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Blown to Bits readers of chapter 4 know that we should stop to think before acting on the information produced by search engines.¬† Yesterday, a Florida stock analyst didn’t stop¬† ‚Äî and United Airlines stock lost 75% of its value, a billion dollars, in 15 minutes.¬† The stock largely recovered, down only 10% by day’s end but investors who sold at the low are stuck; and other airline stocks were affected as well.

Yesterday’s panic was the result the Bloomberg News Wire printing a one-line note about a Florida investment newsletter’s note about an article on the web site of a Florida newspaper reporting that United had filed for bankruptcy.¬† The article, which originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune, was accurate reporting, except that it was from 2002, and it was located in the archive section of the Florida paper’s web site.

It seems that an analyst at Income Securities Advisors did a Google search for “bankruptcy 2008”, which turned up the story, and then passed it on without checking it or, one might suspect, without reading it carefully.¬† In the inevitable finger pointing, one of inevitable finger pointees is Google, with the newspaper asking how a link to a 6-year-old story from their archive got returned from a query indicating “2008”.¬† The article didn’t even appear in yesterday’s newspaper, but, as Google points out in its defense, was listed as one of the “most popular” on the paper’s web site, which the Google search engine took as an indication that the article was, well, popular.

One might imagine a more careful search search engire, one that would double check the actual dates of news article, or even identify their original sources.¬† But more to the point, it wouldn’t hurt to have more careful people, especially those who are being paid to supposedly analyze information, not just uncritically accept and pass along the results coughed up by mysterious computer programs.

According to the president of the securities company, his researcher didn’t verify the story before passing it on because, “we are a reading service,” and since the story appeared in the paper “I don’t think that calls for us to check it out.” (As quoted in the Chicago Tribune.)

That’s an interesting view: it’s OK for¬† professional analysts to do their job by typing in search queries and passing on the results without having to apply any judgment.¬† I bet we could get a computer program to do that.¬† We could call it “Google”.

A law firm acting on behalf of the Church of Scientology has sent more than 4000 takedown notices over a twelve-hour period this past weekend, demanding that videos and other information critical of the Church be removed from public view. The Church of Scientology is famous for this abuse of the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Two stories from today’s news underscore the high tensions and short tempers surrounding the commerce in bits.

As we noted a few days ago, the McCain campaign received a cease and desist letter about its use of the song “Barracuda” at the RNC. According to Reuters, singers Nancy and Ann Wilson issued a statement that¬†”The Republican campaign did not ask for permission to use the song, nor would they have been granted that permission.”

But the situation may not be so simple. According to the RNC,¬†”The McCain campaign respects intellectual property rights. Accordingly, prior to using ‘Barracuda’ at any events, we paid for and obtained all necessary licenses.”

And in any case, the article goes on to explain, “the song is licensed for public performance under a blanket fee paid by the venue to ASCAP, the firm that collects royalties on behalf of composers and copyright owners.” Makes sense that the center would have paid a one-time fee so whoever rented it could play anything they wanted.

The moral here may just be that copyright law gives copyright owners such absolute control over their bits, and there have been so many frivolous takedown notices, that copyright holders assume they can do anything they want, such as to object to a performance for political reasons even when they have legally assigned their rights to others.

In other copyright news, a company has announced that it will sell for $30 what it claims is a legal DVD copying program for Windows computers. (Illegal programs for doing this are widely available on the Net; the New York Times article names a couple.) RealNetworks believes that a recent court ruling opens the door to lawful DVD copying just a crack. The copy could be played only on the computer that was used to make it, or up to four others for which separate license fees would have to be paid. The content industry is not amused, and it looks like another battle over copying technologies, like those we lay out in Chapter 6, will soon be joined.

If you want to know why not, read “When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder,” an opinion piece in today’s New York Times. It’s about the unforeseen consequences of the Bayh-Dole act, which was meant to provide a profit motive to universities, to encourage them to transfer their scientific and technological discoveries to private enterprise as quickly as possible. As a result, the spirit of science and applied science has changed. One of the first thing that happens to students today is that they are informed that the university has rights to inventions and discoveries that come about as part of sponsored research. When I wrote some math software in 1968 that enabled users to write equations in ordinary 2-D notation and to see the graphs of those equations on a screen, I don’t think I had even heard the word “patent.” It was just not part of the vocabulary — certainly not the university’s possible interest.

