Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

California To Set P2P Policy

Governor Schwarzenegger signed executive order S-16-04 last week charging the state CIO, Clark Kelso, with setting up a policy on statewide use of P2P technologies. While the order mentions legitimate uses of P2P, it looks to me like the RIAA and MPAA have his ear. P2P is already being used for legitimate purposes across the UCs and the state. LOCKSS relies on P2P as do many other projects. IT departments everywhere rely on bit torrent to download critical patches and updates to webservers and OS’s.

Concerned? Write early and often to the Governor and CIO Kelso. Kelso mentions in the article that he’d like to have a policy in place by the end of the year. They need to hear how the technology is already being used and that any limitation on legitimate use would adversely (and economically!) affect organizations across the state.

CoolGov

“Jon and Elizabeth” list “neat” U.S. government information they find.

Thanks to Cory

Global E-Government, 2004 Full Report

Here’s the fourth annual update on global e-government from the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. The groups did a detailed analysis of 1,935 government websites in 198 different nations undertaken during Summer, 2004 to see how e-government is unfolding around the world. They also compared their findings from 2001 - 2004. It’s also available in PDF but unfortunately, the raw data must be purchased.

Websites are evaluated for the presence of various electronic features, such as online publications, online databases, audio clips, video clips, foreign language or language translation, advertisements, premium fees, user payments or fees, disability access, several measures of privacy policy, multiple indicators of security policy, presence of online services, the number of online services, digital signatures, credit card payments, email addresses, comment forms, automatic email updates, website personalization, PDA accessibility, quality control, and readability level.

Outfoxed interviews released under Creative Commons

Go to Torrentocracy to download all the interviews used in the movie, “Outfoxed”. Robert Greenwald has agreed to release the interviews within Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism under a Creative Commons non-commercial license (press release).

“maybe, just maybe, we can paradigm shift ourselves to a place where all the established players don’t own the turf.”

[Originally read on Lessig's blog]

Consumer Report Part 1: Look at this — the Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole | Black Box Voting

The major news organizations are not covering this. Is it because it is not correct? Surely, someone else should examining this issue!

Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not “stupidity” or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

Stand up for your rights
by Danny O’Brien.
New Scientist vol 183, issue 2463 - 04 September 2004, page 15. reprinted in
Upd-discuss — Discussion list for Union for the Public Domain,
“New Scientist: Copyright is hampering our basic freedoms”

There is a potential time bomb ticking here. Part of the bargain with
authors of copyright material is that their work will be released into the
public domain after they have been dead for a specified time - currently
70 years in Europe and the US, and 50 years in Australia. This could
vanish. No existing DRM system is programmed to unlock itself after the
copyright on its contents expires.

The original posting for subscribers to New Scientist is

http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg18324632.800

Weapons of mass delusion by Richard Forno

I wouldn’t normally advertise new books, but this one’s of interest, both for its content examining American culture since September 11, and for the fact that he’s just released it under a Creative Commons license.

Homefront Confidential. Fifth Edition, September 2004. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

“Citizens seem to not realize how drastically their right to know has been
limited in the last three years,” said Reporters Committee for Freedom of
the Press Director Lucy Dalglish. “Even journalists will be astonished at
the lengthy list of actions taken by public officials to turn basic
government information into state secrets.”
See the
complete report in PDF format, or follow the above link for HTML version.

Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole

This was recently posted at blackboxvoting.org. The scary part is that the central tabulator is the machine that receives the votes from individual touch screen terminals! What’s more, here in CA, Gov. Swarzenegger froze the funds, allocated by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, which would have paid for increased scrutiny of the voting system.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

The term “information commons” is used in different ways in different contexts.
One idea “…draws on the historical existence of the English commons–pieces of land to which members of a community had specific rights of access to meet important human needs…” (From the Editor Inaugural Issue, June 2002, info-commons.org). This leads to “commons” as places where information is “… maximally accessible to everyone in a society….” So called, “intellectual property” may conflict with this idea, but
the info-commons.org hopes for a society in which
“commercial uses of information are balanced with effective public access to information.”

Another use of the term “information commons” refers to places, often hosted by college or university libraries, that provide
services that combine computer access and research assistance. Such commons have the potential for being more than computer labs and more than warehouses of information. They can be places where information is used, not just delivered; where scholars collaborate using specialized tools. ARL has a new
SPEC kit,
SP281 The Information Commons, July 2004 (PDF of Table of Contents and Executive Summary) that describes implementations at almost a dozen universities.