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A lot of college students are getting “pre-litigation” letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claiming that they have illegally downloaded music. The RIAA threatens them with enormous penalties and offers them the opportunity to settle up for only modestly large fines.

The RIAA identifies these students by their IP addresses — the numerical address of their connection to the Internet. In residential colleges, where students living arrangements are known, the IP address is arguably a reliable identifier of an individual student.

Doubtless many of the RIAA’s claims are accurate. But many are not; we give a particularly dramatic mistake in Blown to Bits.

Now three researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated ways to spoof IP addresses — that is, to make it look to the RIAA as though a download is going to your IP address when it isn’t, and in fact no download is occurring at all. A new way to be mean to your enemies — induce the RIAA to send threatening letters to them, even though they are completely innocent!

The moral of the paper is that the RIAA’s identification methods are deeply flawed and are unreliable. That could be a very important fact, given the levels to which the RIAA has taken the war over music file sharing.

There is more on the New York Times blog or you can read the original paper here.

In the Crimson piece I mentioned in this morning’s post, I said that Rowling might prove to be an inspirational speaker. SHE WAS! The speech is well worth listening to. text and video here, cut to 1:03 unless you want to hear the reports on how much money Harvard raised. One of the best commencement addresses I’ve heard, wise, and personal without being maudlin.

I have a piece in the Crimson about copyright, including a strange story about the publication of Blown to Bits.

I got an email yesterday from a sales agent for Palisade Systems, which offers a product called PacketSure. The “Packet” in that name refers to Internet packets, the little blocks of bits that are the unit of information the Internet transports. And “Sure” means that the product will make sure the packets going into and out of your business won’t contain information you’d rather not see crossing the boundary into and out of the outside world. For example, movies you don’t want your employees wasting their time watching, or Social Security Numbers that might be client or employee data leaking out, or medical records which are private by law. The web site has a short demo video that gives the idea.

As originally conceived, the Internet was simply a packet delivery system. A computer at a junction point in the network was just supposed to look at the address part of the packets so it could send them off on the proper outgoing link. Those computers were slow enough that it wasn’t practical for them to do much more anyway in the way of peeking inside packets, and it also wasn’t feasible to do much scanning of bits as they entered or left host computers at the edge of the Internet.

With faster computers and much more concern about undesirable uses of the Internet, it is now possible, as the email I received states, “to manage communications across over 150 different protocols and¬†applications ‚Ķ¬†to block, log,¬†report, and alert based on company policy.” Not only possible — it may well be wise or even necessary, given the variety of laws and regulations now in place about appropriate handling of data.

But the “based on company policy” part makes this technology much more than a tool for legal compliance. It gives the company complete control over the web sites employees are allowed to visit, the content of their email, and the use of office computers for sharing pictures. It is as though your office phone were locked to work only with certain other phone numbers, and was subject to a constant wiretap to boot. (Except that, I suspect, most personal communication out of offices these days probably goes by IM or email: Telephone conversations are less private because they are audible.)

Questions: If there were a home version of this product, would you buy it to keep your children in line? Should a university install these boxes to monitor or prevent students’ illegal music and movie downloading? If you were the government of Myanmar, would you want to install the system for the entire country?

Like so many other ingenious and useful technologies, this one is wonderful or terrible, depending on how it is used. A few years ago, no one needed to face the question of whether such systems were good or bad, because there was no practical way to build them. Now they exist, and they will keep getting cheaper and better. And I’m sure no one from Palisade Systems does ethics checks on its customers before shipping the PacketSure products.

An alias is literally just ‘another’ — another name someone uses, or another identity. An alibi (alias ubi) is ‘another place’ where a suspect in a criminal place claims he was at the time the crime was committed.

The term ‘alias’ has been adopted into tech talk to describe what happens when information is lost in the course of capturing it as bits. When you see the pixellation of a low-resolution image, or the staircase effect on what is supposed to be a straight, smooth line, you are seeing an aliasing phenomenon. The staircase is as close to a straight line as can be drawn using only a few pixels, but if what you were depicting really was a staircase, you’d get exactly the same representation. Different realities, when reduced to bits, wind up as the same representation, and there is no way to know from those bits alone which reality they came from.

Information is always discarded when anything continuous is represented as bits. The question is not whether such data loss happens, but whether it matters. And whether it matters depends on how the representation is going to be used. The author photo on this site is a good representation of us, but not if you wanted to recognize us from behind. In a digital audio file, it may not matter if very high frequencies are discarded, since most people over the age of 20 couldn’t hear them anyway.

What does this have to do with Mr. Entwistle, who is standing trial on charges of murdering his wife and child? We noted earlier that his computer gave up some bits that the prosecution planned to use against him: the URLs of some adult-oriented web sites he had visited. Apparently the prosecution will argue that these bits are relevant because the URLs gave a glimpse of Mr. Entwistle’s sexual dissatisfaction, thus helping establish a motive for the murder. Not so fast: the defense doesn’t deny that those sites were visited, but offers another interpretation of the same bits. As the Boston Herald explains,

Attorney Elliot Weinstein argued turning to steamy online porn sites is not necessarily an indication of a joyless sex life; it could also mean a couple was looking to spice up their marriage.

“It might improve sexual activity . . . it might be a curiosity,” Weinstein said during the final pretrial arguments in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn.

Searching for porn may just be for “interest,” or “excitement” or to “expand knowledge,” Weinstein added in his appeal to strike any online sex surfing as evidence of prior “bad acts.”

