Pondering the Dangers of eBooks warning from Richard Stallman

I'm planning to get into writing books using e-Book Publishing as the means to get published. Modern technology and the Internet have given us a very interesting opportunity for authors to have more freedom and ownership over their work in a way that hasn't been possible ever in the history of book publishing. At the same time these modern gizmos (Kindle's, Nooks, iPad's, etc) contain buried within them an implementation which endangers the freedom of information and the accepted norms we have as book consumers. Richard Stallman recently released a one page PDF outlining the freedom concerns related to electronic books as currently implemented, and calling for a different implementation that preserves the existing freedom model around printed books. I've embedded the document below and have a long list of thoughts about this.

I think the first topic to cover is the question: Why should we pay attention to this guy? Who is he? To me Richard Stallman is something of a hero who inspired legions of software engineers with software freedom ideology. He might cringe at the phrase but Open Source Software owes a lot to the thinking he did around the ideology of Free Software. Lest you wonder what Open Source Software is about, most of the websites you visit (like this one) are built using open source (or free) software, and so are most of the web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and to an extent Safari) as are the Linux or FreeBSD or Mac OS X operating systems built either entirely or in-part with open source (free) software.

He makes a distinction about Free Software as being different from Open Source, where Free Software is distributed under terms with baked-in guarantee of preserved freedom. Free Software isn't about the cost but about the Freedom.

While his career has been about applying this ideology of freedom to software, the same ideology can be applied in other areas, and the document he posted attempts to apply it to books.

The context is - as he puts it - business dominates government and writes the laws, so it shouldn't be surprising that the result is a weak government whose laws benefit businesses over the needs of we the people. In that context technology is being developed as businesses develop new products to dazzle us with, and time and again the products are being developed to chain us in bonds of enslavement rather than granting us freedom.

It may be difficult to look at an iPad or Kindle and see it as chains of enslavement, but the chains are there nonetheless.

He first describes the current book publishing and distributing system as having a lot of freedom. I've uploaded the document to scribd.com to enable embedding it and hopefully it's visible below, or you can download the PDF directly from his website (linked below). I find myself almost entirely agreeing with his claims:

buy anonymously with cash: Go to any bookstore where they sell printed books and quaint as it may seem today they do take cash. Buying with cash means your transaction is completely anonymous. This freedom is especially important in a time when the police state is for example routinely demanding to see records of book borrowing from libraries, or book purchases.

you own it: Here is one claim where Stallman is off base. I know he understands the word Copyright and would have to agree that when you buy a printed book you're not ending up with ownership of the words on the paper to do with as you wish. You've bought a pile of paper with ink printed on it, and because of Copyright the real owner of the book is the publishing house that printed the ink on the paper. I'm in the middle of writing a book myself and the contract I signed with the publisher includes turning over copyright over the material I'm writing.

not required to sign a license to use the book: Again, there is a Copyright on the book and while you don't sign a license agreement there is an implied pseudo click-through license.

known format, nothing proprietary to read it: Well this is true unless the book is written in a language you do not understand.

freedom to scan and copy the book: Here he's showing some disingenuousity regarding copyright. Copyright law generally prohibits wholesale scanning or copying of books.

Nobody has the power to destroy your book: Maybe he's forgotten about book burnings? While book burning is in the past, I think the religious right when/if they establish the Theocracy they want for America plan to hold massive book burnings of anything that doesn't agree with their brand of Christian Ideology.

The existing printed book system isn't quite as open and free as he puts it. Yes there's a lot of actual freedom such as the whole industry of used bookstores and the ability to trade books with your friends etc. But the main problem with printed book system is the control over who is allowed to be a book author. Publishers are in charge and act strongly to prohibit who can or cannot become published by dint of owning the printing press.

Electronic books offer authors quite a lot of newfound freedom. It's now possible for an author to just put together a document with their word processor, and go to any of several service bureaus to get books into the electronic book marketplaces. It's opened up opportunity galore for authors to become published.

