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Several commercial products make it possible to avoid leaving footprints and fingerprints as you browse the Web. These products are especially valuable in China, where Internet browsing is tracked and many requests are blocked by the “great firewall of China.” FirePhoenix, for example, displays these promises on its home page:

Protect Your Online Activities

In a remarkable and frightening blog post this morning, Hal Roberts reports that FirePhoenix and two other major circumvention tool companies are selling data on users’ browsing histories. As the example of the release of AOL searches (chapter 2 of Blown to Bits) showed, search histories can often identify the users — and in this case, the users are likely dissidents living under repressive regimes with a history of imprisoning dissidents. Here is the sort of offer Hal points out:

Q: I am interested in more detailed and in-depth visit data. Are they available?
A: Yes, we can generate custom reports that cover different levels of details for your purposes, based on a fee. But data that can be used to identify a specific user are considered confidential and not shared with third parties unless you pass our strict screening test. Please contact us if you have such a need.

Now there is a protocol vulnerable to mistakes in human judgment with potentially tragic consequences.

No, the Chronicle isn’t censoring anybody. But I have a piece about censorship in today’s issue of the Chronicle Review.

Having threatened to ban Google Earth because it was allegedly used by the Mumbai terrorists to plan their attacks, India is now considering banning unsecured WiFi routers. This would be very sad — letting others use your wireless is a bit like letting them have a glass of water. Sure, you may be helping a terrorist, but it is far more likely you are just helping some innocent person. And how hard would it be for terrorists to send their messages from Internet cafes instead? Another example of too much regulation for too little good purpose.

Ever wonder how they draw that yellow line on the field in televised football games these days, showing where the first-down marker is? This video explains it nicely. (The part about encoding the camera orientation as an audio signal is just because there is a built-in audio line from the camera to the truck where the processing happens. In other words, it’s adaptive re-use of a technology that is there for another purpose, but isn’t needed — they don’t actually collect the field audio from the cameras.)

You might think the tricky part would be getting the line to go under the players, rather than on top of them, but that’s actually a digital version of an old television technology, the same one that TV meteorologists use. The image they seem to be standing in front of isn’t really there — they are standing in front of a solid blue background. The technology puts the weather map everywhere that’s blue, so it misses the meteorologist (who never wears blue — if one had a blue scarf on, you’d see the weather map right “through” it). In the case of the football field, it’s a uniformly green color, or maybe blue — either way, not a color in the uniforms. If the field gets muddy, this may not work so well, and the yellow line may show gaps.

Travel writer Sean O’Neill went to the trouble of getting his Department of Homeland Security file, with records of information collected as a result of his international files. His report is here, and if you click on the image of a page, you can see what his record looks like. DHS redacted some of its internal annotations, and O’Neill has redacted his passport number and the like, but you can see a few interesting details — for example, that the airlines retain, and then pass on to the Feds for inclusion in their database, the IP address from which the reservation was made. Perhaps some help after the fact in tracing his movements and movements of funds if O’Neill does something evil, but a bit creepy for those of us who wonder how useful these dossiers are for preventing anything.

As Bruce Schneier emphasizes in the book I blogged about recently, bad guys almost never get caught at the airport as the result of security screenings. They get identified ahead of time by old-fashioned police work. Whatever is in the dossier that got O’Neill pulled aside for questioning — as has happened to him — the dossier doesn’t reveal it.

The article gives very precise instructions for getting a copy of your own file. Not sure I really want to know what’s in it, but I should!

We passed another milestone on the road to digital copyright sanity yesterday when Apple announced that it would be removing Digital Rights Management (DRM) from the music in the iTunes Music Store catalog by the end of the first quarter. Along with that, Apple backed off its insistence that all tracks should cost the same: big hits will cost more in the new pricing scheme.

So in a couple of months, there will be 10 million iTunes songs available for purchase on line, songs that can be freely copied from one player to another. This plays out the scenario that began two years ago with Steve Jobs’s public letter to the recording industry proposing that they relax the licensing restrictions that required iTunes to implement DRM. We’ve come a long way since February 2007, when the recording industry’s response was to flat-out reject Jobs’s proposal was ‚Äúcompletely without logic or merit,‚Äù in the words of Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman.

Yesterday’s announcement was welcome news, but not a big surprise. Apple had already been offering a limited number of DRM-free tracks; consumers had shown a preference for them and were even willing to pay a premium for them. And of course, the big breakthrough, as documented in Blown to Bits, came in the fall of 2007 when Amazon began selling DRM-free tracks.

I’ve never bought any music from the iTunes store. I didn’t want to include tracks in my music library where I have to worry about whether I can move them between my iMac and my PC and my GNU/Linux box, copy them to my portable MP3 player or my cell phone, or extract a few seconds of music for a sound effect or background to a video. But once Apple switches over, I’ll happily become an iTunes Music Store customer.

