If discount allopurinol a person is pregnant and trying to quit smoking, they remeron from canada should speak with their doctor about safe and effective cessation cheapest azor aids. In addition, a person may consider making lifestyle changes ventolin for sale and engaging in complementary therapies to help find symptom relief. order triamterene GERD occurs when the stomach contents flow back into the cost viagra esophagus, the tube that carries liquids and food from the clomid prescription mouth to the stomach. The drug information contained herein is generic cialis subject to change and is not intended to cover all purchase generic viagra alternatives problems possible uses, directions, precautions, warnings, drug interactions, allergic reactions, or buy vibramycin canada adverse effects. If a person has alcohol use disorder, it flagyl online is best they discuss treatment options with their doctor before surgery..

So that I can blog about a wider range of subjects, I am moving my blogging activity over to a new Bits and Pieces blog. I’ll keep up my discussions of the digital explosion there, but I’ll also be talking about education and other issues of the day. See you there!

The US Government has announced that federal workers should not be looking at the government secrets. Fine; I suppose your employer can tell you what you can’t do. But several experts are extending the logic, saying that succumbing to the temptation to look at the site may permanently disqualify you from ever getting a security clearance, because you could be asked whether you ever looked at classified information you were not authorized to see.

Would they really do that? This article in the Washington Post says they would.

The Career Services Offices of several universities have sent their students warnings about this danger.

This seems crazy on the face of it. Do we really want our future diplomats and intelligence officers to be the only people in the country who haven’t found out what those cables say? Should these universities be telling their students also not to read the New York Times, which has published some of this classified information?

By the way, if you want to risk your future security clearance by listening to the cables rather than looking at them, this site will give you audio versions.

Oops! No security clearance for me now; I just clicked that link.

A year and a half ago I blogged about the case of Steven Warshak, whose email the US government had obtained without a search warrant. At that point the opinion of the court was that no warrant was needed to obtain your email from your ISP. The reasoning was a bit like the original court view of telephone wiretapping–no warrant needed, since after all, what did you think was going to happen to your conversation once it left the confines of your house?

A US court of appeals has now held that the government needs a search warrant to get your email. “Given the fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication,” the court writes, “it would defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection.” The court has elected to go with common sense. Bad people do a lot of bad stuff by email, but there is no reason why investigators shouldn’t have to take the same steps to justify their searches they would have to do to open postal mail or listen in on a phone call.

Read the EFF’s announcement, which has a link to the decision.

if PFC Manning had given the documents only to the leaders of China, North Korea, and Iran?

I will be teaching a 2-day course, 9-5 on January 10 and 11, on Privacy, Secrecy, and Censorship. This Harvard Division of Continuing Education Professional Development course is for anyone who wants to learn about the digital explosion in one short burst, for either professional or personal reasons.

Several of my colleagues are also teaching fascinating short courses in January, listed on the same web page. There are links for inquiries and registration, or just shoot me an email, to lewis@harvard.edu if you want to get info from the horse’s mouth!

The Massachusetts Statute that was the subject of my last blog entry has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.

My guess is that this ruling sticks if it is challenged. The legislature was given the opportunity to fix a problem and instead did what it figure would be politically popular, to legislate safety over free speech. Back to the drawing board, folks.

Some time ago I blogged about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that the state’s definition of “matter” did not include text messages. For that reason some creep avoided a conviction for texting a minor with some material that would have been criminal had the material been printed.

The state legislature rushed in to fix the definition. Here are the before and after definitions of “matter” taken from the state laws:

[ Definition of “Matter” effective until July 11, 2010. For text effective July 11, 2010, see below.]

“Matter”, any handwritten or printed material, visual representation, live performance or sound recording including but not limited to, books, magazines, motion picture films, pamphlets, phonographic records, pictures, photographs, figures, statues, plays, dances.

[ Definition of “Matter” as amended by 2010, 74, Sec. 2 effective July 11, 2010. For text effective until July 11, 2010, see above.]

“Matter”, any handwritten or printed material, visual representation, live performance or sound recording including, but not limited to, books, magazines, motion picture films, pamphlets, phonographic records, pictures, photographs, figures, statues, plays, dances, or any electronic communication including, but not limited to, electronic mail, instant messages, text messages, and any other communication created by means of use of the Internet or wireless network, whether by computer, telephone, or any other device or by any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photo-electronic or photo-optical system.

Now that is certainly inclusive, but probably too inclusive. At least that is the argument being put forward by civil libertarians in challenging the constitutionality of the revised law. From the Associated Press (Washington Post — the Boston papers seem not to have picked up the story):

The content providers say the recent amendments amount to “a broad censorship law” that would ban from the Internet a variety of information that could be seen as harmful to minors, including material about contraception, pregnancy, literature and art that adults have a First Amendment right to view.

Michael Bamberger, an attorney who represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the way the law is written, adults cannot speak freely in chat rooms “out of fear that minors will see that as well.”

Nonsense, says the Attorney General’s office.