At the same time, as he says, the existing electronic book system does erase the freedoms book consumers have enjoyed over the years. It's impossible to share an electronic book after you "buy" it, impossible to sell it on the used book market, impossible to return it to the store for a refund, etc. Further some electronic book market owners have used back door access to electronic book readers to change or delete books after they were purchased.

He's quite right in raising an alarm about the freedom our society has to access to information as it currently exists. I'm quite concerned by the situation of electronic books. At the same time I'm relishing the thought of much easier access to the marketplace as an author. It's a mixed set of freedoms and constraints.

The Danger of eBooks - Richard Stallman

Links: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57314192/The-Danger-of-eBooks-Richard-Stallman

Links: 

http://stallman.org/articles/ebooks.pdf

Internet means Freedom? Or more Tyranny?

For a long time many have claimed that the growth of the Internet will mean that the proletariat can shake off the chains of tyranny and gain freedom. But is that true? Clearly there are examples where the Internet and the Web have played a significant part in the people circumventing official media dominance to learn things tyrannical governments would rather not be known. Clearly that can lead to more freedom and perhaps the ability of the proletariat to actually revolt against their tyrannical governments. But is this always the case?

Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships goes into this.. so ...

He's got some good points.. that it's up to the people using the Internet to use it in a given way. Just because the creator of a thing wants it used one way doesn't mean the users will do so, they may have some other use for the thing than the intended purpose. Also the powers that be have an ability to be inventive about ways of using the Internet to gather open source intelligence, or to engage with their critics in a way that defuses the criticisms.

I think at the basic fundamental level for a society to successfully revolt against a tyrannical government, the society has to take the step of kicking the bums out. That means an actual revolution, fighting in the street, etc. It won't happen automatically once we all have a blog and can post our thoughts for everybody else to read.

An example is -- if Television is the Opiate of the Masses -- World of Warcraft and other addictive Internet experiences are doubly so. In China for example World of Warcraft and other online games are so widespread that they've identified "Internet Addiction" as a disease and have treatment centers for it.

Someone on the Internet playing games is not a threat to the tyranny of the regime, just as television addicts are also not a threat to the tyranny.

Podcasting was supposed to be controlled by the little guy

The Internet and Podcasting was supposed to create a widely level playing ground. Anybody with an ability to record and produce digital audio or video could set up shop as a podcaster. Armed with a small set of digital media production tools, and a web site, one could produce their own equivalent to a radio program, air their own ideas, and stand on their own virtual soapbox and tell the world whatever is on their mind. The iTunes service makes it real easy at the consumer end of the spectrum. Inside iTunes you have access to a vast directory of podcasts, in addition to the audio books or music or TV shows that you can buy through the iTunes Music Store. It's a wonderful world, but what if Apple decides they don't like your content?

Apple's flip-floppy stance on sex Podcasts continues: Discusses Apple's problem with SEX. Maybe thinking differently stops when you get into the bedroom?

When iTunes sprouted the ability to automatically collect podcasts, Steven Jobs apparently said: that pretty much every topic was fair game except "you know, we're not—we're not allowing any pornography." ... except, in practice the iTunes Music Store has been indexing some sex-oriented shows, making the producers label them with an "EXPLICIT" tag. Except, as the article linked above discusses, some producers of EXPLICIT shows have had their shows summarily dropped from the iTunes Music Store.

Of course, once dropped from the music store the listenership to the shows drops precipitously.

I hadn't realized this but the iTunes service probably redistributes the podcast's RSS feed rather than directly subscribing to it. By having iTunes redistribute the RSS feed, they are able to determine the popularity of different feeds. But at the same time that leaves the podcasters, and the listeners, in a lurch should Apple decide to drop some podcast from their directory.

So, at issue is the ability for one entity to determine what we can or cannot watch or listen to.