I bet I’m not alone in this reaction. The New York Times article that reported the announcement included:

The music companies are hoping that their eagerly awaited compromise with Apple will give a lift to digital downloads. They will be able to make more money on their best-selling songs and increase the appeal of older ones.

Hallelujah! After a decade of fighting the Internet and Internet users, the recording industry is finally getting the message: Letting go of restrictions on the use of your product can make your product more valuable and more popular, to the degree that you’ll end of making more money, even allowing for an increase in ‚Äúleakage‚Äù when the restrictions are lifted. Hopefully, we’ll see that scenario play out with on-line music.

The next group that needs to get the ‚ÄúDRM is dumb‚Äù message is the movie industry. And despite the encouraging developments in music, this will still be a long haul. As we explained in B2B, DRM is the muscle behind the studios effective control over digital video consumer technology, letting them veto new features that they don’t like. Weaning them away from that privileged position will be tough.

As always, the group that most needs to get the message is Congress, whose Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with its anti-circumvention provision, is the lynch-pin of the entire anti-technology, anti-competitive contraption. That damper on innovation is precisely what we don’t need at a time when it’s more important than ever to to foster competitiveness. As we wrote in B2B, the Internet does not have to become your enemy ‚Äì unless you make it your enemy. We’re seeing a truce emerge around music. Video is still a ways away, but we can expect that the realities of the marketplace will let rationality emerge there, too. But Congress has never been a paragon of rationality, and laws passed in the grip of copyright hysteria and not easily overturned.

I have been saying recently that my nightmare scenario is free, web-based facial recognition software. It would mean that someone could say “this is Harry” (tagging a single photo of me) and then “Please go to Flickr and find other photos in which Harry appears.” Those would include both other photos taken and uploaded by members of my family, and also completely unrelated photos taken by people I don’t even know, who were photographing something else and happened to catch me in the background. Say, someone snapping his own family at a restaurant in San Juan, while I just happened to be dining with my Puerto Rican girlfriend at the next table, when I told my wife I was going to New York on business. Oops!

Well, the new release of Apple’s IPhoto is getting awfully close to making this a reality. It will do tagging in your own album anyway based on face recognition. My nightmare scenario can’t be far behind.

QRS, a company in Buffalo, NY, has made its last player piano roll, after more than a century in the business. Readers of Blown to Bits, Chapter 8, will know that George Antheil famously realized that a player piano roll was a generalized digital code that could be used to control communications equipment as well as a musical instrument.

Like the controllers in virtually all communications equipment, piano rolls have been replaced by other digital media. According to the Buffalo News story, QRS “is now a leading manufacturer of digitized and computerized player-piano technology that runs on CDs.”

I wonder if Antheil used QRS pianos for his compositions.

Because the Internet is like so many different technologies in different ways, it incites a variety of anxieties, and a corresponding variety of responses. Governments’ responses are often poorly thought out over-reactions — poorly thought out and little discussed. The past week’s news gives two astounding examples.

In India, a law innocuously called the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill 2006″ allows the government to intercept any form of electronic communications — email, text messages, or cell phone conversations — in order to investigate “any offence.” This is a post-Mumbai anti-terrorism measure, but like the USA PATRIOT Act, it is utterly lacking in provisions that would restrain the abuse of government authority. It was passed quietly, after little debate. Here is a blogger’s account of the bill (India sleepwalks to total surveillance”), and here is an editorial from the Times of India that backs up the blogger’s horrified reaction (“License to Snoop,” which begins, “Big Brother could¬†really¬†be watching”).

Meanwhile, the Times of London reports:

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

Now it’s not clear what that actually means (are the police going start sending malware via email, just like the bad guys do to steal your account information and passwords?). But the trend is unmistakable: Even in major democracies, law enforcement so fears what people are saying over the Internet that it wants complete access to all of them, with only the cops deciding whether the surveillance and searches are justified.

The price is too high for such measures to be adopted without public discussion. In the U.S., let’s hope for better.

About an hour ago, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the RIAA has fired MediaSentry. That’s the company, as explained in B2B, that the RIAA has been using for gathering evidence in the lawsuits against accused file sharers.

One case mentioned in the book was that of Jammie Thomas, who was fined $222,000 in October 2007 for allegedly sharing 24 songs. The judge in the case subsequently set aside the jury’s verdict, as I noted in this blog last September. Thomas is currently awaiting retrial. Only this time, the RIAA would have to prove that she actually distributed music from her computer, not merely that there were music files on her hard drive (which was basis for setting the original verdict aside). Going along with this, the RIAA has claimed that it’s stopped filing new lawsuits, although suits already filed are still ongoing.

As hinted in chapter 6 of the book, we may be on a path to de-escalation in the copyright wars, at least in music, now that there are an increasing number of legitimate ways to obtain DRM-free tracks. Of course, the film industry still seems ready to continue the “file sharing as threat to civilization” drumbeat, and Congress still seems all too willing to listen.