spiked-politics | Column | After the attack on America : Whoever the Bush administration does decide to retaliate against, we can be certain that it will cause more problems than it solves. Whether we are talking about the Balkans or the Middle East, the iron law of modern history appears to be that the more powerfully the USA and the West intervene, the worse matters become.

The Register : FBI steps up Net surveillance, following terror attack And so it begins.

I'm seeing way too many posts all over the web for an instant response in retaliation. This is a completely understandable emotional reaction. But think on this:-

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold

We don't who did this. Remember OKC

Be careful what you wish for. If you wish for WAR you might just get it. And it's good for absolutely nothing. You may think it's going to happen on the other side of the world, but the world doesn't work like that any more. It'll happen in your own back yard, which is where you'll have to bury the body bags.

http://page.blogger.com/search_attack.pyra
Blogs mentioning the attack.

The lockdown is starting in the UK as well. Flights over London banned. Increased security. Private flights banned.

Batten down the hatches. All US borders closed. All planes on the ground. Armed guards (with Stingers?) round all US embassies, worldwide. All US financial markets shut down.

Are other countries potential targets? In the UK, Canary Wharf has been evacuated.

As I heard about the WTC, I was installing XPlanet. Appropriate, to remind me where we all live.

This is why I'm scared to death of what the USA will do next.

It's still going on in the USA, but I'm beginning to wonder what the fall out of this could be. I'm feeling this quite personally as I have a flight booked to DC for Monday next. Inevitably the economic fallout is already happening. Brent crude is going up, the Euro is going up and the FTSE is heading down. Then we have to wonder about the implications for US foreign policy and for their immigration policies.

The New York World Trade Center is on fire. Wow! Two planes flew into the top, one into each tower. The second appears to have been a 737. I'd suggest a link but every news web site is currently overloaded.

Opinion: Speakout : An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists Good stuff. Aligns well with my own experiences.

New World Order, Copyright Style : On the proposed Hague treatyBut the software, movie and recording industries like the idea of being able to enforce their copyrights worldwide, and have been strong supporters of the treaty. So the US government express reservations about laws that impose restrictions on them while proposing laws like the SSSCA which would impose restrictions on the rest of the world. Meanwhile the RIAA, MPAA and others stand on the sidelines applauding. No change there then.

Hollywood Loves Hollings' Bill : In interviews Monday, representatives of the Walt Disney Company and News Corp. defended a draft of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) as a reasonable compromise that will spur high-speed Internet access, boost hardware and thwart piracy. Oh Yeah?

Interview with a content management heretic : most available content management systems leave you with a lot of work to do At last, an analyst who says the emperor's got no clothes on.

Phoebos and Deimos Have Vanished Update #5 - Has NASA Betrayed Us? Uh-huh... And what exactly is "Your Own World USA"?

What is CRAYON ? And how did they get over 280,000 people to use it when it doesn't work? "Create your own newspaper" from all those boringly mainstream news sources? RSS should be able to replicate this and in a much more function rich way.

DMCA (Syklarov), SSSCA, (only US government approved hardware, software, OS ), Win XP (three installs and you're out). What's next?

There's a lot of arguments in there about a lot of topics. But what of software copy protection?

You may remember when Lotus 123 was copy protected and as users we all bought protection crackers so we could install twice, support our users and take backups? How I saw it was that we, the people, complained and voted with our money to such an extent that software copy protection disappeared or became manageable. In the current legal climate, most of the activity that led to a big win for consumers then would be illegal now.

We did this one. Why are we going through all this again?

Why is the playing field so biased towards BigCos this time around?

The USA exports all these laws by implication of it's economic position. And we're not drawing very pleasant conclusions about the land of the free (sic!) imposing the results of a democracy from which the rest of the world is excluded.

The EU is building a reputation for passing similar legislation on the nod. Why is there so little debate here, compared with the USA?

Did the proposers of the SSSCA think through any of the implications? Or were they happy to just take Hollywood's shilling?

Is the SSSCA so extreme that it will polarise the debate, allowing them to slip through a lesser but no less stupid bill?

As Frank Zappa might have said, "What happens when music is illegal?"

n/a

I wonder if there is a logical proof that shows that successful copy protection of computer mediated media is impossible based on cryptography? One requirement of any scheme is that at some stage, the underlying information must exist in clear for the local user to make use of it. In Audio this means that it is turned into an analog signal that is fed to the amp and speakers. Once the signal is in clear there is a window of opportunity to turn it into a non-copy protected digital stream. At this point, the stream can be copied indefinitely. In cryptography, we are always concerned with protecting the information passed from Alice to Bob so that Carol cannot access it. But in copy protection we are trying to prevent Bob from accessing the information while at the same time providing access to Bob. A logical impossibility.

IMHO, we can only make this hard, not impossible. This means that we may only be able to push up the economic cost to Bob (in time, effort or money) to the point where it's not worth the effort, not enforce it. In audio and still pictures the stream is sufficiently simple that we stepped over that line long ago. The existence of MP3 encoders, mini disks, cassettes and so on, mean that it is now trivial to re-code de-crypted source. But in video, the technology has not yet made it easy. We accept that decrypting Sat or Cable TV is too hard. So while possible we cannot do anything useful with the clear signal reaching our display device. A similar situation happens with software. It's virtually always possible to obtain cracks or cracked versions of software. But copying and distributing 500Mb of MS Office is just too much effort. Compared with the price.

So arguably, it's the protection cracking technology that sets the retail price of commodity digital forms. If cracking is easy, then official sources have to be cheap.

Forget DMCA, the new nemesis 'SSSCA' - From a Wired article: Music and record industry lobbyists are quietly readying an all-out assault on Congress this fall in hopes of dramatically rewriting copyright laws. The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), scheduled to be introduced by Hollings, backs up this requirement with teeth: It would be a civil offense to create or sell any kind of computer equipment that "does not include and utilize certified security technologies" approved by the federal government. [kuro5hin.org]

Apart from going What the F***, I'm not sure how to respond to this at all, at all. most of the commentators seem to see this as the hardware equivalent of the DMCA but I can't see anything in the proposed law specifically aimed at digital rights management. It seems to me to be another attempt to mandate Clipper with an NSA approved back door.

It seems pretty unlikely that this bill will make it into law in this form, there's just too many holes and too much stupidity in it. But as ever it's the process that is damaging. It's all part of a continuing effort to soften us up and accept something. And what is worse is that even though it is aimed at USA law, it inherently affects the rest of the world due to the USA's position of economic leadership. Can we really expect the manufacturers that build for the USA making non compliant hardware for the rest of the world? And how long before the EU sneaks though a provision that is as strong or stronger in order to retain "competitiveness".