In this case it is Apple. Through selecting what appears in the iTunes Music Store podcast directory, they determine the content we can easily listen to. Yes, we can eaily browse web sites and directly subscribe to the feed published by the web site. In iTunes when one finds a podcast RSS feed they can get the URL of the feed and using a choice in the Advanced menu make a subscription to that feed. But, in reality, how many people do so? Isn't it a lot easier to click on the music store, browse to the podcast section, and search around in there?

It's not just Apple that has this role. For example when Google decides to drop a web site from its search engine that site generally sees traffic fall dramatically. On my web site statistics over half the traffic comes through search results in Google.

There are certain services that act as gatekeepers. If these services decide to not list some web site, then nobody will know about it. If Apple doesn't list your podcast in the music store, how will people hear of you? Similarly if Google doesn't list you in their directory, then how will people hear of you?

Okay, there are alternative avenues .. there are other search engines besides Google, and there are other podcast directories besides iTunes. However the fact is that the vast majority of traffic goes through Google for general search results, and through iTunes for podcasting.

The Internet was supposed to create a level playing field where everybody has the ability to open up a web site and publish to a global audience. This picture is outside the control of Big Media and Big Corporations, supposedly. As individuals we can decide to spend the $5 per month for a website hosting fee, and set up a web site. No Big Corporation is involved in approving our web site, and it's very liberating for the little guy to have such an ability to speak to the world.

But we have Big Corporations, the like of Apple and Google, deciding who is listed in the commonly used directories and search engines. It is they who are determining what we can or cannot read or listen to.

Today the Prudes are telling them to go after SEX-related web sites. Okay, you probably can't find a lot of people who would defend the SEX-related web sites. But there's that story which sprung from WW II, first they went after the Jews and I am not a Jew so I didn't speak up, etc, until finally they came after me and there was nobody left to speak up for me.

In the U.S. freedom of speach is a core principle.

This picture is one of ... you can shout all you want, but if nobody can hear you then all you'll do is get a hoarse throat and zero effect.

The last thought I want to discuss is the Dirty Old Mens Association International. Quit giggling, it is a real organization with a very interesting set of ideals. The concept is that there is great beauty in the feminine form and one should be free to, if not obligated to, enjoy that beauty wherever and whenever you find it. The site features pictures of naked women, but I challenge you to call it pornography. Artists throughout the ages have depicted naked women in their art, and that's the tradition followed on this site. Celebrating beauty through the feminine form.

A few days ago on their front page was a notice how DOMAI was no longer able to accept payments through PayPal. This is because PayPal's acceptable use agreement prohibits payments for nudity. Okay, fine, here again we have a large corporation deciding what is fit and appropriate for others to view. Interestingly at the same time eBay, PayPal's corporate parent, has a large section of sex-related merchandise listed for sale.

There is a huge difference between the typical images in the sex/porn industry, and the images on the DOMAI web site as well as the high-art images that also pictorialize nude women.

Does nudity automatically mean SEX? No! Nudity can very well be an enjoyment and appreciation for beauty. But the typical images from the sex/porn industry are not geared to appreciate beauty, but instead seem intended to inspire raunch and even a degradation of women.

The laws seem to convey an idea that nudity does mean SEX. But clearly that's not the case. And in any case does discussion of SEX automatically mean that something bad is going to happen?

Bush Administration proposes labeling for web sites with sexually explicit content

Attorney General Gonzales is proposing a mandatory labeling requirement for web sites publishing sexually explicit material. A web site operator not labeling their sexually explicit web site would face imprisonment.

See Gonzales calls for mandatory Web labeling law and U.S. attorney general calls for 'reasonable' data retention

This kind of discussion is not new, and the articles above give a history of the previous efforts along these lines. The big bugaboo that has people scared, of course, is will their children accidentally stumble across these sites. I've looked at some of those sites, and the raunch people engage in and look at it simply astonishing. Some of that stuff is clearly not for children, and it's quite possible to stumble across it.

e.g. "A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive "words or digital images" in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs."

