Blown To Bits

Archive for May, 2008

Tracking your teen

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 by Harry Lewis
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In Blown to Bits, we write about the various reasons we willingly surrender our privacy. Promises of convenience, economy, and safety all make practices acceptable that would once have been offensive.

Enter Teensurance, a mashup of automobile insurance and global positioning systems aimed at parents of teenagers. With the GPS installed, Mom and Dad can: locate the car instantly; find out instantly when Johnny is exceeding a 60mph; find out when Johnny has driven more than 10 miles from home; know whether Johnny actually arrived at Sam’s house; and get a phone call or email if Johnny is driving after his midnight curfew. The company reports lower accident rates in families using their service.

Whatever its lifesaving merits, getting young people used to such a way of life accommodates them to a new and different understanding of civil liberties. And it is another step toward the infantilization of teenagers, a phenomenon about which I have written in another book.

More on the Lori Drew case

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

I wrote a few days ago about the overreaching federal prosecution in this sad case. Blogger Susan Crawford has a good explanation today of just how great the stretch is, and how far the same principle could be taken by ambitious prosecutors to criminalize speech acts never meant to be prohibited by any existing law.

Copyright law is a mess.

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

And, as Lawrence Lessig explains in today’s New York Times, Congress seems bent on making it even worse. An “orphaned” work is something that is copyrighted but whose copyright owner can’t be found. Such works can’t be reproduced, performed, or otherwise used in violation of copyright law, but it’s also difficult or impossible to obtain permission to use them since the copyright owner has died or disappeared. Because everything written, photographed, or drawn has been copyrighted automatically for the past thirty years, there are vast numbers of orphaned works, creations that are effectively lost to human culture until the copyright term, nearly a century, expires.

To “fix” the orphaned work problem, Congress proposes immunity from copyright infringement charges for those who make a “diligent effort,” defined as “reasonable and appropriate,” to locate the copyright holder. But it assigns to a bureaucracy the problem of fleshing out that standard. As Lessig explains, this will do more to foster bureaucracy than it will do to liberate orphaned works.

Lessig describes several other problems with this legislation. We would note one broader troubling aspect. The law follows a pattern seen in the past, for example with the Deleting Online Predators Act discussed in Blown to Bits. Congress has developed a habit of handing off to the executive branch of government the job of defining vague terms on which the full force of its legislation depends. The definitions are hard to get right, and require discussion and compromise over fine points of language. So Congress, in its hurry to show that its heart is in the right place, comes up with some verbiage that sounds good but is so vague as to vest vast power in unelected officials charged with implementing it. The courts may overturn such laws later, but by that time Congress has proclaimed its accomplishments, and can blame the courts for their activism and heartlessness. Rather than going to the trouble of legislating carefully, elected officials have been able to devote the full measure of their attention to the earmarks and sports videotaping investigations on they prefer to spend their time. Politically, if the members of Congress can malign the courts at the end of the process for what is really their own legislative laziness, so much the better.

Running software = Copyright infringement?

Sunday, May 18th, 2008 by Hal Abelson

If you purchase some software, do you have the right to run that software on your computer? Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the popular multiplayer game World of Warcraft, is asking an Arizona judge to rule that you don’t have that right. As Blizzard would have it, running a program ‚Äì even software you’ve bought and paid for ‚Äì is copyright infringement unless it’s done with explicit permission from the software publisher. This legal theory rests on the claim that when the computer moves program code from disk to memory in order to run the program, the bits are being copied, hence the liability for copyright infringement. This is the same interpretation of ‚Äúcopying‚Äù that raised its head in the early 1990’s. As described in Blown to Bits, it would lead to the conclusion that almost any use of a computer is potential copyright infringement if done without explicit permission from the software publisher.

In the Arizona case, Blizzard is suing MDY, Inc., which makes a program called Glider. Glider is a bot that that automates some of the activities in playing World of Warcraft, such as fighting. Fire up Glider and you have a large unfair advantage in your game playing that lets you skip ahead to advanced levels of play. Blizzard’s attitude towards Glider is much the same as the International Olympic Committee’s attitude toward steroids.

Using Glider or other bots is against the rules in WoW and violates the user license agreement for the client software. Accordingly, one of Blizzard’s claims is that MDY is encouraging players to break the license and should therefore be liable for so-called ‚Äútortious interference‚Äù with contracts.

