Given buy cheap spiriva online that researchers have found an increased risk of RLS in buy toradol from us people who have more disabling MS, this might mean that viagra from india progressive nerve damage plays a role in RLS. Although anyone viagra online without prescription can develop osteoporosis, research has shown that Asian and non-Hispanic cialis cheap drug white women are generally at higher risk of developing osteoporosis buying cialis online than other groups. The combined efforts have greatly increased the find viagra no prescription required average lifespan of people living with cystic fibrosis. Healthcare professionals kenalog for sale do not know exactly what causes lupus, and scientists have asacol online pharmacy not linked a single gene to its development. If someone diflucan discount buy online info experiences early symptoms of oral cancer for more than two buy cheap glyburide online weeks, the ACS recommends speaking with a healthcare professional. You cheap mirapex can also refer to these articles about Xeljanz and Humira or.

A huge sword that has been hanging over Google Books was lifted today, when the company came to terms with representatives of U.S. authors and publishers. Those groups had claimed that by scanning in copyrighted works and making them available in limited form, Google was infringing their copyrights. Google here explains how book search will work in the future. In essence, the company will add an option so you can buy access to the full, scanned version of a copyrighted work. You won’t be able to download it, but you’ll be able to access it any time you log into your Google account. Libraries will be able to buy institutional subscriptions. An independent rights registry will be created to figure out where the money should go, in the (very large) case of copyrighted works for which the copyright holder is unknown (orphaned works).

Many, many details will determine whether this is a good deal for society or not. A lot depends on the price points, where the kitty of undistributed money goes, and so on. Any time an important issue like this is settled out of court, it’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, most people will continue to get the service they’ve gotten used to and the courts have not gotten in the way. On the other hand, the underlying legal questions have not been settled, and could come back in another form.

Update: The settlement involves payments by Google of at least $80 million up front. The full details are available here, including how the user payments will be divided among the parties going forward. Again, the bottom line is that Google never admitted to doing anything wrong and the publishers never agreed that what Google was doing was within “fair use,” so the most important copyright questions may come back to bite us another day.

One of the most serious problems facing the Internet is that the free flow of information it permits is blocked by a variety of national regulations and laws. We give several examples in Blown to Bits: Google’s concession to Chinese demands that its search engine not return certain results, and the judgment of an Australian court that Barron’s had libeled an Australian businessman by Web publishing, in New Jersey, something that was perfectly legal in the U.S.

Now a joint effort by several Internet companies and nonprofits including the Berkman Center as resulted in a set of principles about how to deal with censorship and privacy violations demanded by national governments. (New York Times story, Wall Street Journal story and related blog. I can’t find the actual text of the agreement anywhere.)

The rules apparently will not cause any immediate drastic changes — we can be confident that Google will still be in China a year from now — and for that reason have drawn criticism from some human rights groups. But this is a very tough issue, and something is better than nothing. Essentially what we have here is a parallel to the anti-apartheid Sullivan Principles for companies doing business in South Africa. (Probably less onerous on the companies than the Sullivan Principles, actually.) There was always dispute about whether the Sullivan Principles went far enough and whether they played a significant role in bringing about change, but I think there is no doubt that they raised global awareness, and that alone would be a step forward for the Internet privacy and free-speech issues.

For those in the New York City area, Harry will be involved an Intelligence Squared Debate of that question on November 18 at Rockefeller University. Joining him in arguing the affirmative are Siva Vaidhyanathan (author of “Copyrights and Copywrongs,” and the forthcoming “The Googlization of Everything”) and law professor Randal Picker. They will be opposed by Esther Dyson, John Battelle (author of “The Search,” a good book about Google), and author Jeff Jarvis. Should be a great event.

As we discussed recently, electronic voting is an extremely tough problem, because it requires voters to have confidence that their votes are being recorded correctly, and to be unable to prove to anyone else how they voted. The two conditions can be achieved with the aid of cryptography — in theory. But it’s also essential that the system be simple to use and works in such a way that the general public will have confidence that there are no scams embedded in the software somehow.

There is a nice article in Salon on a couple of fairly realistic voter-verifiable election systems, including one by Ben Adida, who worked with Hal at MIT and is associated with Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society. There’s progress and reason for hope, but it’s also possible that a bad experience in the upcoming election with some completely unrelated kind of electronic voting machines could increase resistance for any kind of continued deployment of better-designed systems.

Earlier this month, Harry blogged about the proposal by Google and others to open up some of the white space in the TV band for more unlicensed use.  the FCC will be voting on this proposal on November 4.  You can support this effort by signing the petition at www.FreeTheAirWaves.com.

The US Armed Forces are using the Internet for voting this year. I’m quite skeptical about machine voting in general. But by comparison with vote-at-home, both electronic voting and Internet voting are far superior ideas. The country seems to have forgotten that votes can be bought, if you can demonstrate to someone that you actually voted a particular way, by having them watch you or by walking away with a receipt showing how your vote was registered. You can also be pressured (OK, kids, let’s all sit down at the kitchen table and fill out our ballots family-style).