One issue mentioned in the article is concerns by search engines. For example the government might decide to make a law requiring that search engines correctly index sexually explicit sites, and then correctly return results based on the sexually explicitness of the query. But, as the search engines pointed out, it's rather difficult to determine whether something is sexually explicit or not. And, in some cases, the raunchy crowd will reuse innocent words to have raunchy meanings.

The whole issue raises a whole range of freedom of speech considerations.

The people who publish and read/view the raunchy material certainly have a right to do so. That's called freedom of speech, but there's a principle I heard a few years ago that's very apropos. Your freedom to swing your fists stops at my nose.

Should their freedom to publish raunch stop somewhere before it reaches childrens eyes?

But, wait, there's more ..

For example, how can this preserve the right of medical researchers to discuss Breast Cancer?

For example, the Dirty Old Mens Association Intermational (DOMAI) exists to publish photographs of naked women. You might think, oh, they'll fall directly into this sexually explicit category. But, I challenge you to look through their site and find sexual explicitness. The purpose for that site is the celebration of beauty, specifically the beauty of the feminine form. They don't publish sexual pictures, but instead the pictures are of naked women in their beauty. Often the sexually explicit pictures are, to my eye, very degrading as it presents a naked woman purely as a sexual object. On the DOMAI site their pictures are very affirming of beauty and femininity.

I will say the proposed law is interesting by explicitly naming the kind of content which must be labeled.

In the past there was always a question over whether something is, or is not, pornographic. Like I said about the DOMAI site, there's a long tradition of non-pornographic artwork depicting naked women as beauty.

They are borrowing definitions from existing federal law: sexual intercourse of all types; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person. Clearly those categories are easy to verify and enforce, unlike prior standards which.

The second article linked above is a little more chilling. It concerns requirements proposed to be placed on "internet service providers" requiring that "data" be retained for 90 days. They are claiming that the "failure" of ISP's to retain data is hampering investigations into criminal activity, including "gruesome sex crimes".

This may be very innocent and above board, but it also may be coming from the existing government plans to create a ubiquitous spying apparatus akin to Big Brother.

Again, there is a privacy consideration. In this case the "data" is our activities on various web sites, email we send and receive, even chatroom transcripts. The requirement is for that "data" to be retained, so that it can be handed over to government investigators.

Hurm...

Utopia? Maybe...

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

The guy is a University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, also happens to oversee a blog, a music label and a microbrewery. He's written a book An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, which I haven't read. But I am living what he's talking about, so with that let me write a few things.

In the NPR piece the situation is described thusly.

Up until the Industrial Revolution humans did most things on a small scale. A few people running a farm, or running a mill, etc. These were very human scaled organizations, he claims.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened and suddenly the scale of organizations had to expand dramatically. A cost effective factory for that time was huge, and employed thousands of people. To go along with it was the rise of huge corporations.

But, today, technology has come full circle to being able to enable individuals to work on small scale organizations.

An example is what I do with my web sites. I have a "day job" in a large corporation, but I also am a web site publisher and earn a tidy side income at that. Additionally I see a way to totally divorce myself from the large corporation, and instead operate several small operations each of which would provide part of my income.

In the interview they gave some more examples.

For example all the people making a living (partial or not) via sales through eBay.COM. He exemplified eBay as a wave of future business style. Another example was someone making custom guitars at home, and he uses eMachineShop.com for parts production.

The way eBay makes their money is through taking advantage of others doing what they want to do. This is drastically different from the large corporate style organization, where the organization exists to tell thousands of people what to do. There are dozens of companies making money through enabling others to do what they want. Google, for example, makes a lot of money from individuals like me who run AdSense advertising on their web sites.

I think, though, he's selling a bit of a pipe dream.

These individuals making their small organizations are riding on the back of some very large organizations. An individual selling stuff through eBay is absolutely dependant on eBay, as well as the package delivery industry (FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc). These are all very large companies who operate in the top-down style of telling their employees what to do.

