee already have similar laws in place. South Carolina is considering one, as is Florida. - Susan P. Crawford, Bloomberg
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:20:36 -0500The universities of Western Ontario and Toronto have signed a deal with Access. Copyright that allows for surveillance of faculty correspondence, unjustified restriction to copyrighted works and two million dollars in fees that will be passed along to students.
The agreement reached last month with the licensing agency includes provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and surveillance of academic staff email....
"These two universities threw in the towel prematurely on the copyright battle," said Turk. "We call on other post-secondary institutions not to follow their example of capitulating to Access Copyright. It's time to stand up for the right to fair and reasonable access to copyrighted works for educational purposes."
[PJ: Here are the member organizations of Access Copyright.] - CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:53:17 -0500Emacs works with all sorts of files
There aren't many types of files that Emacs doesn't recognize. There's a major mode for nearly every programming language you can think of, and for languages you cannot think of.
This trimester, I have four classes that use four different languages: Java, C, C++ and Scheme. I use Eclipse for Java, because that's required by our professor, but for the other three classes, I use Emacs. In my free time, I also like to play with Haskell and OCaml, which are both supported by Emacs. In the past, I also used Emacs to edit R code, GAMS code (a research operations language), Python code, JavaScript code, Clojure code, etc.
Eclipse is great at working with Java and Visual Studio is great at working with C#, but they're less great with other languages. I don't want to have to learn many different tools (with different menus, shortcuts, etc.) to work with the languages I need to use. This is a major reason why I use Emacs; all the basic operations (and sometimes not so basic) that I use are the same regardless of the language I'm editing. That's very important in keeping my productivity high; I often delete entire lines in Eclipse (Ctrl+D) because I wanted to delete a single character. I cannot imagine what sort havoc I would wreak if I had to use 5 different editors/IDEs. - Occasionally Sane
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:48:06 -0500Actually it was this transition from film to digital that has led some problems to Kodak back at the beginning of the millenium. BUT... I believe that we'll still print few amazing pictures that we want to keep forever, and print them in a huge size to attach them on the wall of our bedrooms or living rooms, like a wallpaper. ...
They basically need to trasform a camera roll (and all the fuctionalities realted with the priting) into an API. And it's because of all the know-how they have, IPs, the brand and 10 years of investments in the printing business that they should leverage all this, and become a platform, in the cloud, by launching a set of APIs and beginning with a RESTful Print API. - Mashape
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:42:39 -0500The Nook Tablet's biggest problem so far has been that it costs $50 more than Amazon's Kindle Fire while targeting the same budget-conscious Android tablet market. That's likely to change soon, however, as we've come across documentation showing a planned February 22nd launch for a Nook 8GB Tablet. It appears to be the same Android slate as Barnes & Noble's current $249 Tablet, but with less onboard storage (matching the Fire's 8GB) and what will very likely be a correspondingly lower price. All we know for sure is that Walmart plans to launch this new device at 12:01AM on Wednesday, February the 22nd, and deliveries of the 8GB Tablet should be arriving in stores already. - Vlad Savov, The Verge
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:21:53 -0500A typical week in the office....
"I want it super-linear. Can you or can't you do that?"
Well, yes, maybe I can, I'll need to-
"What do you mean maybe? Look, this is a mathematics problem. Math is a formal science. You're supposed to be an expert. Well, look in your books of algorithms and data structures and figure out which combination will produce a super-linear implementation for me."
Umm, maybe, I'll get right on that-
"Yes indeed get right on that. I need it on Friday, ok?"
Well, not sure about Fri-
"What do you mean not sure? This is Math. It's a science. You're an expert. Do that thing that you do when you do so well. By Friday. How can there be uncertainty about having it ready on Friday?"
Well, it's not that simple, beca-
"Yes it is that simple, it's Math, not flipping coins and hoping they all come up heads. We're talking less than a thousand lines of code here, you're lucky I can wait until Friday."
Sure, when I figure out which lines of code there will probably be fewer than a thousand, I just don't know which thousand they are yet.
"Harrumph, well, be in my office on Friday with the code or else!"
Hmmm.
Ruminations
You know, Computer Science is just like Mathematics, it's very black and white, fully determined. But mathematicians aren't, and neither are programmers. To an approximation, asking when a non-trivial program will be done is just like asking when a theorem will be proven. - raganwald's posterous
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Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:54:06 -0500Looking at the changes coming in OS X Mountain Lion and Windows 8, it's clear that both Apple and Microsoft are trying to bring their mobile and desktop platforms closer together. They both want to tie more things into cloud services and social networks, and generally work toward more consistency and security.
On the surface, these are all great things and I'm looking forward to many of the new enhancements. At the same time, though, I'm worried that these trends lead to a more closed view of computing, one in which Apple and Microsoft play much larger roles as gatekeepers. This is a step away from the openness that has defined the personal computing era. - Michael J. Miller, PCMag
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