The ACLU, EFF, ALA, CDT and PK have jointly criticised the proposed Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act:

"... we write to express our concern that this bill will penalize and potentially jail Americans who seek only to protect their privacy and right to anonymous free speech online...

... The WHOIS database requires that individual Internet users, when they register domain names, make their names, home addresses, home phone numbers, and home email addresses available to the world, with no privacy protections. Users covered by this requirement include human rights activists, corporate whistleblowers seeking to avoid retribution, and ordinary Americans seeking to avoid spam, stalking or identity theft. As long as WHOIS lacks safeguards to protect their privacy and security these users will feel compelled to place inaccurate data in the database for reasons that have nothing to do with the furtherance of illegal activity.

However, HR 3754 would... create a presumption that inaccurately registered WHOIS data represents evidence of malicious intent... would make violations of copyright or trademark in conjunction with an inaccurately resistered domain "wilful," carrying the highest penalties, even if the activity were otherwise innocent...

... Under current law, the author of an anonymous web log who innocently quotes a portion of a news article that a judge later considers to be too long to qualify for "fair use" would be an "innocent infringer" and subject to reduced statutory damages. Under HR 3754 the same "blogger" would face damages up to $150,000 and potential criminal liability...

...Domain name holders who submit inaccurate WHOIS data: 1) on the basis of bona fide concerns with privacy, or 2) to protect their legitimate rights to anonymous free speech, should not be branded criminals."

The conflict between the Korean mobile phone companies and the music industry over Mp3 playing phones is getting worse. The music indsutry are threatening to get an injunction banning sale of the very popular phones.

The European Commission has proposed a new recommendation of the EU parliament and Council of Ministers on the protection of minors and human dignity and the right of reply in the European audiovisual and information services industry.

Finally for today, Larry Page's and Sregey Brin's letter to potential Google shareholders in their registration statement with the SEC makes fascinating reading.

"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one...

...Eric, Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company. Our mission and business description are available in the rest of the prospectus; we encourage you
to carefully read this information. We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects. We will run the company collaboratively with Eric, our CEO, as a team of three. We are conscious of our duty as fiduciaries for our shareholders, and we will fulfill those responsibilities. We will
continue to attract creative, committed new employees, and we will welcome support from new shareholders. We will live up to our ?don?t be evil? principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results. We have a dual-class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me.

In this letter we have explained our thinking on why Google is better off going public. We have talked about our IPO auction method and our desire for stability and access for all investors. We have discussed our goal to have investors who determine a rational price and invest for the long term only if they can buy at that price. Finally, we have discussed our desire to create an ideal working environment that will ultimately drive the success of Google by retaining and attracting talented Googlers. "

You don't see many IPOs running on the principle "don't be evil."

The NYT yesterday reported the large Canadian telcos' concerns about their future in the era of Net telephony. It's the standard fare about VoIP but worth a read.

John Lettice at the Register has been thinking about the UK government's draft bill and consultation [which, just as a matter of interest, is unreadable from the old computer I happen to be using at the moment] exercise on the national identity card.

After lots of analysis including genuine puzzlement as to how Mr Blunkett, the Home Secretary, really believes he can convince people that the ID cards will cost them £4, when they actually pay £35, he concludes with a question,

"So do you want this? It's a system that won't achieve most of its objectives, and those it will achieve will be achieved via massive overdesign (secure passport system? Here, take this networked database and personal information register to go with it). You get a personal ID card you don't need. You pay vastly more than you need to for the ID documents you do need. It only addresses the immigration problem (most of the British public sees immigration as a problem) if you pretend to love it and use it all the time, in all sorts of areas where you don't need it and it's inappropriate. And you get the free centralised database of your personal information anyway, providing a locus for any number of government and private databases of your personal information. Don't worry you've nothing to hide - even from your bank, other banks, loan sharks and double glazing salespeople, right?

It costs £3.1bn for all this cool stuff. At least. Go and tell the Home Office how much you support it, you've got until the 20 July, and you'll find a link to the consultation document below. If you happen to agree with any of this article, paraphrase it, don't just copy it. If you do they'll just mark you down as a petition signer and disenfranchise you, like they did with the Stand objectors in the previous "consultation.""

Consultation document.

U.S. Releases 2004 Report on Intellectual Property Protection.

Ukraine cited as "priority foreign country"

U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) placed 33 trading partners on the "watch list" for IPR violations: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovak Republic, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Another 16 trading partners are on the "priority watch list," which entails greater
scrutiny. Eleven of these -- Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, EU, India, Indonesia, Lebanon,
Philippines, Poland, Russia and Taiwan -- were on last year's priority list. The other five
-- Egypt, Korea, Kuwait, Pakistan and Turkey -- were moved this year from the watch
list to the priority list.

China and Paraguay get warned they're facing imminent trade sanctions for IP violations.

It seems that the start of trial of of the ten thousand (i.e. biometric national ID cards in the UK) was delayed by three months because the technology didn't work. Now it is going to for last three months rather than the planned six months.

David Blunkett has said that although the pilot scheme was late, "it is important to get it right rather than get it quickly?". I see. It does n't work. So delay the start. Then cut the time for the trial in half in case people notice there are lots of problems with it. And then claim you're trying to get it right. This is a joke. Right?

Ok, call me a cynic again. Hey, that's twice in one day.

My colleague, John Naughton, pointed me at this 10 minute interview, where an MIT student quizzed Jack Valenti. Jack genuinely didn't seem to know there were no DVDCCA licensed linux DVD players on the market.

"TT: But today, you still cannot on the market actually buy a licensed DVD player for Linux.

JV: I didn?t know that.

TT: So the question is, do you think people who go to Blockbuster, they rent a movie, they bring it
home, and they play it on Linux by circumventing the access control, are those people committing a
moral transgression?