Contract violation may be all well and good, but Blizzard goes further, and claims that WoW players who use bots or break other game rules are infringing copyright when they run the WoW client program on their computers. These players may have bought the program, but in Blizzard’s theory, they don’t actually own the copy of the program they paid for: they’ve merely licensed it for certain use. Any other use (including breaking the WoW rules) is unauthorized. And so, the theory goes, copying the program from disk to memory is unauthorized copying, hence infringement; and MDY is therefore guilty of secondary infringement.

What difference does it make whether this is contract violation or copyright infringement? Plenty, as readers of Blown to Bits know. The penalty for copyright infringement includes mandatory statutory damages of at least $750 per violation. That is, a judge must award at least this amount if infringement is proved. MDY, which has sold over 100,000 copies of Glider, would be facing statutory damagers of at least $75 million.

MDY’s fortunes aside, the real losers of a judgment in Blizzard’s favor would be all all of us who use sofware.¬† We’d find that any violation of software license conditions would be copyright infringement with the consequence risk of liability for mandatory statutory damages.¬† This would be the case even though nothing is being copied ‚Äì unless you count the copying of the program into memory to run it. For example, it’s against the rules in WoW to use bots, and it’s also against the rules to give your player a name that includes a title: name your WoW character ‚ÄúKing Alfred‚Äù and bingo ‚Äì copyright infringement and a $750 fine.

In March, both Blizzard and MDY filed motions for summary judgment. Let’s hope the judge throws Blizzard’s copyright claim on the legal junkheap. The world of bits and the world of copyright law have an uneasy enough relationship without resurrecting this absurd legal theory.

Fighting World Hunger with BITS

Saturday, May 17th, 2008 by Ken Ledeen

As we wrote Blown to Bits, we came to recognize that many of the stories in the news were “bits stories.” Sometimes it’s a bit of stretch, other times far less so. Consider world hunger.

The price of rice has been rising. A story last month in the New York Times reported that rice producing coountries were cutting back on exports, civil unrest was rising, and a crisis loomed. For populations that spend a large portion of their income on food, populations where rice is often a staple of their diet, these increases can be devastating. It is a complex problem with potentially dire consequences.

But how is it a bits story?

The University of Washington’s “Nutritious Rice for the World” project is seeking to mitigate world hunger by analyzing rice proteins. The goal is to make it possible for farmers to grow rice strains with higher yields, greater resistance to disease, and even improved nutrition. It’s a noble cause, and a difficult scientific and technical problem. The computational needs of the project are enormous. Using conventional computing approaches the time to complete the analysis could well be measured in centuries.

We could just wait for computing power to increase. With computers doubling their performance approximately every year (close enough for this calculation), in a a decade, they will be 1000X faster. A task that would take 200 years using todays’ computers should take 73 days then. Wait another decade, and they will be 1,000,000 times faster and our protein analysis will take less than 2 hours. But the rice crisis won’t wait that long.

The team at the University of Washington had a better solution – harness the aggregate computing capacity of thousands and thousands of otherwise idle computers – your computer and mine (if you choose to participate). They joined the World Computing Grid project.

A computing grid is a loose collection of computers that work cooperatively, each doing a small portion of a large computing task. It’s similar to the way Google works – dividing the processing of your query across lots and lots of computers so that the response is fast. This particular grid joins technology and social involvement, allowing individuals to “contribute” unused computer time. In addition to analyzing rice proteins, WCG now has active programs for cancer research, AIDS, protein folding, denque fever, and more. The WCG harnesses the computing power of over 1,000,000 computers from more than 380,000 participants.

This is one more example of the transformative power of the digital revolution. Not only is it possible to do complex protein structure analysis, but also we can share the task across thousands, even millions of computer linked through the Internet, computers that belong to ordinary citizens of the world, with a shared purpose, part of a community that has been made possible only by virtue of the social connectivity that the Web engenders and supports.

Even world hunger is a bits story.

A Bits Prosecution for a Bits Death

Friday, May 16th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

The horrible, sad story of Megan Meier has been widely reported. Meier was 13 years old when she took her own life after being taunted by a MySpace friend named “Josh,” who turned out to be a fiction. Who exactly “Josh” really was, and whether that person committed a crime by telling Meier that the world would be better off without her, are matters now to be determined in a court of law.