If the Internet protocols were developed in a university setting today, the university would almost have to patent them and then give a single private company a long-term exclusive license to use them. The Internet would not be common property, and research at other universities would be restricted by the legal requirement that they negotiate use of the patent rights.

It’s a new world, and not a better one. Jennifer Washburn’s book, University, Inc., which is mentioned in the article, is also excellent, even though it’s a few years old now.

Caylee Anderson is the Florida toddler whose mother Casey failed to report her missing for a month and who has been jailed for child endangerment (she’s out on bail). No one yet knows what happened to the little girl, but CNN reports this tidbit today:

Authorities said they have found traces of chloroform in the car Anderson drove and Internet searches of chloroform Web sites on her computer.

Searching computers is as much a part of criminal forensics now as searching a crime scene or the home of a suspect. And because, as we say, bits don’t go away, it can be even harder to eradicate digital fingerprints than it is to eradicate real ones.

Most likely the authorities were just checking the web browser history on Casey’s computer. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, look for a “History” menu on your browser; it’ll show ¬†where you’ve been to on the Web. The default setting on Safari, a browser I use on my Mac, is to save the history for a week, but I can make it longer. It’s a convenience; every now and then I want to go back to something I was looking at a few days ago, and by using the history I can find it quickly. When I search using Google, the history records not just that I was using Google, but what I was searching for. Bingo, if you’re a gumshoe and can get access to my machine. (There is an entirely separate issue of whether Google is keeping its own record of my searches and would turn it over to law enforcement. We talk about that in Blown to Bits also.)

Suppose Casey wanted to cover her tracks — what should she have done? Well, Safari has a “Clear History” command; that would be a good place to start. There’s also a “Reset Safari” menu item (try it — it will let you choose what to reset and give you the option of canceling or following through). Firefox calls this “Clear Private Data.”

But most people are PC and Internet Explorer users. I assumed Casey is too, and checked what Microsoft says about clearing the history of Explorer searches.

Have you seen those Mac ads where a geeky Bill Gates figure fumbles about the complexities of Vista, side by side with a cooler, more normal Mac user? (As a personal caricature, it’s actually unfair to Bill; when he was the age of the actor, he was wiry and energetic, like a coiled spring, not the doughy goofball the ad depicts. Of course, the ad doesn’t claim that’s supposed to be Bill. And in any case ads aren’t required to be fair about things like that.)

Here’s what Microsoft has to say about How to Clear the History Entries in Internet Explorer for version 6:

1.	Close all running instances of Internet Explorer and all browser windows.
2.	In Control Panel, click Internet Options.
3.	Click the General tab, and then click Clear History.
4.	Click Yes, and then click OK to close the Internet Options dialog box.

If the cached addresses are still listed in the Address box in Internet Explorer, use the following steps:

	1. Quit Internet Explorer.
	2. Delete all of the values except for the (Default) value from the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs

NOTE: Values in this registry key are listed as Url1, Url2, Url3, and so on. If you delete only some values and the remaining values are not in consecutive numerical order, only some of the remaining entries are listed in the Address box. To prevent this behavior from occurring, rename the remaining values so that they are in consecutive numerical order.

Even if Casey had tried to cover her tracks, she probably couldn’t have managed, if she was using the version of Explorer that is most widely in use. No wonder Microsoft is mounting its own funky advertising campaign, starring Jerry Seinfeld and the real Bill Gates, to humanize its products.

And no wonder Google sees an opportunity with its new Chrome browser, as we discussed recently. And indeed, no wonder, as David Pogue noted, Chrome has

something called Incognito mode, in which no cookies, passwords or cache files are saved, and the browser’s History list records no trace of your activity. (See also: Safari, Internet Explorer 8 [which is now available in Beta].) Google cheerfully suggests that you can use Incognito mode “to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays,” but they’re not fooling anyone; the bloggers call it “porn mode.”

That’s a useful feature for anyone planning a crime, too!

P.S. There is yet another issue. Even if the history isn’t visible through the menu commands, traces of it may well still be stored on disk in a way that a brute force search of disk blocks, one by one, would reveal. “Deleted” doesn’t actually mean that the bits have been destroyed utterly. In both the offense and defense of computer forensics, you can almost always do a better job if you spend more time and money, so how confidently one can say that bits are “gone forever” depends on the cash value you attach to destroying them or discovering them.

