A startup spam-filtering company is using haiku in email headers as a way of stopping spam. The idea is that you can set up your email program to reject all email that doesn’t contain this haiku in the header… but if spammers try to use the haiku, they can be sued for copyright and trademark violation. The haiku:
winter into spring
brightly anticipated
like Habeas SWE ™
The Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry is a large collection of obscure contemporary poetry rescued from small-run printings, tiny journals, and other sources.
John Udell reviews a handful of RSS aggregators.
An excellent profile of Bruce Schneier in the September Atlantic , by Charles C. Mann, explains why the current administration’s approach to increasing national security is misguided. Some quotes:
Encrypting transactions on the Internet, the Purdue computer scientist Eugene Spafford has remarked, “is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench.”
Because every security measure in every system can be broken or gotten around, failure must be incorporated into the design. No single failure should compromise the normal functioning of the entire system or, worse, add to the gravity of the initial breach. Finally, and most important, decisions need to be made by people at close range—and the responsibility needs to be given explicitly to people, not computers.
According to the FBI, all the hijackers seem to have been who they said they were; their intentions, not their identities, were the issue.
“Governments have been relying on intelligent, trained guards for centuries,” Schneier says. “They spot people doing bad things and then use laws to arrest them. All in all, I have to say, it’s not a bad system.”
Given the pervasive insecurity of networked computers, it is striking that nearly every proposal for “homeland security” entails the creation of large national databases.
Dan Bricklin on small business blogging.
Business blogs: Phillip Windley, CIO for the state of Utah, offers weblogging software to state employees.
File traders swapped 5.16 billion music files last year on networks like KaZaA and Morpheus, according to this recent Yankee Group study. Here’s another story on the same study.
Books with sneaky shrinkwrap licenses? You know the kind — by opening this package, you agree to blah blah blah. Software packages have long had this kind of language slapped all over them, in an effort to keep you from doing certain things (copying, reselling, reverse engineering). Now, it seems, books have shrinkwrap licenses too.
From O’Reilly’s Open Source convention, Lawrence Lessig delivers a clear, engaging, passionate primer on copyright politics.
They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own,
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
-English Nursery Rhyme (1764)