According to an early police report,¬†Lori Drew, the mother of a friend of Megan’s, acknowledged “instigating” and monitoring the MySpace account, though she denies creating it. But officials in Missouri, where Drew and Meier lived, couldn’t find a statute under which Drew could be prosecuted. Now creative prosecutors have indicted Drew under federal statutes, claiming that she was engaged in interstate fraud. Why interstate? Meier and Drew lived within blocks of each other, and it would seem that whatever happened was purely the province of state and municipal authorities. But the MySpace servers are in California. Drew was, according to the theory, transporting bits across state lines to fraudulently inflict emotional distress on Meier, and that would be a federal crime.

One observer describes this use of federal fraud statutes as “aggressive,” which is legalese for “a stretch.” It will be interesting to see how this plays out. But it signals a much larger development. As Cyberspace unites the nation and the world, there will be many more cases in which federal and international authorities will be able to take an interest in what used to be local matters.¬†

Electronic Medical Records Dangerous to Your Health?

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Writing in the April 17 New England Journal of Medicine, Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman throw cold water on the way the electronic medical record is being “touted as a panacea for nearly all the ills of modern medicine.” Among the touters they mention are George Bush, Michael Bloomberg, the presidential candidates, insurance companies, Google, and Microsoft. Electronic records are now in wide use, especially in leading teaching hospitals. But in actual practice, they observe, the record is sometimes simply “clinical plagiarism,” in which “physicians have clearly cut and pasted large blocks of text, or even complete notes, from other physicians.” It is now so easy to drop in a patient’s lab results in their entirety, that finding the wheat in the bushels of chaff is “like ‘Where’s Waldo?’,” according to one of the authors’ colleagues. Cutting and pasting for completeness replicates garbage and gold indifferently, making the electronic record “a powerful vehicle for perpetuating erroneous information.” “The worst kind of electronic medical record,” they write, “requires filling in boxes with little room for free text.” In a brief clinic visit, physicians may spend most of their time pointing and clicking rather than talking to the patient. I am reminded of the state automobile inspection process, at the end of which the driver is handed a printout of the dozens of details the inspector “checked” on the screen but not on the vehicle.

In the summer of 1971, KSL needed a programmer for his pioneering startup company, Computer Systems for Medicine, Inc. The company’s systems would take medical histories from patients. The system was a DEC PDP-8 computer and a teletype machine. HRL was starting graduate school and needed to earn a few bucks over the summer. He did the coding. He managed to wedge the entire program into 4K of 12-bit PDP-8 words. The working system was operationally a marvel; the branching logic was much more efficient at homing in on problems than the old fill-it-all-out paper history forms, and as Weizenbaum had discovered five years earlier with ELIZA, people would tell the computer things they did not feel comfortable telling a living, breathing human being.

That was 37 years ago. The engineers have been much more successful at increasing the storage capacity of computing devices than than society has been at figuring out how to make good use of all those bits that are now captured, reproduced blindly, and, very often, never examined critically.

A Good Case of Spying

Saturday, May 10th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

We say that technology is neither good nor bad, it all depends how it’s used. The forces of good won one yesterday.

Kait Duplega’s laptop was stolen. Sometime later, a friend called her to say she was glad to learn that it had been recovered. The friend saw that the laptop was in use and connected to the Internet.

The New York Times story doesn’t explain how the friend figured that out. Perhaps Ms. Duplega uses Skype or some social networking software that informs her friends when her computer is connected to the Internet so they can contact her. In any case, the computer was still in the hands of the thieves. Ms. Duplega, who works at the Apple store in Westchester County, used a remote-access program to snap a photo of the thieves using the camera mounted above the laptop’s screen. Her roommate recognized the men in the picture, and the police arrested them.

This is a funny story. So is the story about the thief who stole a Global Positioning System and turned it on, which not only helped him know where he was, but made it easy for the police to locate him. But these tales are a little disquieting too. Do you care if your friends know whether your laptop is connected to the Internet? Depending on your habits, they might take that to mean you are ignoring them. In my own case, it would pretty accurately tell you when I am commuting or traveling, as those are about the only times I don’t have my laptop online. But if someone stole my computer, I might wish that like Ms. Duprega, I had set it up to share a few bits with the world about what it was doing. And what could someone else do with the bits on your computer if it were stolen? The men who stole Ms. Duprega’s machine were apparently planning to buy a bed–perhaps using her credit card number, stashed away on her computer.

