T-PLL zoloft for order differs from B-PLL in that it may involve the lymph order cialis on internet nodes and the skin, while B-PLL generally does not. Also, cheapest accutane some people with mild or moderate anemia and iron deficiency compare viagra prices online may benefit from taking iron-containing multivitamin supplements. A doctor can nasonex prescription treat the following rashes using antibiotics, and a parent or order prozac caregiver and manage symptoms at home. They may recommend ways buy cheap amikacin to ease your symptoms and determine whether you should continue buy petcam (metacam) oral suspension online receiving Vyvgart. Anyone experiencing new or worsening adrenal symptoms should buy cialis online without prescription speak with a healthcare professional as soon as possible. A purchase generic tizanidine prescription delivery person's doctor can advise on whether they recommend FISH testing, cheapest amikacin how they will take the sample, and what they can buy cheap cafergot online expect from test results. Although it is not clear how get cheap cialis best price tablet melanoma develops, researchers have found various factors that can increase get kenalog a person's risk. However, more recently, they base treatment on order azor from canada how frail the person is, or whether they also have other.

The New York Times had several good bits stories over the weekend. The Education Week article about de-tagging Facebook photos, for example. Cheap, ubiquitous sensors–digital cameras in the hands of teenagers and college students–combined with the vast Facebook social network have resulted in lots of embarrassing party photos appearing online every Sunday morning. When their peers tag the photos with the names of the people appearing in them, the photos turn up in searches for the names of the revelers. So every Sunday afternoon the hung-over youth “de-tag” the photos, which remain visible but unsearchable. (And if you’re the only one not tagged in the photo, well, that creates an interesting social tension–you’re saying you’re the only one who believes that your reputation is going to be damaged by being seen with the others at that party!)

But my favorite is the story about the perhaps under-age Chinese gymnasts. They have passports showing their age as 16, the minimum allowed in Olympic competition. But the enterprising reporters think some may be as early as 14. Why?

The Times found two online records of official registration lists of Chinese gymnasts that list He’s birthday as Jan. 1, 1994, which would make her 14. A 2007 national registry of Chinese gymnasts — now blocked in China but viewable through Google cache — shows He’s age as “1994.1.1.”

Another registration list that is unblocked, dated Jan. 27, 2006, and regarding an “intercity” competition in Chengdu, China, also lists He’s birthday as Jan. 1, 1994. That date differs by two years from the birth date of Jan. 1, 1992, listed on He’s passport, which was issued Feb. 14, 2008.

Nice detective work. Some earlier public list of athletes had the correct date, goes the theory; Google indexed it and kept a copy, as Google generally does; the Chinese later decided to make the athlete a couple of years older, and took the web page down; but Google’s cached copy is still visible from the U.S. site where it is stored. Just like the example on page 125 of Blown to Bits. Except in this case, the cached copy itself is blocked inside China, even though it’s a copy of a Chinese web page. Bits are awfully hard to eradicate–it will be interesting to see if this incident becomes a problem for the Chinese team.

Last April (see MSN Music RIP) I blogged about Microsoft’s decision to shut down the license servers for MSN Music at the end of August, thereby stranding customers who had purchased music tracks governed by MSN Music’s Digital Rights Management. As it turned out, Microsoft reconsidered, and now says that the license servers will operate until at least 2011.

Now Yahoo has joined the DRM customer stranding game with its July 23rd announcement that it will shut down the Yahoo Music Store servers at the end of September. The result will be that anyone who purchased Music Store tracks will be unable to move them to new machines after the deadline. As with Microsoft’s (since retracted) announcement, this is another demonstration that customers don’t really own the music they “purchase” under DRM systems. Instead, they remain dependent on the distributor’s willingness to keep the DRM license servers running: something for which the distributor has given no long-term guarantee.

As Blown to Bits argues, DRM is a bad deal for customers and a bad deal for innovation. It’s also a bad deal for the music distributors themselves, since it obligates them to maintain an ongoing technical infrastructure of license servers. It’s encouraging to see the continuted growth of non-DRM alternatives for music distribution. Now if only Congress would figure out what a bill of goods they’ve been sold by DRM pushers.

Readers of Chapter 7 of Blown to Bits will know some of the story of the U.S. government’s efforts to make the Internet “safe” for children to see by banning from it many things that are legal and appropriate for adults. (We talked about part of this story yesterday, in our post about the COPA legislation.)

Now the FCC has come up with the bright idea of a child-friendly Internet, that is, an Internet where no one could ever say anything that would be “harmful” to children, down to the age of 5. (I mentioned this briefly in a posting a few weeks ago.) No medical images, presumably, of the kind that teenagers from time immemorial have sought out to satisfy their curiosity. No discussions, it would seem, of sexual matters that you would not discuss with your 5-year-old. The standard is so absurd as a weapon to put into the hands of government censors that one has to assume large parts of classical English literature and daily adult discourse would be barred.