Would it be in line with the tough language of McCain’s Issues page:

John McCain Will Protect The Creative Industries From Piracy. The entertainment industry is both a vital sector of the domestic economy and among the largest U.S. exporters. While the Internet has provided tremendous opportunity for the creators of copyrighted works, including music and movies, to distribute their works around the world at low cost, it has also given rise to a global epidemic of piracy. John McCain supports efforts to crack down on piracy, both on the Internet and off.

… or the more relaxed posture of their nominating convention, which played music without the permission of the recording artists, who are angry about it? Protesting are:

Van Halen (Right Now): Used for McCain’s big entrance last night. Permission was not sought, and would have been denied.

Heart (Barracuda): Used last night when Palin joined McCain on stage after his speech. The copyright holder has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the campaign.

This is not the first time McCain has taken a generous view about sharing others’ copyrighted material. For example, there was an issue earlier this summer with¬†Franki Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” Warner Music sent a takedown notice to YouTube, where a video montage mocking Obama had been posted on McCain’s official channel.

Digital copyright law is crazy to be sure (that’s our Chapter 6). You have to wonder whether McCain has any idea how crazy, or whether he thinks it applies only to teenagers so he doesn’t need to worry about it.

As previously discussed here, the FCC recently chided Comcast for interfering with the flow of data packets to its customers based on the content of those packets — a violation of the principle of “network neutrality.” Net neutrality is an important value, but it isn’t the law. In fact, while it’s easy to give some examples of violations of the principle — delivering email from the RNC more efficiently than email from the DNC, let’s say — it’s actually hard to give a detailed, operationally useful definition, one that is clear about all possible service proposals Internet Service Providers might propose. Nonetheless, the FCC declared, on a split vote, that what Comcast was doing was plainly wrong.

Comcast has now filed a challenge to the FCC’s ruling. Part of its argument is on the details, but part of it is on the law: Comcast claims that Congress never gave the FCC authority to regulate the Internet.

Much as I applaud the FCC ruling, Comcast may actually be right about the FCC’s lack of authority. The laws may just be too old to have anticipated the importance of Internet communication and to embrace this technology in its definitions. If so, this case could be a 21st century reprise of Herbert Hoover’s struggles with radio broadcasters, the courts, and Congress in the 1920s, to gain control over the radio waves (a story we tell in Chapter 8).

Rather than explaining what’s at stake in my own words, I’ll just close by quoting a blog post from law professor Susan Crawford from a couple of weeks ago.

The network access providers [would] like to be able to charge what the market will bear for each Internet transmission, watching carefully what people are doing and choosing how to treat particular traffic.  The FCC’s action last Friday, while a noble and necessary first step, won’t make that kind of behavior illegal.  We need structural change to the law that will allow Americans’ instincts about the importance of basic nondiscriminatory transport to shape legal reality.

It looks as if public concerns about private discrimination have once again mounted towards the place that drove this country to adopt the original paradigm of regulation in the telecommunications field: administrative oversight of an industry providing nondiscriminatory services.  That paradigm disappeared in a rush of deregulatory fervor over the last twenty years or so, leaving all general-purpose communications services private and free to discriminate.  Traditional phone services (which aren’t allowed to discriminate) are disappearing, as people drop their home phone subscriptions and companies rip out regulated copper wires.

Over the same period of time, there has been tremendous consolidation in the network access provider market.  Most Americans have very few choices when it comes to buying highspeed Internet access.

The battle over nondiscriminatory Internet access is far from over.  But the outcome of this initial skirmish is the right one for our shared future.

Political contributions have long been a matter of public record in the U.S. But there’s “public” and there’s “very public.” With the Internet, they are now very public.

In Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits we mention a couple of sources for campaign contribution data. But the Huffington Post’s is just outstanding. Click on the link, type in your Zip code, and you immediately see a neighborhood map decorated with little blue donkeys and red elephants, which you can click on and mouse over to reveal your neighbors’ names, who they’ve contributed to, and how much. (Or, if you live in my neighborhood, blue donkeys with no red elephants.)

It’s very invasive, even though in principle there’s no more data disclosure than there was in the days when you had to go to the Town Hall and ask to see the files.

Very positive reviews of the book have appeared recently on Slashdot and the Linux Gazette. The latter in particular really gets what the book is about.

Google has changed its terms of service for its new Web browser so that it no longer claims the right to use your content in its advertising. This fixes a problem about which we blogged yesterday. CNET story here. It seems the old language was just cut and pasted — with specific intention or not — from those for some other Google services.