The obvious problems seem to have been covered here (for example, the vote travels from the foreign location to the US via a VPN connection, which should be secure). It’s not comforting that the system has had so little scrutiny (see Kerckhoffs’s principle in Blown to Bits — we’d feel much better if a bunch of our best hackers had been let loose on the system and it couldn’t be cracked). But given that soldiers are so disenfranchised generally, I regard this as a positive invention. Of course, I hope they’re not voting in the configuration shown in the picture, where they can easily look at their buddies’ screens!

Wikipedia articles now turn up at the top of many Internet searches. They have assumed an astonishing degree of authority in only a few years. And deservedly: They are, in general, remarkably accurate. In an article appearing in Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel argues that the standards and protocols Wikipedia uses are redefining the very notion of truth. As Garfinkel explains,

On Wikipedia, objective truth isn’t all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication–ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth,” states Wikipedia’s official policy on the subject.

“Verifiability” means that the information appeared in some other publication. Other principles are “Neutral Point of View” — editing an entry about yourself is a no-no, for example — and “no original research.”

These principles work beautifully given the fact that anyone can edit entries. Vandalism and errors generally get corrected extremely quickly.

But the three principles don’t work perfectly, and Garfinkel gives a couple of thought-provoking examples where they fail dramatically, because information has gained currency through repetition and only the principals are in a position to explain why it is false.

A fascinating piece, and, like everything Garfinkel writes, very well-argued.

The New York Times reported yesterday on the Personal Genome Project, which is encouraging volunteers to put their genetic data online. As the story explains,

The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000 participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects. The more genetic information can be made open and publicly available, nearly everyone agrees, the faster research will progress.

Early volunteers include my colleague Steven Pinker, the noted psychologist and my colleague on the Harvard faculty, and entrepreneur Esther Dyson. It’s wise that the first people in are well-educated, and fully able to assess the privacy risks. Still, the project raises some worrisome questions.

One of the more interesting paragraphs in the story is this:

“A potential boyfriend could look at my genome and say, ‘I don’t know if this relationship is meant to be,’ ” said John Halamka, a participant and the chief information officer of Harvard Medical School, who has a 15-year-old daughter. (His daughter, he said, told him that if a suitor did that, “I wouldn’t want them as a boyfriend anyway.”)

This seems to reflect a naive, open-book-or-shut model of human identity. We are who we are, and we can either manage our identity the old fashioned way, letting other people see a page or two at a time as we decide, or get it all out there at once ahead of time so no one is proceeding with imperfect information as the relationship develops. Of course we all have problems that are not genetic in origin, and moreover, we ourselves tend to change as we interact with others.

But the more troubling question is whether Dyson and Pinker and the other early adopters should make privacy decisions not only for themselves but for their grandchildren yet unborn. Who knows how, in 50 years, society will react to the knowledge that an individual has an above-average risk of carrying some genetic condition? These successful people are unlikely to be injured much by their disclosures, but they are leaking information about other people, who have no say in the matter. Is the immediate benefit to scientific research worth the risk?

Hard on the heels of yesterday’s story about logging all phone calls made, emails sent, and web sites visited in the UK, comes a story about a plan to filter all Internet content in Australia. Users would be able to opt out of the child-friendly level of filtering, but that would only drop you to a level where all illegal content would be filtered.

Problem is, of course, that what’s illegal can’t be determined automatically. Even filters against illegal pornography will inevitably filter much lawful content as well.

And then there is the small problem of encryption. When you make an online purchase using a credit card, no one on the path between your computer and the store’s computer can tell that the data packet being transmitted contains an encrypted credit card number. How could any government filter know that a packet contains illegal pornography (or, in the case of the child-friendly filter, material unsuitable for children)?

What about dirty jokes in obscure foreign languages? What about email discussing illegal acts — does that also qualify as illegal?

Such schemes are absurd, but that does not make them any less scary. There are many more surveillance camera enclosures sold than surveillance cameras. You only have to have people believe they are being watched to change their behavior.

The British government is proposing to log every telephone call, the address of every email, and every web site visited by everyone in the UK. To fight terrorism, of course.

Bits like these should be regarded as toxins. In theory they can be confined, but the public should be alarmed that so many are being kept, and so little reassurance can be provided about how they are to be contained. As a nice example to ponder, the Washington Post reported yesterday that the Maryland State Police had classified 53 nonviolent protesters as terrorists and entered their identifying information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects. What one police official called “fringe people” who needed to be tracked were activists against the death penalty, with no history of violence.

But here’s the best part. Police stated that “the activists’ names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.”

We’ve all experienced that. Press 1 for this, 2 for that, 3 for a third thing, and what you actually want is none of the above, so you are forced to pick one of the other options. Sometimes this is just bad user interface design; sometimes it is a way of encouraging people to select an option for which you are trying to drive traffic, for commercial reasons, for example. Intentionally or not, this interface bloated the national count of terrorism suspects, at the cost of the personal liberty of innocent people, who are now likely to get shaken down at airports.

And no one can say how many other databases may have been infected with this bogus information.

British civil liberties groups are protesting the data-logging plans, and the government is trying to reassure folks by saying that it’s “only” the addresses and phone numbers that will be recorded, not the contents.

1984 is here to be sure.