Let's take another example. Suppose you have a great salsa recipe and you want to make and sell salsa. Go to any farmers market and you'll find several people living a similar dream. It's relatively simple, you need to pass health inspections, be able to operate a healthy kitchen and production facility, find FDA certified packaging, get a FDA certified label made showing the ingredients, etc. One could launch a salsa business with a small group of people, and then go to farmers markets or local Whole Foods stores to sell your product. If you keep working at it, you might eventually have national distribution and so on.

But, let's get back to the beginning. Where does your packaging come from? Are you going to make the packaging, or are you going to buy that? How big is the company who makes the packaging? Where do you buy the ingredients? The local farmer, or from an agribusiness?

What I'm getting at is that this utopia Glenn Reynolds holds out in front of us won't be there for all of us. Some of us will have to work in large organizations like UPS so that others of us can run our humanely-sized home businesses. And that's probably okay, because not everybody is inspired to do this. Many people seem content to go to work and be told what to do with their lives. If that's what they want to do, then more power to them.

U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet

There's this current story about massive snooping into telephone conversations by the NSA. The NSA and CIA and other spy agencies are supposed to turn their efforts on targets outside the U.S. but under Bush Administration edict they've been working inside the U.S., in opposition to U.S. law. Yes, the President has been breaking the law.

The conduct of the U.S. Administration is that this is not a war on Terror, but instead a war on Personal Freedom.

Consider: US plans massive data sweep Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far? (Christian Science Monitor, February 09, 2006)

The article describes a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio.

The project it describes is very similar to the process of search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Technorati, etc. It's to scoop up a vast amount of data from the Internet and to draw out extra information from it. The technical phrase is "data mining" which is a practice of taking one data source, and putting it to a different use. Data mining is widely performed in businesses.

For example credit card companies perform data mining to detect fraudulent use of credit cards. e.g. they might look for your card being used to make an abnormally large purchase, or a purchase made far from your normal area of activity. And if they see it, they could give you a phone call saying "we noticed suspicious activity, did you make purchase X on date Y".

So long as the ADVISE system is collecting publicly available data, is there a problem?

The difference here between the government activity and what, e.g. Google, would do with it is: The government is looking for "terrorists", and the government has people with guns who are known to use those guns to kill people.

The problem with the government's hunt for terrorists, is they've got a rather loose definition and they make mistakes. For example in the Extraordinary Rendition stories, one was a German tourist who the U.S. agents identified as Al Qaeda linked, they kidnapped him, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured him for months, eventually realized they mistakenly identified him, and dropped him off penniless in Kosovo. And for loose definitions of terrorism, we can think of the people arrested for "ecoterrorism" where they are taking their protests of e.g. logging activities to doing property damage and whatnot. Sure, commiting property damage is illegal and they should be punished, but labeling them as terrorists is going too far.

In other words, I think it's legal to collect data that's publicly available (e.g. published on a web site) and to make secondary uses of it. If it's good enough for Google or Technorati, then it's good enough for the U.S. Government. But there needs to be oversight and measurement to ensure they don't overstep themselves.

For example, what if they made a deal with Google or other search engines to capture some of the private search query data which the search engines have on hand. That is, each time you make a search engine query, the company running your preferred search engine receives your IP address, your web browser, your operating system, etc, along with the query terms. If you've registered with the search engine (e.g. signed into your "mail" account) then the search engine can know exactly who you are.

Now, that's private data which the search engine collects. One way they use it is to further tailor your search results based on past queries you've made. But what if they began handing that data over to the government, which the government would than incorporate into this ADVISE system?

Would you get a knock on the door just because you had a hankering to learn about terrorists and did a lot of google searches about activities done by terrorists? Or you wanted to see for yourself just how easy (or not) it is to get information on making nuclear bombs?

I want to close by reminding the reader of the Total Information Awareness system. TIA is/was a Department of Defense project to that acted as an umbrella over several inter-related projects, some of which would use data mining techniques of the kind described in the CS Monitor article. While a couple minor TIA projects were shut down, it's clear the bulk of them went forward, and that the intent of the Government for several years has been to create a technologically advanced system that can effectively track every action and look for "dangerous" patterns.

