The internet becoming less open with more censorship

The common expectation is that democracy is increasing around the world, and associated with that is the concept of the internet being a beacon of openness, letting the global citizen access new from anywhere and on anything. Difficult to block, and complicated enough that slow-moving governments can only play catch-up. Well, was a good thought, and now onto reality. A study by the Open Net Initiative shows how wrong this belief is:

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests.
The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said.
Such "state-mandated net filtering" was only being carried out in "a couple" of states in 2002, one researcher said. "In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.
Countries which carry out the broadest range of filtering included Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, the study said.

And of course you have China, which was not covered in the survey (since it was probably not considered safe to do a survey on censorship in China). China is the best example of how to beat the openness of the internet; it has an entire department dedicated to censorship, and they do a pretty effective job. In addition, the lure of China's size is that even supposed big corporations such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have buckled down. And you also have India, which at one time blocked off access to all the blogs on Google's blogger for a few days because of adverse comments. Of course, the power of democracy showed when people pressure and adverse comments forced the Indian Government to lift their blockage.

MySpace refuses to provide sex offender names to attorney generals

In a letter this Monday, attorney generals from 8 states sent a letter to MySpace asking it to provide names of registered sex offenders who use the social networking site. MySpace has finally responded, and the answer is a nyet. Citing federal privacy laws (Electronic Communications Privacy Act), MySpace refused the request from the attorney generals, and instead passed the blame onto them in terms of the attorney generals not following the law. As per MySpace, they can only provide information after a proper legal process is followed, not on the basis of a letter.
MySpace is one of the leaders of the social networking websites, but it is not following all the security measures about preventing minors from logging on (and minors are very influencable, and hence the need to make sure that they are not allowed easy access where predators can get at them), for example, people under the age of 14 are not allowed to create a profile, but the only check is that the user has to certify whether they are above or below 14, hardly a very water-tight security measure.
On their side, MySpace proclaims that they are very proactive about removing registered sex offenders; and while denying the request of the attorney generals, claim that they still want to follow the law and make their network safe for everyone to access. Refer this story:

Citing federal privacy law, MySpace.com said Tuesday it won't comply with a request by attorneys general from eight states to hand over the names of registered sex offenders who use the social networking Web site.
"We're truly disheartened that the AGs chose to send out a letter ... when there was an existing legal process that could have been followed," the security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, said in an interview.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Tuesday blasted MySpace for refusing to share the information and said no subpoena is needed for MySpace to tell the attorneys general how many registered sex offenders use the site "or other information relating to possible parole violations."
Christian Genetski, an attorney who has represented MySpace, said the Electronic Communications Privacy Act requires subpoenas, court orders or search warrants, depending on the information sought.

A contradiction between wanting to make its network safe (and it would do almost anything to preserve that reputation) while also ensuring that it follows the complete law even when cooperating with legal authorities could prove difficult for MySpace. It might have to buckle down.

iPhone gets official FCC approval

Now it's official. Nothing can stop the Apple iPhone from coming into the market and into the hands of eagerly awaiting consumers. After earlier diverting coders from the Leopard project to move to the iPhone development in order to meet the June date, the iPhone has crossed another milestone. In documents released on the website of the US Federal Communications Commission, approval for the iPhone was released along with the phone's radio test results, but no unannounced phone features. Refer this story on Forbes:

An Apple representative confirmed that the phone has received FCC certification and that Apple still plans to begin selling the phone sometime in late June.
The $500 iPhone combines a smart phone with Apple's iPod music and video player, and will compete with high-end phones from Research In Motion, Palm, and Samsung, as well as phones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system.
Apple asked that the FCC keep certain diagrams and an operational description of the phone confidential for 45 days.

Not too many surprises out of these documents. People hoping that the iPhone will move to a 3G wireless capability will be disappointed since the phone will operate on an EDGE wireless data network (a 2.5G rather than 3G). There will be some geeks who will be surely disappointed with this decision.
Overall, the phone is a very anticipated phone, combining the best of a phone's capability with music and video playing, and all packaged together by Apple's design team in a veru exciting package, what with the touch screens and finger based navigation. Whether that will be enough to overcome the high price tag is anybody's guess right now.

Google upgrades its search engine

What do you get when you search in google for something ? You get a page of search results in text format, although when searching for an image, you can do an image search that shows you resulting images matching your search pattern. However, would it really not be good if you could get a composite search result, for example, when searching for a public figure, you get text searches, images and videos (from Youtube), all in the same search ? Well, this is going to be the next reality of Google search. In a presentation to press and analysts, Google presented a revamped search that integrates news, pictures, videos along with the regular text search. One side benefit of this is that advertisements on the search page could be made better looking and richer. Refer this article from MSNBC:

Google announced a significant upgrade to its core search engine on Wednesday, promising a richer multi-media experience for users and pointing the way to increased business with advertisers, the source of 99 per cent of its revenues.
Other examples included a search for Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple, that produced pictures, video and news from Google Images, Video and News along with the regular text links.
"The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialised or vertical search will see new opportunities," said Mr Sullivan in a blog note.