The Internet Archive and the FBI

Friday, May 9th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

The Wayback Machine is a marvelous invention. Using the Internet Archive, a huge series of periodic snapshots of the Web, the Wayback Machine enables you with a single click and see what the web page you are now viewing looked like months or years ago. It’s fun. It’s useful. Even the FBI uses it.

For some reason the FBI got curious about someone else who was using the Internet Archive for something, and asked if it might please know what human being was associated with a particular “address.” Brewster Kahle, the father of the Internet Archive, protested, and the FBI withdrew its request.

It’s important to realize how much that brief account leaves out. The FBI did not go to court to get a search warrant issued. No conventional police work needed if national security is at stake. The FBI issued a “National Security Letter,” which it can do on its own. NSLs have the further interesting property that recipients cannot lawfully disclose having received them. Kind of like the double-secret-probation of Animal House memory. We know about Kahle’s only because he successfully argued that he was running a library, and when the PATRIOT Act was renewed, an exception for libraries was built in.

I’m delighted for Kahle, but somehow the whole sequence of events does not leave me feeling happy. The FBI issues 50,000 NSLs annually. We find out about very few so there are no statistics about who gets them and how many of them are requests for IP addresses of people using web sites. We don’t know what counts as a library; I’m glad the Internet Archive seems to, but only because the State of California classifies it as such.

“Orwellian” is one of those terms that have been cheapened by overuse. But it’s hard to think of a reason not to use it here. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s coverage, these are the terms that were presented to Kahle: “The NSL included a gag order, prohibiting Kahle from discussing the letter and the legal issues it presented with the rest of the Archive’s Board of Directors or anyone else except his attorneys, who were also gagged. The gag also prevented the ACLU and EFF from discussing the NSL with members of Congress, even though an ACLU lawyer who represents the Archive recently testified at a congressional hearing about the FBI’s misuse of NSLs.”

He couldn’t talk even to his congressperson!

It’s a great victory, but it settles nothing, because the case never went to court. Nor has any other challenge to an NSL; in every one of the handful of cases in which an NSL was challenged, the FBI simply withdrew the NSL and the case evaporated.¬†

So the bottom line seems to be: 1984 is alive and well, as we report in Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits. There is no way to know how many ISPs, in situations as outrageous as Kahle’s but lacking the resources or the will to fight the FBI, simply comply with its demands and shut up. Whatever else the PATRIOT Act is, it’s a license for the FBI just to keep trying things, confident that it is almost certain to succeed even if it goes beyond the already vast powers Congress and the President have granted it.

One final, hopeful note. Where civil liberties are balanced against national security, significant numbers of people will usually go for the promise of security. But maybe people are getting fed up. Of the 77 comments on the Washington Post story linked to above, not a single one seems favorably disposed toward the FBI in this case. Of course, the FBI couldn’t really talk to the Post’s reporter ‚Ķ.

Public and Accessible are not the same

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 by Ken Ledeen

Watching the results come in from the Indiana primary I was reminded of the difference between public information and accessible information. Quantitative changes can have qualitative impacts. Information that was always nominally public, but nearly impossible to retrieve, is now completely accessible.

In the case of Hillary and Barack, the obvious example is FEC records. The Federal Elections Commission provides detailed information on who gave money to whom. Go to www.fec.gov and take a look at the interactive maps for the presidential election. They did a great job presenting information that was always public – but not readily accessible. Now, if you want to check on your neighbors, it’s a piece of cake.

Some people play both sides. Bill Gates gave the maximum ($2,300) to both Hillary and Barack. We always had the legal right to know. Now the information is just a mouse click away and that changes everything.

Campaign contributions arent’y the only example. My daughter bought a condo a while ago and was uncomfortable when all of her co-workers starting asking what she had paid. Why bother asking? Just go to Zillow, or any of its competitors and this traditionally public information is now readily accessible.

Lots of communities post property tax data. It used to take a trip to city hall. Now, no gas required, a couple of mouse clicks and you are there.

Curious about your neighbor’s house? In my case you can go to the town website and find everything from the property valuation to the kind of roofing material they used. This information was always public, but making it easy to retrieve has utterly changed our sense of privacy.

Careful. Snooping on your neighbors can be habit forming.