The TIA existed before the September 11, 2001 events which "changed everything". The TIA existed before the Bush administration. This is just an ongoing desire by government agencies to vastly step up their capabilities to spy on everyone.

Search engines cooperating with the police

Microsoft Confirms Turning Over Search Data to Feds: This covers not just Microsoft but the other search engines as well. The story is there's an obscure court proceeding going on, under which the Department of Justice (DoJ) has subpoenad records from the search engines as to search terms. MSN, Yahoo and AOL have apparently cooperated with the request, while Google has refused to cooperate.

Let me bring into the conversation this: Re: Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ? In that case some organization is organizing a move to require "Internet Companies" to impede cooperation with repressive regimes who want to surveil what their citizens are doing. But with this request from the DoJ, I wonder just how you want to define "repressive regime"?

And then we have Microsoft's side: Privacy and MSN Search posted by the MSN Web Search general manager.

As the eWeek article suggests, this is a very worrisome privacy issue. Suppose the government surveillance system were to know about every search query you were to make? It's easy to think you're just searching around the Internet, and the search results are very ephemeral and disappear very quickly. But when you're Googling or MSN'ing or Yahoo'ing, the search engine is able to make a record of your searches. The search engine might even remember searches you did before, the items you clicked on before, and helpfully rank the results based on what you searched for previously. This is information the search engines already collect.

It's important to note that the search engines are unable to identify YOU. Instead they know specific IP addresses, and are able to track which IP address did what. Or, in some cases the search engine installs a long-lived cookie, and with data in the cookie is able to correlate activity you do from day to day even if your ISP gives you a different IP address each day.

The MSN general manager says all they turned over was IP addresses and search queries. No personal identifying data.

It would be up to the government surveillance system to correlate IP addresses with people. This isn't easy, but is doable. For example my ISP assigns me a fixed IP address, and therefore the governmnet surveillance system might have an arrangement to query my ISP to retrieve the identity of people to which specific IP addresses are assigned.

Re: Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ?

Reporters sans Frontiers has made a call for action/change about Internet companies that do business with repressive countries. Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ? They cite several cases of Internet and Technology companies cooperating with repressive countries, for example Google and Yahoo filter search results based on blacklists provided by the countries in question.

In case you don't grasp the significance of this ... In the 1930's and 1940's IBM gave a lot of help to Hitlers government in Nazi Germany. They used the just-developed punched card machines (not quite computers, but close) to record and track information about Jews, so that they could more efficiently perform the Holocaust.

Todays computer equipment and technology are far more efficient and capable than the crude toys IBM used to help Nazi Germany commit the Holocaust. And, of course, that means any country that deploys their technology for repressive purposes, will be able to do so much more effectively than did Nazi Germany.

In a sense this is very simple. If these companies want to do business in those countries -- e.g. China is among these repressive countries, and China is a huge and burgeoning market which any technology company would be foolish to ignore -- then they have to do so within the laws of the country in question. In particular, under what justification would some company have the right to ignore the laws of some country in which they do business? None. Countries are supposed to trump companies.

But RSF makes a very interesting point. They cite several instances where technology companies cooperated with repressive countries, and claim those are violations of article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed by the United Nations when it was founded and which is supposed to apply to everyone, including business corporations.

They offer several proposals that would limit "U.S. Companies" in what they can do inside a repressive country. For example

No US company would be allowed to host e-mail servers within a repressive country*. So, if the authorities of a repressive country want personal information about the user of a US company’s e-mail service, they would have to request it under a procedure supervised by US.

The activities seem geared to keeping equipment and services outside the repressive countries, so that repressive countries have to abide by U.S. law in order to take certain repressive actions. And, they say the list of repressive countries will be defined by the U.S. State Department.

I think they're pissing into the wind, but you have to admire the integrity with which they are approaching this.

