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“Based on feedback from our customers,”¬† Walmart announced today that it’s put on ice the plan to shut down its DRM music server, a move that would have stranded its customers, as I reported here two weeks ago.¬†¬† This new announcement from the Walmart says that they have decided to maintain the servers “for the present time,” but adds, “we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD.”¬† It looks like Digital Rights Management is turning out to be a tarpit for companies as well as for consumers.

Here is a nice radio interview with the three authors on the HearSayCulture radio show out of California.

An interesting discussion is happening on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. The indictment against the college student who broke into Sarah Palin’s email charges him with a felony. The prosecutor, in order to get the charges up to the felony level, must claim that the break-in occurred in furtherance of some other tortuous or criminal act. Perhaps they mean that he posted the new password so others could also view Palin’s emails — that he was enabling other violations of the same statute. It isn’t at all clear, and some of the lawyers who are commenting wonder if the argument isn’t circular and the indictment flawed. That would go with the view I mentioned earlier that the crime was a misdemeanor at worst.

You can download the indictment here. It is easy to read, if not to interpret.

David C. Kernell, the college student who allegedly broke into Sarah Palin’s email account, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for intentionally accessing her account without authorization. You will recall (previous blog post here) that someone boasted of doing this by getting her password reset through knowledge of the answers to three security questions — birthdate, ZIP code, and where she met her husband.

It appears that the young man is being charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The press release goes on to state,

If convicted of the charge, the defendant faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three year term of supervised release.

A few days ago, experts were speculating that he would probably be up on a misdemeanor, and unlikely to do any significant jail time.

“It would be a stretch to charge a felony [in the Palin case], but if they want to be hard on [the hacker], they could do that,” [former DOJ computer crime prosecutor Mark] Rasch said. “I wouldn’t have predicted that they would use that argument in the MySpace case, but they did. So they could certainly do that to [Palin’s hacker].”

The MySpace case is the case of Lori Drew, discussed in Blown to Bits. It looks as though the prosecutors have decided to throw the book at Mr. Kernell, as they did at Ms. Drew.

In the article on email privacy I published yesterday, I mention the Palin incident, not venturing to speculate on its criminality, given Mark Rasch’s doubt about what prosecutors might do. The case will be interesting to watch.

A law is under consideration in France that would require ISPs to be the monitors and enforcers of copyright law. All Internet traffic would be monitored to make sure there was no copyrighted material among the love letters, business plans, and family photos that residents of that nation were receiving. A complete Big Brother state, at the behest of the movie and music content industries. Penalties would range up to losing your Internet connection — and entry of your name on a national registry of persons not allowed to get another. President Sarkozy is all for it.

The EU is quite skeptical, fundamentally concerned that losing your Internet connection is losing the ability to communicate, a fundamental human right. The EU Parliament debated the matter and has adopted language that causes problems for the French initiative.

It is somewhat amusing to see another nation as much out of balance as the US because of the reaction of the content industry to the digital revolution. The interesting thing is that the matter is being fought out in Europe not on the basis of property and money as in the US, but on the basis of conflicting rights, that of creators to control their works and that of human beings to communicate freely with others.

In Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits we discuss the Total Information Awareness program, which was cut short but replaced by several other programs aimed at identifying terrorists by sifting through massive quantities of everyday data. A National Research Council report released today comes to the conclusion that such data mining efforts don’t work very well and wouldn’t be a good idea even if they did. The panel is no bunch of hippie leftists; it includes a former Secretary of Defense, computer science experts, and a former president of MIT.

The CNet summary of the report is here. The bottom line:

The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn’t really work.

A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” Inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.

This reminds me of the NRC report on strong encryption (Chapter 5), which recommended against legislative efforts to prevent the export of encryption software. It didn’t immediately settle the political argument, but eventually reason won out. Will reason prevail here, and will we go back to a probable-cause basis for searches of our personal information? Or will we act on arguments like the one Senator Gregg used in favor of regulating encryption: “Nothing’s ever perfect. If you don’t try, you’re never going to accomplish it. If you do try, you’ve at least got some opportunity for accomplishing it”?

In Blown to Bits we talk about the Electronic Data Recorders in new cars, which document critical data about speed and braking. In case of an accident, the police and the insurance company will know far better what happened just before the accident than they used to, when they had to rely on witness testimony and accident reconstruction from skid marks and the like.

Here’s another innovation in digital automotive technology. Ford has introduced a digital key that sets the vehicle’s operating parameters. So if you don’t want Johnny driving the car over 80mph, you just make sure that Johnny’s key won’t let him. Your own key fits the same ignition lock, but lets you drive as fast as you want.

Other things the key controls are chimes that sound when the vehicle’s speed passes certain thresholds, — and the stereo volume, which can be maxed out at 44% of the system’s capabilities.

Though the key is programmed at home, it appears that the programmability is limited. You can’t set the top speed at 60, for example, only at 80. That is probably a good idea — there are occasions when you need a burst of speed for collision avoidance. But no reason why the codes couldn’t do something more complicated in the future — such as letting you drive over 60mph only for short periods.

Surprise, surprise: Parents like this feature and kids don’t.

I have an opinion piece in tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor on privacy of email. It’s up on the Web already.

It’s easier to document the erosion of privacy due to technology advances and fear of terrorism than to formulate legislative proposals to counter the trend. The Center for Democracy and Technology has a good summary here. The bottom line:

In short, the next President and Congress should —

• Update electronic communications laws to account for the way that Americans communicate today;

• Restore checks and balances on government surveillance, including vigorous judicial and congressional oversight of surveillance programs;

• Review information sharing policies and practices to ensure that the government can “connect the dots” while preserving privacy; and

• Revisit the REAL ID Act and ensure that governmental identification programs include proper privacy and security protections.

The first bullet refers to the reality that in a very few years, many Americans have moved to keep their email “in the cloud” — that is, Gmail or Yahoo! mail or a similar web-based service, leaving them dependent on the practices of those companies to deal with government demands for copies of their email.

5 pages, and a quick read.

A couple of weeks ago, John McCain’s top economic adviser held up a Blackberry and proclaimed,

“He did this. Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years — comes right through the Commerce Committee — so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create, and that’s what he did.”

The next day the campaign characterized this statement as a “boneheaded joke.” So be it. Everybody has to disown their surrogates’ statements from time to time.

But a related claim appears on the McCain campaign’s Web site, on the Technology Issues page.

He is the former chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The Committee plays a major role in the development of technology policy, specifically any legislation affecting communications services, the Internet, cable television and other technologies. Under John McCain’s guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology that enables Americans to surf the web while sitting at a coffee shop, airport lounge, or public park.

Now the success of Wi-Fi is an important example of what spectrum deregulation can make possible. And the explosive growth of of Wi-Fi as a consumer product did in fact happen during years when McCain was chair of the Senate Commerce Committee (for the record, from 1997-2001 and 2003-2005). But what happened to Wi-Fi policy during these years? Basically nothing.

As readers of Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits know, the important policy step happened two decades earlier, under the administration of Jimmy Carter, of all people. That is when forces within the FCC started to push for unlicensed use of a small spectrum band — they wound up using a 100MHz band starting at 2.4GHz, because it was mostly used for microwave ovens, not communication technologies, so fewer parties would complain about the risks of “interference.”

What happened in the late 1990s was not new spectrum policy, but the inexorable advance of Moore’s Law to the point where wireless processing could occur in home computers and hundred-dollar wireless routers. So unless McCain’s guiding hand helped pass Moore’s Law, this claim seems utterly groundless. (Perhaps someone could ask him to explain it.)

Thanks to Michael Marcus for pointing this out.