benmurray / washington d.c.

Leave no trace – Avoid the gotcha text

Tiger Woods. Kwame Kilpatrick. Mark Foley. John Ensign. Jim Gibbons. They’ve all given us reason to reconsider how we communicate with others online and via text message. Those chats aren’t as private as we all thought and the misunderstanding is bringing down some big names.

Many of these stupid mistakes are the result of a failure to understand where these messages go, who sees them and how long they sit around on servers for retrieval. Here are a few tips to securing your conversations and some common pitfalls in leaked communications.

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Freedom to Tinker with eVoting Machines?

Microsoft‘s recent bid to acquire Yahoo!, I was looking around to find out where the anti-Microsoft folks from 1998 have ended up. They were witnesses, journalists, economists, congressmen, etc. One was Ed Felten, a professor at Princeton. He has a blog (“Freedom to Tinker“). And he found something interesting recently.

He found two sets of unattended, electronic voting machines at Princeton. It is well documented that these machines can be tinkered with to affect the vote outcome. Proponents of the machines assure they are always well-protected to prevent this from happening. Apparently, not so much.

Anonymity a “Fundamental Right”

The European Court of Justice ruled today that record labels and film studios cannot ask telecommunications companies to hand over the names and addresses of people they suspect of downloading copyrighted material from the Internet.  They did, however, mention that EU member nations may create their own rules to allow such information to be obtained for civil proceedings.

The European arm of the Motion Picture Association actually applauded the decision, saying that it upheld both copyrights and the right to privacy.

Both are fundamental rights, the court said, and governments will need to find ways to reconcile them and allow copyright holders seek some kind of compensation.

The MPAA, RIAA and their European partners have been crying foul over illegal downloading and claiming that it is the single greatest obstacle facing the growth of their industries.  It is painful to continue watching these associations trying to fight the world back into its little box o’ distribution rights and controlled releases.  They are fundamentally failing to adjust to the new technologies today and will continue to lose out if they can’t seize on the opportunities provided by the new medium.

Even their members are starting to get it right.  Universal and NewsCorp started Hulu, a medium that seems to be working well in Beta, although it is hampered by the writers’ strike.  Other studios are seeing increased sales online through iTunes, Amazon’s Unbox and others.

Also, remember when the MPAA claimed that 44 percent of its lost revenues were due to pimply college students downloading moves to their computers?  Looks like they were wrong.

R.I.P. Anonymity?

“Guest” commenters, anonymous users, pseudonyms and pedophiles beware, your anonymity on the Internet is hanging in the balance. If family watch groups, state attorneys general and MySpace haters get their way, your true identity will be headlined next to everything you do.

The latest battle in the war on anonymity was waged on January 14 when MySpace and 49 state attorneys general released a set of privacy principles for online social networks. The majority of the release implements positive new systems in MySpace that liken it to Facebook, with separate networks for high schoolers, restrictions on changing one’s age, mandatory privacy restrictions for minors, etc.

Unfortunately, the movement doesn’t stop there. It continues forward and mandates the creation of a nationwide database to store the email addresses of minors. If parents don’t want their children to participate in online social networking, they can submit their child’s emails and they’re forever blocked from joining. Clearly a shallow promise from MySpace to keep regulators at bay, this measure is foiled in 30 seconds with the creation of a second email address unknown to the rebel child’s parents. Wonder if they thought about that. What’s more important here is how certain groups are advocating for the complete elimination of anonymity on the Internet.

Making MySpace safer for youngins’ is an important mission. MySpace’s previous efforts at “privacy” have been laughable. The site has operated as an unregulated assembly of disjointed, standards-less HTML pages without providing a shred of confidence to users that the page they’re looking at is genuine. Any step towards allowing users to segment themselves into networks and restrict access to their profiles is laudable. For example, to be a part of the high school network, you must be invited by at least two other high schoolers. This prevents skeezy old men from just joining on their own, unless of course they’re already holding two other high schoolers captive in their closet.

But, when sites like MySpace start verifying someone’s identity with a national database, it creates enormous problems for anonymity on the Internet. An article in USA Today advocated for such a measure in response to MySpace’s announcement. True, if no one could be anonymous, we wouldn’t have the problem of 55 year old men pretending to be 15, we wouldn’t have slanderous edits to Wikipedia. But, we also wouldn’t have whistleblower websites that reveal dark secrets about bad employers, we wouldn’t have honest discussions about sensitive issues, we wouldn’t have Lonelygirl15 or countless other web personalities that have thrived on their anonymity. The web would become regulated and secure, sterile and developed. It would be the closing of the wild frontier. The eccentricities of the web would be lost.   Unfortunately, many of the people advocating for large-scale regulation and age verification from a national database just don’t understand quite how the Internet works.