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23 Oct 2020
The 20th century was the golden age of surveillance.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/goodold.html
14 Oct 2020
I get a lot of mail from political campaigns. I expect a lot of us do.
In my case, each campaign gets a separate e-mail address so I can track how much they pass the addresses around.
(Nothing surprising, local passes them to national for the same party, stuff like that.)
While I was supposed to be doing something else, I wrote some scripts to track the mail, per campaign.
You can see the results, updated daily, at https://www.taugh.com/polispam.php.
If it looks like one day the Republican presidential campaign sent me 15 separate messages, yup, they did.
It's not entirely clear what their strategy is because they keep telling me that I am one of their TOP 100 SUPPORTERS
even though I've never sent them a dime.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/polispam.html
14 Sep 2020
The Internet Archive scans paper books and lets people borrow the scans. In what they call Controlled
Digital Lending (CDL), scans of books still in copyright are limited to one person at a time per physical copy,
analogous to the one person at a time who can borrow a physical book from a library. For books not in
copyright, there's no limit on how many people can use the scans at once.
Earlier this year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, they turned CDL into a National Emergency
Library that let multiple people borrow the in-copyright
scans as well, saying this was a temporary replacement while local libraries were closed, and indeed
they want back to the one-borrower CDL policy in mid-June.
The publishing industry has never liked CDL, and the expanded access was for them the last straw, leading four
large publishers to sue the Archive in early June to make them stop.
The suit is moving very slowly, with the current schedule running through at least September 2021 before
a trial could start,
but in the meantime, lots of people have opinions about the suit, such as a recent
article
in The Nation.
The public face of the Archive's CDL is
Brewster Kahle,
who started the Archive and still leads it.
Since those publishers are pretty faceless, the most visible public face of opposition to the CDL
has been
Ed Hasbrouck, one of the leaders of the National Writers Union (to
which I belong so he's sort of my shop steward.)
Ed's written a lot about CDL, such as
this FAQ on the NWU web site.
I happen to know and like both Brewster and Ed, each of whom has been kind enough to invite me to dinner
at their respective houses when I was in town.
So which one is right?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/cdl.html
01 Jul 2020
A fundamental rule of trademarks is that they have to be distinctive, and that
nobody can register a trademark on a generic term like "wine" or "plastic."
In a case decided today
by the U.S. Supreme Court, the court decided 8-1 that online travel agent Booking.com
could register its domain name as a trademark.
In this case, I think the majority got it wrong, and Justice Breyer's lone dissent is correct.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/booking.html
17 Jun 2020
An acqaintances said "We trust our electronic systems to transfer millions of dollars of value; I
suspect we will eventually develop schemes we will trust to record and
count votes."
This is, unfortunately, one of the chronic fallacies that make voting
security experts tear their remaining hair out. The security models
are completely different so what banks do is completely irrelevant to
voting.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/novote.html
15 May 2020
Back in 2017, Enigma Software sued competitor Malwarebytes claiming that Malwarebytes flagged
Enigma's software as "Potentially Unwanted Programs" for anticomptitive reasons. (I gather
Malwarebytes had good reasons to flag it but they're not relevant here.) The district court
dismissed the suit on section 230 grounds that Malwarebytes found the Enigma software
"otherwise objectionable" and the law gave Malwarebytes immunity from being sued.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/mbappeal.html
10 May 2020
In a widely reported decision last week, a court in Melbourne, Australia
held that Google defamed someone merely for including in its index
three web pages it did not create, including an article from a major
newspaper and a Wikipedia article.
The plaintiff, George Defteros, is a lawyer who defended gangsters in 2004, and was
arrested for murder of one of them. The charges were dropped in 2005.
In recent years he has had an uncontroversial legal career.
This case is
somewhat similar to right to be forgotten cases in Europe.
According to the
100
page decision,
Defteros sued Google in 2016 about four links, one to a 2004 opinion piece
about the arrest in the Age, a Melbourne newspaper, the second to another
Age article linked from the first but not directly from Google,
the third to a vulgar private
site with some comments about him, and the fourth to a Wikipedia article
about the Melbourne gang wars which had a footnote that linked
to the first Age article.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/ausdef.html
11 Mar 2020
A recent piece in The Markup called
Swinging the Vote?
attempts to figure out how Google decides where to deliver political e-mail.
They were startled to discover that only a small fraction of it was delivered
into the main inbox, and a fair amount was classed as spam.
They shouldn't have been.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/notspecial.html
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It turns out you don’t need a license to hunt for spam.
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