The parallel universe the FCC imagines would be created by companies using a block of wireless spectrum. They would be allowed to bid on this block only if they agreed to use part of it to provide free public access to this parallel, child-friendly Internet universe.

The proposal is absurd, and the cyberspace it imagines could not be the Internet. There could presumably be no encryption, for example, else how could the censors be sure whether the data being sent represented a birthday card or a dirty joke in Yoruba? (In fact, how would the censors recognize unencrypted dirty jokes in Yoruba, that a Yoruba-reading child might see?) It seems likely that the FCC’s proposal, if it went into effect, would eventually be ruled unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, just as the government couldn’t ban swearing in Yellowstone National Park on the theory that it was public property and children went there. The FCC proposal is here. The critical passage is on page 26, the stipulation that the network must have technology

That filters or blocks images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and, in context, as measured by contemporary community standards and existing law,  any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents.  For purposes of this rule, teens and adolescents are children 5 through 17 years of age

I have joined a number of other Fellows of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society to comment on the FCC proposal (pdf here). This “comment” has a calmer, more measured and nuanced explanation of the stakes than does this intemperate post. Thanks to Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodall, and Steve Schultze for carrying the burden of drafting it and of incorporating the hundreds of suggestions they got back.

Persephone Miel has a nice quick summary of our position here.

Definitely Slydial. It’s a free service that enables you to leave a message on the other party’s voicemail directly, with no possibility you’ll get an actual human being instead. The site shows a bunch of uses for this, for example

You go to a week long convention for work in Las Vegas and blow $5,000 the first night at the roulette table. You need to call your wife and tell her why she should hold off on making the monthly mortgage payment. Her voicemail will be much more understanding then she will.

You are working on a dozen different projects and have as many calls to return. Instead of being stuck on the phone with just one, leave each a voicemail with an update and you may just have enough time to enjoy Happy Hour.

Is this a great country, or what?

On pages 247-249 of Blown to Bits, we tell the saga of the Child Online Protection Act, an act criminalizing the posting to a web site “material that is harmful to minors.” The law was protested for a host of reasons, among them that it’s hard to tell how old the viewers of your web site actually are. It never took effect, and we say in the book, “in March 2007, the ax finally fell on COPA.”

We spoke too soon. The ax referred to there was the decision of a federal district court in eastern Pennsylvania that the law was unconstitutional, but the government appealed that decision. Yesterday the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment of the district court (opinion here): the law goes too far in restricting speech. In particular, harmful material is better kept from minors at the destination, by use of filters in the home, rather than at the source, by criminalizing the publication.

But even now, ten years after the law was passed, it may not be dead. The government may appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping that the third time’s a charm.

Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits tells the tale of how the federal government got into the business of determining which parts of the female anatomy may be shown on broadcast television and for how long, and whether the occasional s-word or f-word may be spoken. It’s an important story, because it’s one of the few clear-cut instances of a sweeping override of the First Amendment by a government body. And that body, the Federal Communications Commission, keeps reaching farther. For example, it has proposed to grease the rails for companies willing to provide a free-to-the-public, fully censored parallel Internet universe over the airwaves, an Internet with a mechanism

That filters or blocks images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and, in context, as measured by contemporary community standards and existing law,  any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents.  For purposes of this rule, teens and adolescents are children 5 through 17 years of age.

You read that right: nothing unsuitable for a 5-year old could be said or shown over this network.

While I have no interest in the famous Janet Jackson halftime stunt (I love the Superbowl, but never watch the halftime shows), I am delighted that the FCC fine was thrown out by a federal court as being capricious and arbitrary. The court essentially ruled that the FCC had improperly raised its standards. The Technology Liberation Front has a good explanation of the decision and a link to the decision itself.

An even more important judicial deliberation will be happening in the coming Supreme Court term, when the entire issue of the FCC’s indecency standards will be under review.

In the meantime, isn’t it odd that the FCC is working so hard to make broadcast TV safer for children than it has ever been, just at the moment when from what I can tell, the advertisers think the only people watching network TV are those who need AARP, Viagra, and motorized wheelchairs?

Google already knows what you’ve been looking for with its search engine, and whether you have a swimming pool in your backyard (and it will happily disclose the latter to anyone who wants to know — just use Google Earth). Now Google is toying with the idea of “activity recognition,” such as watching you eat. “Activity recognition systems unobtrusively observe the behavior of people and characteristics of their environments, and, when necessary, take actions in response — ideally with little explicit user direction.” So states a recent paper¬†by Google researcher Bill N. Schilit and two coauthors. Why would they want to do that? Well, to improve your health, for example.¬†”Information about household activities can even be used to recommend changes in behavior — for example, to reduce TV viewing and spend more time playing aerobic games on the Wii,” the paper suggests.