However, as a practical matter, how can we trust the U.S. State Department to be a fair arbiter of repressive governments? We, the U.S., are actively engaged with China as a business partner, for example. And there is the matter of Indonesia where the U.S. actively helped them in repressing the East Timor peoples.

Also discussed by:

Dan Gillmor: A Dangerous Question and Smart Mobs: Regulate internet companies to make them respect freedom of speech: Reporters Without Borders

This is difficult to defend

The context is this - we're in the middle of a war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the never-ending-war the conspiracy theorists warned us was coming. The legality, legitimacy or sensibility of this war is not the issue though. Instead the issue is a man who operated a web site offering porno pictures for free in exchange for pictures of dead or mutilated or tortured Iraqi or Afghani people. He was exchanging these pictures with the troops in the field.

Porn and gore man arrested GI Jane man collared for 'obscenity' (By John Oates, Published Monday 10th October 2005, The Register)

GI Janes in Iraq DIY smutfest Warzone porn and gore online (By Thomas C Greene in Washington, Published Monday 26th September 2005, The Register)

US Army probes nude GI Janes Porn is one thing, but corpses... (By Lester Haines, Published Wednesday 28th September 2005, The Register)

And he has now been arrested on obscenity charges. The web site used for the above exchange now carries this message:

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours." You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

Along with contact URL's for a legal defense fund.

The writer of that statement is right, I'm appalled by someone wanting to collect such things. At the same time I recognize the right to free speech. However, there is more going on here than the exchange of speech and ideas. By offering something desirable in exchange for brutal photographs, isn't he encouraging the troops to commit atrocities?

Perhaps it's fitting he's offering porn images in exchange for atrocity images. Porn is, after all, an atrocity performed upon the beauty of sexual union.

The deeper principle here I see is ... it's not a crime to think about such atrocities. What is a crime is to encourage others to commit them.

Who controls the net?

There's been an ongoing hue and cry over the control of the domain name system (DNS). The DNS is what turns a name like 7gen.com or cnn.com into the underlying addressing your computer uses to reach the computer. Humans are better at remembering names than numbers (aside: why do we still use telephone numbers after all this time?) so the DNS increases the user friendliness of the Internet.

The hue and cry seems to hover around who "controls" the Internet. I guess the idea is that if someone controls the names by which computers (hence web sites) are known by, then they have some control over the network. And a case in point is the ".xxx" top-level domain name, which was approved by the Internet governance body, but the Bush administration has been blocking because they don't want to be seen as approving a red-light district. Hurm.

Here's a case in point: Power grab could split the Net (By Declan McCullagh, CNET News, Published: October 3, 2005, Will the U.N. run the Internet? By Declan McCullagh, CNET News, Published: July 11, 2005, U.S. to retain control of Internet domain names By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, Published: June 30, 2005)

In my opinion he's doing journalistic grandstanding, overplaying the issue.

The article concerns

At a meeting in Geneva last week, the Bush administration objected to the idea of the United Nations running the top-level servers that direct traffic to the master databases of all domain names.

Apparently the ITU and United Nations are offering to take over governance of the domain name system. But the U.S. is balking, for some reason. (??Why??) As the article points out later, what would happen is to transfer control of the "root" servers from their current governance to the United Nations.

This deserves a little explanation. The "root" domain name servers are the ones which define the top-level domain names. In the top level domain names you have ".gov", ".com", ".org", ".edu" as several of the three-letter top level domain names, and there are newer top level domain names such as ".name" and ".info" plus all the two-letter country-specific domain names such as ".ws", ".tv", ".uk" or ".yu". Yes, ".tv" means Tuvalu not Television.

It is through the U.S. control of the root domain servers that the U.S. is unilaterally blocking the creation of the ".xxx" top level domain name. You can thank our prudish leaders for this moment of brilliance. (Bush administration objects to .xxx domains By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, Published: August 15, 2005)

The work in question has been controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN http://www.icann.org/general/)

What is ICANN?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. These services were originally performed under U.S. Government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other entities. ICANN now performs the IANA function.