Assistant Attorney General Jessica Barnett said the new law only prohibits the dissemination of matter that is obscene to minors under a standard set in a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, that is, when the person sending the material specifically intends to disseminate it to someone under the age of 18.

“Absent intent to specifically send it to a minor, there is no crime,” Barnett said.

The problem is you can’t tell who is viewing a web page; nor can you control what web pages Massachusetts children are viewing that come from way beyond the horizon of Massachusetts Law. This all looks like yet another quixotic child-protection statute that will not protect children but will arm prosecutors with a handy tool to go after people saying things they don’t like.

The Wall Street Journal reports on leakage of Facebook data to the advertising world, even data held behind what were supposed to be Facebook’s highest level of privacy settings.

Why does this keep happening? Surely not by design on Facebook’s part. The company has been bitten enough times over the past year not to be venal without good cause. I have much less confidence in the intermediaries in the leakage, the data aggregation firm Rapleaf for example, which pled that “We didn’t do it on purpose.” Uh-huh.

Facebook is not just a social network any more. It is an entire operating system on top of which applications run. If you take it with a grain of salt and a roll of the eyes that Windows still has bugs, you should not be surprised that Facebook has bugs. And the more innovative and experimental a computer system is the more likely it is to be buggy.

Of course, any software developer does a risk-reward calculation. The people who build air traffic control systems do more careful testing (and more careful design up front) than the people who build social networking sites, because the harm to the company of a failure is lower, and the benefit to the company of a success is higher. Absent liability for privacy failures, Facebook will keep producing neat products that people love, and patching them when someone points out their problems.

Good job by the WSJ journalists, one of whom, Geoff Fowler, was a reporter for the Harvard Crimson (see this piece on diversity, for example), and also a student in my Bits course when he was an undergraduate at Harvard.

In what is surely another example of people thinking something is a bright idea just because it is possible, cities are putting RFIDs in recycle bins. The trash collection process weighs the bins and logs who is being naughty in their recycling habits. I had a lot to say about this when the Fox News journalist contacted me. Credit where credit is due — I learned about the process of chipping dairy cows and weighing their milk production from the course project of an undergraduate from Wisconsin several years ago.

I am happy to jump the gun on a bit of a blog-a-thon in which a number of us are taking up topics related to Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a masterful analysis of the forces at work to control the Internet.

The Internet disintermediates. It breaks the grip of the middlemen we used to rely on for a variety of services. I don’t need a publisher for my ruminations about the digital world; I can self-publish on this blog. I don’t need a travel agent, or a stock broker; I can make my own travel reservations and buy my own stock picks. Whether I do a better job now at these tasks than I used to have done for me, and who is getting the financial benefit of my doing the work that I used to hire someone to do for me, are nice questions, but the power shift is the important thing.

Which brings us to the interesting story of Craigslist and its Adult Services (née Erotic) section. After a horrible murder here in Boston in which a woman was killed after setting up shop in a nice hotel and receiving paying visitors there, Martha Coakley of MA, Richard Blumenthal of NY, and a number of other Attorneys General started pressuring Craigslist to remove the Adult category. This weekend, Craigslist did exactly that, replacing it with the word CENSORED. (Only in the U.S.)

A number of good stories appeared about this. I thought the Boston Globe had the money quote, from Harvey Silverglate, a noted defense attorney and civil libertarian. “They do not have the legal power [to shut down adult services on the site], so instead they’re abusing their office by intimidating private citizens,’’ he said. ’’I think it’s cowardly.’’ David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post got a good quote from Blumenthal, who may have a hard time remembering his athletic career at Harvard, but knows right from wrong. “They lack either the will or the wherewithal to effectively screen for prostitution ads. Which is why we [said] to them, ‘Shut down the site.'” (Fahrenthold also quotes Zittrain. Full disclosure: David Fahrenthold is my son-in-law.)

What is going on here is CDA Section 230 in action. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The same law that protects the Globe and the Post if one of their online commenters says something libelous also protects Craigslist. As law professor M. Ryan Calo told the New York Times, “What’s happened here is the states’ attorneys general, having failed to win in court and in litigation, have decided to revisit this in the court of public opinion, and in the court of public opinion, they have been much more successful.”

I have a question for the Attorneys General: Why don’t they go after the prostitutes for prostitution, rather than, lacking any legal basis to go after the web site on which they advertise, bullying the site? It’s not like the prostitutes are hard to find. Have one of your gumshoes answer the ads and make a few arrests. Not rocket science. Just not headline stuff. Before you start lobbing Congress to change the law about what people can say online, why not make some arrests for the act you are actually supposed to be worried about and which already is a crime?

But the story of the day is in Boston’s “other” newspaper, the Boston Herald. “Hub Escort Service Cheers Craigslist Ad Shutdown,” reads the headline. “With Craigslist, there’s no middleman,” says the madam, who expects her business to surge if it becomes harder for willing customers and willing service providers to connect to each other directly. Now there is a businesswoman who understands the Internet. This story isn’t over yet — some of those adult ads are reappearing under other rubrics — but I can’t help feeling we are seeing world-historical forces clashing over information control right before our eyes.