Well, now. It missed unanimity by (count 'em) three votes, but the U.S. Senate late April 29 voted to restore a ban on Internet access taxation. "We have held steadfast," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), "that the Internet, this extraordinary and global treasure, shouldn't be subject to multiple and discriminatory taxes."
This ends a logjam from last fall, when the House voted on a permanent Net access tax ban but the Senate got tied down over some arguing a permanent ban would "drain" state and local revenues and be an "unnecessary subsidy" for telecommunications. The latter group got some compromises in the new package, especially exemptions for some Net access taxes already in place in some states and localities. And now comes the fun part - reconciling the new Senate bill to a House bill.
A leading telecommunications analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute is having a difficult time reconciling why "privacy fundamentalists" (and bear in mind, the Cato Institute takes a back seat to very few when it comes to privacy rights) cannot get one thing through their thick skulls regarding Google's controversial Gmail, which privacy advocates and at least one California lawmaker think is a bit of a raid on privacy with its ability to glean from sent messages targets for advertising.
After all, said Cato director of telecommunications studies Adam Thierer in a note to Internet journalist Declan McCullagh's PolitechBot newsletter, just which part of voluntary do these "privacy fundamentalists... not understand? How many times and in how many ways must it be said: you do not have to sign up for this free service!" Thierer also ripped the like of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and others for "persistently" trying to put private-sector privacy concerns and government privacy violations on too equal a footing.
Just what torqued Thierer? A letter from EPIC staff counsel Marcia Hofmann, also obtained by McCullagh's PolitechBot, in which she made a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI regarding whether or not the bureau might use Gmail and even Google search technology for law enforcement intelligence reasons. "Because Gmail combines tremendous storage capacity with search technology, the service could also analyze vast amounts of personal information on every Internet user who subscribes to the Gmail service or corresponds with a subscriber the Gmail service," Hofmann wrote. "As one editorial on Gmail has noted, 'It won't be long before law enforcement agencies say they, too, want in. If that sounds paranoid, well, it's exactly the argument that defenders of the Pentagon's Orwellian Total Information Awareness program used: "If credit card companies can rifle through your transactions, why not us?"'"
"There is a world of difference between the two," Thierer thundered, "and it basically comes down to the fact that governments hold guns to our heads and coercively force us to do certain things against our will. That is the real Big Brother problem. Google, by contrast, isn't holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to sign up. If you're concerned about how government might co-opt this service for its own nefarious ends, that is not a Google problem, that is a Big Government problem. Let's work together to properly limit the surveillance powers of government instead of shutting down any new private service or technology that we feel the feds might have to chance to abuse."
McCullagh himself couldn't resist a gentle jab. "Sure," he said, in sharing the Hofmann letter with Politech readers, "a Web-based e-mail system that you voluntarily use is exactly the same as FBI wiretapping and a mammoth government data-mining project! Why didn't I think of that before?"
This does not exactly mean that Google is off the hook among sundry critics, by the way. Consider the folks at Red Herring, who can't quite figure out just why Google is rolling out a $2.5 billion initial public stock offering and maybe compromising their ability to continue as a truly privately-owned company that can pretty much do what it bloody well likes, risks and all, and potentially obstruct the very thing which made it successful in the first place.
"A publicly traded Google... is a company that will live in conflict with itself and the majority of shareholders," the Website wrote just before Google rolled out the unique IPO, which is intended to be done through a public auction online. "A public Google would not have been able to announce Gmail, its controversial search-based e-mail service, with few details and no firm release date. At the end of the day, Google may say that it needs to pursue a secretive approach to business in order to deliver higher returns, but that is an invitation to abuse no matter how saintly management intends or pretends to be."
Before we bid Google farewell for the weekend, be advised that their IPO isn't the only piece of the action up for bid - beta testers Google invited to join in Gmail also got invites to give to others, but many of those are up for bid on eBay, with the bidding as high as $61. "Gmail is still in beta testing, so Google is strictly limiting how many people are using the service at this time," wrote one seller with five days left on the auction at this writing and six bidders interested. "This is an opportunity to get in 'on the ground floor' with this interesting new e-mail service." CNET News says 42 testers are hawking invites on eBay, one looking to sell outright for a measly $199.
Some think Google are bullies in training (what a concept: as a magazine said years ago, build a better mousetrap and the cats gang up on you), but others think there's another kind of cyberbully to beware: high school students using online journals to threaten, harass, and otherwise make miserable those among their peers who displease them. Like the jealous girlfriend of a musician who autographed a teen fan's stomach; or a New Jersey schoolboy said to have borne two years' humiliation after another boy devoted an online journal to mocking him continuously; or sundry schoolboys sticking it to the girls by posting online journals and sites dedicated to their promiscuities, actual or alleged. Anyone surprised that brain-damaged high schoolers would take it to the Internet should probably go in for their own mental checkup.
While we're on the subject of brain-damaged students, meet the Wolf Creek Job Corps student who is now under arrest for child porn possession - after his computer disk was turned over from corps personnel to the Douglas County Sheriff's office, a disk Clinton Gene Hester was said to have downloaded while in Missouri on winter break, and brought back to Oregon. The disk included stills and video clips of children ages 4 to 13 in sexually explicit acts. He's in the county clink on $25,000 bail.
Meanwhile, back in the cyberjungle, worrying about the next Internet worm is one thing, but security experts are scrambling to kick some bot: namely, "a quieter but equally damaging threat [that] is slowly gaining control of large networks of computers"; bot software: remote attack tools that can find and infest vulnerable computers and run in the background quietly, letting attackers send commands while you key or surf away unknowing. The attackers usually do it through chat servers and peer-to-peer networks, according to CNET News. "It has been one of the big underreported problems in security," said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the Internet Storm Center, a network threat tracker.
The most common such botware, Ullrich said, is Agobot, and has been upgraded with a new variant said to use publicly-available code to breach computer security by way of a Windows security component known as Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS). Agobot is also known as Gaobot, and Symantec - the makers of Norton Antivirus - has warnings up for three variants. The good news, Symantec says: The threat is generally easy enough to handle. Symantec rates Agobot/Gaobot as easily enough contained, with low geographic distribution - for now.
Those who have been looking to kick some popup butt may be in for a mild setback: German-based online ad delivery system vendor Falk eSolutions AG says it has a new tool to ward off the software programs that block popups and popunders by converting them automatically into other kinds of online ads when such blocking programs are suspected. The detection tool is now an option in Falk's AdSolution FX ad management tool. "The proliferation of pop-up blocking software has made it harder for Web publishers and marketers to do business and monetize the content that users desire," said Falk North America chief executive Joe Apprendi, announcing the tool.
OK, the weekend is upon us, so it absolutely has to be Heatter time: there's good news tonight. Remember the gentleman who won a Porsche from America Online in a sweepstakes aimed at settling a lawsuit against a spammer whose junk mail claimed AOL would offer the $47,000 car to a member in a contest? Well, meet Charles S. Chase of Berryville, Virginia once more - because he and his wife picked up the car at AOL headquarters in Dulles April 29. AOL got the car in a suit against the spammer and decided to award it in a contest absolutely untied to the spammer.
It's a 2002 Porsche Boxter S, which should look rather intriguing next to the cars Chase and his wife, Margaret, already own - a Subaru and a Ford Focus, the latter of which Chase told the Washington Post "already got kicked out of the garage." Mrs. Chase couldn't resist needling her husband about reliving his bachelor days, when he owned a two-seat MG and an equally two-seat Triumph TR-3. "I think he's too old to act that way," she told the Post, but when asked whether she'd get a crack behind the wheel of the Boxter, she said wryly, "The question is under consideration."