As a private-public partnership, ICANN is dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the Internet; to promoting competition; to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and to developing policy appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.

Earlier in this posting I described Declan McCullagh's article as grandstanding. He's trying to say this will "split" the Internet. The picture he's painting is one of the U.S. retaining control over the domain name system root servers via keeping ICANN in its position (but I note in one of his articles, the U.S. administration wants to keep ICANN on a "short leash"). At the same time it's clear the U.N. will move ahead with creating its own root servers. Which, in the picture being painted, means the fracturing of the Internet.

Hmm... not quite.

First, it would be foolish of the U.N. to ignore the existing root servers. Hence, the U.N. root servers would contain the content of the existing ICANN root servers, plus extra entries as the U.N. agency decides to create new top level domain names. Not a problem. There are several existing unofficial top level domain names that are privately run between cooperating server administrators, so technically there's little trouble with this. What would happen is outside the U.S. certain top-level domain names would be known which at the same time would go unrecognized by the U.S. and other countries that follow the U.S. lead.

Second, the ICANN does more than control the top level domain names. They also control assignment of the IP address space. The IP addresses are the underlying numeric addressing I referred to earlier. If a second body, e.g. the U.N., were to try and assign IP addresses then there would be clear possibilities of conflict as the U.N. body might well assign some IP addresses that the ICANN also assigns.

The chance of chaos depends on what the U.N. decides to do. But does having control over the domain name system constitute control over the Internet? As in this article title: "Will the U.N. run the Internet?"? Depends on what you mean by "control". There's so many aspects to the Internet. For example, the actual system is telecommunications wiring systems controlled by telecom companies around the world. Several Internet backbone providers exist who run the network on a daily basis. They will retain control over their businesses and the telecommunication channels they control, and the transfer of ICANN functions from U.S. to U.N. control would not change that fact.

Another aspect is the communication protocols through which Internet traffic is sent. Those protocols operate over the physical Internet wiring. They are defined through International committees meeting under control of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in a process that has operated perfectly well for over 30 years. Control of the IETF process is not discussed in the articles, and I don't think this is being proposed for transfer to the U.N. The IETF process defines the protocols, and then equipment makers from around the world build gadgets that implement those protocols.

Between the physical wiring and the telecommunications protocols and equipment, there's a lot of "control of the Internet" that is outside the purview of the ICANN and IANA activities under discussion.

I wonder if the potential transfer is a good idea. I have often wondered whether it's a good idea for the U.S. to have such a dominant role in the operation of the Internet. Why, for example, are the three-letter toplevel domain names primarily for U.S. use? For example, the ".gov" or ".edu" domain names are largely used for U.S. government or educational institutions. Why is that? And, for that matter, why are U.S. federal, state or city governments using ".gov" rather than a country-specific domain name?

I remember in the 1980's when all this was new, the concept floating among the designers of the domain name system is the coolness factor of having the domain name disconnected from physical location. For example you could have "joesbar.com" refer to any computer in the world, and to the geeks designing the system that seemed like a great idea. Heck, I thought it was a great idea at the time.

But thinking back on this I wonder just how good an idea it is in practice. A city government for example controls a specific piece of land, and is very location dependant. Why would a city government need a location-independant domain name? Most Universities have the same issue, in that they are governed by state or city governments and generally don't have operations outside their geographic areas. Hence, why should ".gov" or ".edu" exist? Why shouldn't they all be under their country specific domain names?

Another objection discussed in the "Will the U.N. run the Internet?" article is the SPAM issue. Some of the country representatives are quoted complaining how the current "control" of the Internet is doing little to control SPAM, like this statement from Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable."

The research I've seen about the source countries for sending SPAM is that it's largely coming from China. Yet the equipment is usually designed by U.S. companies.

The vague logic aside, SPAM is allowed free reign because of problems with the protocols. It's got little to do with the control over the top level domain names. Well, unless there's something I don't know about in the decision making over the domain name system (this is not an issue I've followed closely).