Lovely. An automated nag.

To be fair, home health care is a huge market, and it’s very costly to have people see physicians just to be told the same things about behavior modification every six months. If people want it, why not?

Well, what if it’s their insurance company that wants it, on pain of canceling their policy? Or the government that wants it, in exchange for a tax credit?

Health improvement is a good thing, but where does it stop?

And, of course, there are all the usual questions about the bits: who gets them, how could they be repurposed, and what if they leak.

Thanks to Information Week for its nice summary story on this.

Readers of Blown to Bits know that when it comes to bits, nothing goes away (koan #6). Information, even information you’ve deleted, can come back to your surprise – and your embarrassment. In the book, we illustrated this at Harvard University’s expense by showing that an outspoken presidential statement on Harvard’s Web site about the scientific abilities of women had quickly been replaced by a more conciliatory version, and yet the original remained accessible to anyone who thought to look in Google’s cache.

The McCain campaigners had similar fun last week at Obama’s expense when they revealed how the Obama Web site’s statement on the plan for ending the war in Iraq was substantially rewritten between June 11 and July 14. For instance, where the earlier version led with “Bring our troops home,” the later version spoke of “A responsible, phased withdrawal.” The McCain camp scolded that this was politics-as-usual flip-flopping; Obama supporters replied that that it was simply elaborating a position and to more details. The tussle is unlikely to sway any votes.

What’s more interesting from a Bits perspective is that the McCain folks discovered the change through a new on-line service called Versionista <http://www.versionista.com/>, which is set up to track just these kinds of changes to web sites. Tell Versionista to monitor a web site, and it will watch it constantly, keeping track of every addition or deletion, and show you side-by-side comparisons of the different versions with the changes highlighted. You can compare Obama’s before and after Iraq plans yourself by following this Versionista link.

We can be sure that Obama and McCain through November – and perhaps all political campaigns from now on – will think twice when they modify their Web sites. That goes for the rest of us as well: anything you place on the Web can now be monitored by an automated agent in the service of a competitor, enemy, or rival, and any change or inconsistency can be thrown back in your face.

There are many more shoes yet to drop in this tale of automated change monitoring. Here‚Äôs something to ponder, relating to subpoenas for email and other documents: Word processors make automated backups as you write. You might type a phrase as you are composing and delete it almost immediately, and yet the original fleeting text might have been caught by a backup. If your documents are subpoenaed, do you have to turn over only the final versions, or the backup drafts as well? You might end up having to answer not only for email messages you sent, but for the unedited drafts of those messages, including the stupid   ill-considered words that you later edited out. The issue hasn‚Äôt yet come up in court, but those drafts fit the legal definition of ‚Äústored documents‚Äù and so in principle should be turned over. We can be sure that the issue will arise before long.

As the book says, bits never go away; they can’t even be replaced.

That’s what happens when the contents of Internet packets are inspected en route from the source to the destination for analysis of what’s in them. For example, if your Internet Service Provider were to peek inside the packets for this web page, en route from our web server to your home, to make sure they aren’t carrying a copyrighted movie instead. It’s exactly as though Fed Ex were opening the packages and deciding whether they were OK by Fed Ex standards before delivering them.

Dave Reed’s testimony before Congress yesterday on this subject is well worth reading. What’s nice about it is that his argument that this practice should be prohibited is fundamentally not based on civil liberties grounds, but on economic grounds — that allowing these practices will staunch the growth of the Internet by making innovation at the endpoints impossible, and it is the innovation at the endpoints (along with the great improvements in packet delivery, without peeking at the contents) that have resulted in VoIP, streaming video, and hundreds of other technologies built on top of Internet protocols but for which the protocols were never designed in the first place.

The testimony is clear, well-organized, and plainspoken. Highly recommended.

“Dr.” John Romulus Brinkley, the notorious medical quack, makes a cameo appearance in Blown to Bits as the plaintiff in a suit against the Federal Radio Commission. When the Supreme Court upheld the FRC’s authority to strip Brinkley of his radio license, it set the stage for all subsequent federal censorship of the airwaves. The technological part of the court’s reasoning now rests on shaky ground, as our book explains.

Pope Brock’s recently released book¬†Charlatan is the amazing tale of Brinkley and his lifelong battle with Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association. It’s a terrific read, highly recommended. The Supreme Court case is barely mentioned, but there is a lot about Brinkley’s pioneering role in radio — he was the first to do major country music programming, and to use recorded music to time-shift the performances. When he had to move his station to Mexico and federal authorities said he couldn’t telephone his broadcast from the States, he recorded them and sent the records to Mexico to be played. A communications pioneer to be sure.

Brock has dug out lots of nice details — for example that the first time Johnny Cash heard June Carter sing was on Brinkley’s radio broadcast! Good summer reading.