This entire news has been touted as something incredible and that will make the searches more user-friendly in terms of results. However, and this is a point that all of them may be missing; people were attracted to Google in the beginning because of the simplicity of its search results, and the fact that Google has never let any kind of clutter come in the way.
In fact, as per a number of interviews, the founders of Google rejected the concept of showing ads other than plain text because that would detract from the users search results. If they now give up that concept (and maybe buckle down to advertise needs), and if they screw up their implementation by making it very heavy or confusing, they will turn away a number of their users.

Amazon jumps on DRM free bandawagon

DRM (Digital Rights Management) was the ultimate solution to prevent piracy and trading through the torrent network and others, you could have a way to ensure that everybody is getting their songs legally. It was the solution recommended by the recording industry; but there is a contrary position pushed by a number of people. This position states that there is a large section of people put off by copy protection schemes (such as DRM) and would purchase songs if they were DRM free.
A start was made in this direction when Apple signed a deal with EMI a few weeks back when Apple announced that they would make DRM free songs available on iTunes (slightly more expensive than regular DRM restricted songs). Now Amazon has jumped on this same platform, announcing that Amazon will make DRM free songs available that will be playable on a wide variety of portable music players, including Apple's iPod and Microsoft's Zune.
If it turns out that this strategy starts to sell more songs, then a lot of other retailers will jump onto this effort, and start to sell DRM free music. More such successes will start to hurt the basic claim that DRM is necessary, after all, money and sales count. Refer this article:

Apple's iTunes and e-tailer Amazon.com are in position to test this hypothesis in the coming months. On Wednesday, Amazon announced that it plans to sell digital songs from record label EMI Group that will be DRM-free. Amazon's unprotected music, which will be sold from the retailer's upcoming download store, can be played on a wide variety of portable music players, including Apple's iPod and Microsoft's Zune. Amazon's announcement follows one last month from Apple, which is also due to begin selling unprotected music from EMI.
"DRM is the only thing that has given the industry any kind of control," said one record executive, who requested anonymity. "Amazon is a strong endorsement for this (unprotected music) strategy," Card said. "The question of whether it's enough to tilt the tables away from DRM remains to be seen. The sales would have to be huge to bring the others on board."
Sales of traditional CDs are in a free fall. The industry reported a 17 percent decline in album sales so far this year. Ipsos Insight, a Chicago-based market research firm, issued a report recently that showed a 15 percent drop from 2002 in the number of U.S. consumers who had bought a CD within the past six months. The music industry is waiting for music downloads to make up these losses, but that hasn't happened yet.

A lot of people are pushed off by the restrictions on purchased music, where the music can only play on one player, and not others. However, by offering both DRM protected songs, and non DRM protected songs, they could end up confusing users, large sections of which cannot be expected to understand the reasoning and basis for copy-protection.
Another possible outcome is that users do not buy these songs just because they are priced higher than protected songs. If such a thing happens, it is not going to be far-fetched for music industry executives to claim that consumers have rejected DRM free songs, while the reasoning could be a matter of simple economics.

Microsoft attacks open-source Linux with lawyers

Microsoft has been an open advocate of dangers posed by open-source systems; trying out concepts such as Total Cost of Ownership (to make it seem that MS was cheaper than Open source if you add training and support), that these systems were unsafe, and now Microsoft has launched its latest attack on Linux, using its famous method of legally harassing a competitor to death. This policy is certainly not going to win it any friends, even if it may be a legal way. Refer this story:

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday that open-source software, including the rival Linux operating systems, violates 235 of its patents, making its most detailed intellectual property challenge to open source.
The maker of the Windows operating system said it wants to work out licensing deals with open source companies instead of fighting out the patent disputes in court.
"The real question is not whether there exist substantial patent infringement issues, but what to do about them," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft Vice President of Intellectual Property and Licensing in an e-mail statement.

This can be a serious challenge, because Microsoft will use it arsenal of lawyers to harass open source companies, and at the same time, if they actually have some patents that seem to have been copied, it will be open season.
Of course, with open-source being a big thing, such moves by Microsoft are likely to draw even more bad press and deal a blow to its efforts to portray itself as promoting some form of open source for a section of its technologies. Developer mistrust of Microsoft is deeply entrenched, and such moves are likely to make them even more so.

Data breach at University of Missouri Computer Database

A hacker managed to access and download information from a computer database (owned by the University) that contained information on names and social security numbers of around 22,000 current and former employees and students. In a sign that officials realized that keeping this information was not safe, there was a project to removed social security numbers from unnecessary computer systems, but the project was not complete. Refer this report at DailyTech:

More than 22,000 current and former University of Missouri employees and students are at risk of identity theft after a hacker reportedly accessed a computer database containing names and Social Security numbers.
Campus IT people discovered the intrusion on Friday morning -- the hacker exploited a hole in a campus web site that is used "to make queries about the status of trouble reports to the university's computer help desk."
The school suffered a similar intrusion in January. In that incident, a hacker was able to secure more than 1,000 Social Security numbers and the passwords of around 2,500 users of an online grant application program.

The shocking thing is that this has happened before in January, and yet this happened again. Now, it is true that computer systems security is an evolving field with constant battles between security folks and hackers, but the fact remains that one would have expected a greater show of urgency towards making systems safe.
Now, the university is faced with the prospect of sending out letters to everybody who could be affected, including former employees and students. And stealing of social security numbers is very different from stealing of credit card information because a database of stolen social security numbers can cause immense identity theft cases.