"These rights keep expanding without any solid information about why they're socially beneficial," Posner said. "At the same time that regulations are diminishing, intellectual-property rights are blossoming--(two) opposite trends bucking each other."

"The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.


The idea, which was explored at a two-day workshop in California in August, touched off an angry private dispute among computer scientists and policy experts who had been brought together to assess the implications of the technology.


The plan, known as eDNA, called for developing a new version of the Internet that would include enclaves where it would be impossible to be anonymous while using the network. The technology would have divided the Internet into secure "public network highways," where a computer user would have needed to be identified, and "private network alleyways," which would not have required identification..."


"The review of the proposal was financed by a second Darpa unit, the Information Processing Technology Office."


"...Darpa awarded a $60,000 contract to SRI International, a research concern based in Menlo Park, Calif., to investigate the concept. SRI then convened the workshop in August to evaluate its feasibility.

"The workshop brought together a group of respected computer security researchers, including Whitfield Diffie of Sun Microsystems and Matt Blaze of AT&T Labs; well-known computer scientists like Roger Needham of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England; Michael Vatis, who headed the National Infrastructure Protection Center during the Clinton administration; and Marc Rotenberg, a privacy expert from the Electronic Privacy Information Center..."

"...Dr. Stavridou told the other panelists, "Darpa asked SRI to organize the meeting because they have a deep interest in technology for identifying network miscreants and revoking their network privileges."..."

From Autumn 2002 until Autumn 2004, dot-store will produce and sell a range of low cost vintage products that reference both the history of the world wide web and the popular explosion of mobile communications in the 1990's.



dot-store is particularly interested in drawing attention to the blurring of public & private spaces online, and the increasing overlap between personal testimony & corporate interest.

...the plaintiffs demonstrated that thousands of Web pages containing protected speech are wrongly blocked by the four leading filtering programs, and these pages represent only a fraction of Web pages wrongly blocked by the programs. The plaintiffs' evidence explained that the problems faced by the manufacturers and vendors of filtering software are legion. The Web is extremely dynamic, with an estimated 1.5 million new pages added every day and the contents of existing Web pages changing very rapidly. The category lists maintained by the blocking programs are considered to be proprietary information, and hence are unavailable to customers or the general public for review, so that public libraries that select categories when implementing filtering software do not really know what they are blocking.

The "cognitive system" DARPA envisions would reason in a variety of ways, learn from experience and adapt to surprises. It would be aware of its behavior and explain itself. It would be able to anticipate different scenarios and predict and plan for novel futures.

Talk to the extraordinary president of eAccess, Sachio Semmoto, and he'll tell you the key to eAccess's success: That Japan learned from the United States that access to copper had to be "open." Open access meant new competition; competition has driven prices down, speed up.



It's an amazing thing, competition. Apparently it doesn't work in America, though. Now that the Japanese have profited from the American lesson on regulation, the Americans are retreating. The FCC is moving as quickly as it can to undo open access requirements.

With Phoenix, AltaVista seems to have genuinely moved toward establishing itself as a viable player in the web search arena once again.

The FTC now gets around 70,000 forwarded spams a day. Last year, they received about 40,000 pieces a day. Three years ago, that mailbox received about 4,000 missives daily, and in 1998 the entire year's take was fewer than 100 spams.

The FTC's spam collection is neatly sorted into "libraries" viewable by date received or subject matter. The spam can also be searched and sorted using keywords like "Opportunity," "Hi! and "Free!"

Six FTC employees are in charge of the spam database's contents.

"No one sits down and actually reads all the spam that we receive daily," Huseman said. "That would be incredibly boring and totally futile. We read selected spams when we're investigating a specific issue."

The FTC uses a content management application from Convera to search the database, dubbed "The Refrigerator" by FTC employees in reference to the large white server that houses the collection.