JV: I do not believe that you have the right to override an encryption. Because if you have the right
to do it, everybody can do it. For whatever benign reason you have, somebody else has got one
even more benign. But once you let one person deal in a digital copy -- and I don?t have to tell you;
you know far better than I that, unlike in analog, the ten thousandth copy is as pure as the original --
it is a big problem. So once you let the barriers down for your perfectly sensible reason, you gotta
let it down for everybody.

I don?t want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was
saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.

TT: Indeed, but are you doing that when you rent a movie from Blockbuster and you watch it at
home? ... I run Linux on my computer. There?s no product I can buy that?s licensed to watch
[DVDs]. If I go to Blockbuster and rent a movie and watch it, am I a bad person? Is that bad?

JV: No, you?re not a bad person. But you don?t have any right.

TT: But I rented the movie. Why should it be illegal?

JV: Well then, you have to get a machine that?s licensed to show it.

TT: Here?s one of these machines; it?s just not licensed.

[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line ?qrpff? DVD descrambler.]

TT: If you type that in, it?ll let you watch movies.

JV: You designed this?

TT: Yes.

JV: Un-fucking-believable.

TT: So the question is, if I just want to watch a movie--I rent it from Blockbuster--is that bad?

JV: No, that?s not bad. "

Valenti is going to be a hard act to follow when he leaves the MPAA.

Microsoft have launched their Janus drm software.

California have allegedly toughened their stance on electronic voting. The devil is in the detail and I remain unconvinved this is anything more than political posturing at the moment, especially since California Secretary of State is reportedly calling Diebold reprehensible and calling for a criminal investigation of the company. Ok call me a cynic.

Meanwhile at least one county in California is suing the secretary state for the right to use electronic voting in the presidential election.

The Dutch data protection authority, CBP, have stated, that the Dutch entertainment industry's anti-piracy group BREIN's sharing of information [on file sharing] with US counterparts is in breach of Dutch data protection and privacy laws. Following on from the Dutch supreme court's decision in the Kazaa case, that won't make the Netherlands any more popular with the industry.

Nice profile of Avi Rubin and his stance on the electronic voting controversy at the NYT.

From the Scotsman via historian Professor Steve Hindle, Blunkett's 'Id Card' Was Around in 16th Century. Wonderful.

I've spent another couple days this week away from my office at the OU, helping some colleagues agree the final structure and content of our new cybervandalism course, T187. The facilities at the conference centre, Harben House, run by Initial, were fine. What did really irritate me, though, was trying to access my weblog from their internet cafe and discovering it was censored by their filter software, which declared that my thoughts here might be unsuitable for children.

Do contact them about inappropriate filtering, if you feel so inclined. I've complained and been told my complaint would be reviewed by a human being. I wonder how many other filter software packages block these pages, presumably because the url and blog title contain the letters 'xxx'?

I spent a couple of days in Barcelona last week, one at the terrific Univeritat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the virtual university, where I met a group of like minded enthusiasts for the deployment of technology in education, who actually understood what can and cannot be done with technology in that context.

I shouldn't be surprised at this but it is such a rarity in the thick of all the nonsense that gets talked, written about and done in the name of computers in education that it was an absolutely delightful day. UOC have grown from about 300 to 30000 students in about ten years. They have also in that time been learning the same lessons, as an institution, that those of us in the Open University in the UK who have been deeply engaged in deploying multimedia computer and Internet facilitated education with large numbers of students over a similar period have learnt about the potential, current limitations and practicalities of technological tools in an educational context.

I only hope our wonderful hosts, Sylvia Gonzalez and Ferran Gimenez Prado, found it as useful as we did.

The NYT are reporting that the FBI were given millions of passenger records by airlines in the says after the September 11th tragedies. Seems like a pretty sensible course of action for the FBI to request such records given the circumstances. They used subpoenas, so it was all above board. The only question, I guess, is regarding the boundaries of the request and the quantity of information handed over. Apparently at least one airline provided a year's worth of records.

The ID card draft bill is proposing to create quite a few new offenses, like disobeying an order from the Secretary of State. I hope one of the draftsmen have put that in as a joke to test how well this thing is going to get scrutinised? Think of it - in a democracy there could actually be an offense of refusing to follow the orders of a public servant. It also includes little incentives like a £2500 fine every time someone fails to turn up for an appointment for a biometrics scan (Section 6(4)). Jailtime for having someone else's card in your possession (don't offer to look after a friend's belongings whilst they respond to the call of nature then). All this draconian stuff is just an initial extreme pitch, so that Mr Blunkett can be seen to be making "reasonable concessions" when the actual law gets passed. Simon Davies of Privacy International is right - this whole shambles is a "disgrace to democracy."

A draft bill for a national ID card is online. There are lots of stories round about the ID card in the UK press today. Ministers are peddling the usual propaganda in favour and by and large journalists are lapping it up unquestioningly. Regarding the test progamme with ten thousand volunteers I have mixed feelings. I'm irritated with it because it's a waste of money and primarily a PR exercise. But at the same time I think it's a good idea because proponents and ordinary people, to whom the idea is intuitively and superficially attractive, will finally get to see how bad this 'state of the art', 'impossible to fool' biometric technology is in reality. The Australians did an ID card trial in the 90s and quietly abandoned the notion, having discovered how many problems it caused. Let's hope the UK version goes the same way

On the day that the UK government launch their controversial pilot national ID card scheme with ten thousand volunteers, Privacy International have released an interim report on a study of the connection between ID cards and preventing terrorism. Not surprisingly, "Mistaken Identity; Exploring the Relationship Between National Identity Cards & the Prevention of Terrorism" concludes that ID cards do not help to prevent terrorism.