The judge will decide whether these bits are relevant, and if they are, the jury will get to decide whose interpretation of them is more plausible. But the defense’s basic point is sound: decontextualized bits can represent more than one reality, and our digital fingerprints, while revealing, are an imperfect representation of who we really are.

No, not hemophilia, and this term has nothing to do with homophiles either. Homophily is your tendency to hang with people like you. There is good reason to think that the communications revolution encourages it. When we we spent our time talking with the people fate had put in our neighborhoods and workplaces, we got used to dealing with ideas and attitudes different from our own. With the infinite connectivity of the Internet, even the oddest splinter groups can draw huge numbers from a world-wide pool, and we can happily spend all our time talking to our alter egos. (The opposite of homophily is xenophilia. I took a lot of heat in 1995 for trying to encourage a bit more xenophilia by changing the method by which Harvard students are assigned to the residential Houses. Ethan Zuckerman has a good blog about these terms here.)

CBS News is reporting that extremist Muslim women are banding together anonymously to protest being excluded from Al Qaeda. Some complain of being powerless, and others point with pride to the rising number of suicide bombings being carried out by women. As the story explains, Al Qaeda uses the Internet, but “the Internet has also given those disenfranchised by al Qaeda – in this case, women – a voice they never had before.”

Metadata is data about your data. A filename is the simplest kind of metadata; it is data that goes with the file but is different from the data in the file itself. Depending on the software you are using, a file’s metadata might include the time it was created and last modified, the registered name of the owner of the computer on which it was created, the name of some other file from which this file was derived, and the name of the software that was used to create it.

A file’s metadata can be revealing once the file gets into circulation. If you are organizing your sister’s birthday party and you send her the RSVP list, forgetting that you named the file “my_stupid_sisters_stupid_party.doc,” sis may draw some inferences from the metadata beyond what she learns from the file itself about who is coming.

In Chapter 3 of Blown to Bits we give some embarrassing examples of this kind. But today’s news brings us a whopper. The foolish computer user in this case user seems not to be some hapless birthday-giving brother, but Google. Talk about people who should know better!

The story is set in Australia, where Ebay is planning to shift its payment system to Paypal only, eliminating the credit and debit card option. Ebay owns Paypal, and in Australia, this sort of thing requires public comment. Among the comments received was an anonymous 38-page document, giving all the reasons why Ebay should not be allowed to do this — it would be anticompetitive, etc., etc.

Anonymous, but perhaps not too anonymous. The document was a PDF, but the “Title” property was “Microsoft Word – 204481916_1_ACCC Submission by Google re eBay Public _2_.DOC.” (If you use Acrobat Reader to open a PDF document, then use the “Properties” menu item, you may be able to find this kind of information as part of the “Description.”) I wonder if someone at Google would really use Microsoft Word or put “Google” into the filename. But even if not, the document could still be Google’s — it might have been written by an outside counsel, or consultant, or summer intern even.

Google seems neither to be confirming nor denying that it is the source of the anonymous document. Theoretically, it could be a third party trying to embarrass Google. And¬†Google isn’t currently competing for the Paypal market in Australia. But it does make you wonder if Google is venturing a bit beyond its “You can make money without doing evil” philosophy.

For the whole story, and links to the document itself, check out this item on TechCrunch.

We are featured on InformIT today, with two short articles that are not taken from the book: One on the good and bad use of cell phone data to locate individuals, and one on everyday eavesdropping.

So asks the New York Time’s blog today.

I know the answer about these two Harvard dropouts, because I taught and graded them both. I also had some outside-the-classroom interactions with each of them while they were students. I gave Gates the “pancake problem,” which is the source of his sole publication in a scholarly journal. (Careful; that’s a 5MB file if you download it.) A few months before founding Facebook, Zuckerberg put up a prototype social network in which the edges denoted “being mentioned in the same Crimson story,” and I was at the center.

The answer to the question? Hate to disappoint, but due to professional ethics and¬†FERPA requirements, I’m not telling! I will only say that I have no evidence that anything they say in this interview about their episodic study habits is inaccurate.

After moaning about surveillance and privacy a few days ago, I wanted to acknowledge the other side. The electronic traces we now routinely leave behind during our daily lives are also left by criminals, and the data is now valuable for solving crimes.

Neil Entwistle is the British-born man who allegedly killed his wife and 9-month-old daughter in Hopkinton, Massachusetts with a gun in 2006. As the notorious case moves to trial, some aspects of the prosecution’s evidence are being published. Entwistle Googled how to kill with a¬†‚Äúknife in the neck‚Äù and also visited service-providing web sites with names such as¬†blondebeautyescorts, halfpriceescorts and hotlocalescorts. Based on previous reporting, it appears that this information was culled from Entwistle’s home computer, rather than from Google. (Check your web browser’s “History” menu on your own computer to see how this information might have been retrieved.)

In other news, the Italians have again proved that they are smarter about tracing digital breadcrumbs than Americans are at hiding them. In Blown to Bits, we explain how an Italian blogger managed to uncover sensitive military information from the official US Army report on the shooting by American troops of an Italian intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari. Today, Italian security experts reveal that they were able to link the CIA to the abduction in Milan of radical Imam¬†¬†Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, simply by noting which cell phones were in use in the vicinity of the site of the kidnapping. (Sorry, of the “extraordinary rendition”; that’s the official US term.) The cell phones reported their location to nearby cell phone towers, as cell phones are constantly doing, and the Italians were able to sort through the stored location data after the fact to identify the culprits. The Italians seem almost contemptuous that the CIA would provide so little challenge to their electronic sleuthing abilities.