Another socialist blog

Via BoingBoing:  the EFF has published a step-by-step guide that tells how to find out if your laser printer is secretly watermarking everything you print.

Tracking dots are the secret marks that many popular color laser printers and photocopiers scatter across every document they touch. The marks, almost invisible to the eye, uniquely identify the printer that produced the document, and, as EFF uncovered, can even automatically encode the time and date it was created. Anonymous self-publication and distribution have been, and remain, a vital political communication channel in many countries. A telltale pattern readable by government officials is a tool that oppressive states everywhere would love to have — not to mention the general threat to individual privacy countries more respectful of human rights.

Finally, after attempts to suppress it, an independent report on the security of Sequoia voting machines is out.  The report lists eight ways the AVC Advantage 9.00 voting machine can be subverted, i.e., made to tamper with your vote. If you live in a jurisdiction that uses Sequoia machines, you should take steps immediately to vote absentee, which will secure your vote on a paper ballot.

Executive Summary

I. The AVC Advantage 9.00 is easily “hacked” by the installation of fraudulent firmware. This is done by prying just one ROM chip from its socket and pushing a new one in, or by replacement of the Z80 processor chip. We have demonstrated that this “hack” takes just 7 minutes to perform.

The fraudulent firmware can steal votes during an election, just as its criminal designer programs it to do. The fraud cannot practically be detected. There is no paper audit trail on this machine; all electronic records of the votes are under control of the firmware, which can manipulate them all simultaneously.

II. Without even touching a single AVC Advantage, an attacker can install fraudulent firmware into many AVC Advantage machines by viral propagation through audio-ballot cartridges. The virus can steal the votes of blind voters, can cause AVC Advantages in targeted precincts to fail to operate; or can cause WinEDS software to tally votes inaccurately. (WinEDS is the program, sold by Sequoia, that each County’s Board of Elections uses to add up votes from all the different precincts.)

III. Design flaws in the user interface of the AVC Advantage disenfranchise voters, or violate voter privacy, by causing votes not to be counted, and by allowing pollworkers to commit fraud.

IV. AVC Advantage Results Cartridges can be easily manipulated to change votes, after the polls are closed but before results from different precincts are cumulated together.

V. Sequoia’s sloppy software practices can lead to error and insecurity. Wyle’s Independent Testing Authority (ITA) reports are not rigorous, and are inadequate to detect security vulnerabilities. Programming errors that slip through these processes can miscount votes and permit fraud.

VI. Anomalies noticed by County Clerks in the New Jersey 2008 Presidential Primary were caused by two different programming errors on the part of Sequoia, and had the effect of disenfranchising voters.

VII. The AVC Advantage has been produced in many versions. The fact that one version may have been examined for certification does not give grounds for confidence in the security and accuracy of a different version. New Jersey should not use any version of the AVC Advantage that it has not actually examined with the assistance of skilled computer-security experts.

VIII. The AVC Advantage is too insecure to use in New Jersey. New Jersey should immediately implement the 2005 law passed by the Legislature, requiring an individual voter-verified record of each vote cast, by adopting precinct-count optical-scan voting equipment.

I’ve covered this company’s dangerous products before, under their old name of Diebold. Their reputation was so bad, they chose to rename the company, a la ValuJet, rather than actually fix the cause of their notoriety.

When governments are run by corporations, you’ll hear a lot about “private property,” but it won’t refer to your stuff. Only the corporations will actually have property rights, and your stuff will all be rented from them. Just a few recent examples:

• Virgin Media cable says that the record industry is in charge of your router configuration. Customers of the British internet provider are being told they can’t provide open WiFi connections because someone could use them to download music. The internet connection you paid for, and the router you thought you owned, turn out to be someone else’s.
• The MPAA has convinced the FCC to begin a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology is called Selectable Output Control (SOC), but the FCC restricts its use. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs. All your DVRs are belong to us.
• The Associated Press now expects you to pay a license fee to them, for the privilege of quoting and commenting on an A.P. story. And they reserve the right to cancel your license if you criticize A.P.

Fortunately I don’t have to pay to quote Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s excellent comment:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they’re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn’t amount to proscribed “circumvention.” Hey, why have laws? Let’s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we’ll save.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.

When in doubt, attempt to shut up your critics? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to be having mixed success with this strategy. Someone leaked a copy of the church’s Church Handbook of Instructions, a two-volume book of policies and is a guide for leaders of the Mormon Church. You wouldn’t think church policies would be secret, let alone copyrighted, but church lawyers have been busy silencing anyone who tries to bring the handbook into the light of day. They’ve managed, through abuse of copyright law, to force several people and organizations to take down the leaked—and presumably embarrassing— material, including Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Scribd and Wikimedia Foundation. Wikileaks, a whistleblower website which publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of its contributors, has refused to take the handbook down. Wikileaks describes the material as significant because “…the book is strictly confidential among the Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka LDS in short form) bishops and stake presidents and it reveals the procedure of handling confidential matters related to tithing payment, excommunication, baptism and doctrine teaching (indoctrination).”

Good for Wikileaks. This document is a perfect example of the twisting of intellectual property law, to cover material that isn’t valuable but is something the rich and powerful would like to hide. It’s madness to give new power to people who already have too much. Unless, of course, you’re a legislator who’s for sale to Hollywood.

The worst features of two bad copyright bills, defeated previously in Congress, have been combined into a single monstrous bill, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, introduced in the Senate on Thursday.  The bill permits the forfeiture of property from copyright infringers, which means that if you download a movie you could lose your house.  No, I am not making this up.  The bill also turns federal prosecutors into a legal department of the movie industry, permitting federal prosecutors to file civil suits against alleged infringers, under the more lax standard of proof used in civil cases.

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that permits local police to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. That’s right. Instead of civil lawsuits for money, the recording industry wants to criminalize what they call copyright violation, and empower law enforcement to permanently seize any property they claim was used to violate copyright. This expands a government power that even some conservatives will acknowledge has been widely abused.

This is the future of property rights. They will own the property. You can only rent it.

Last week a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved H.R. 964, the Spy Act. It’s supposedly a law designed to protect you and me from spyware, but it should more really be called the Yes! You Can Spy Act. It legalizes the use of spyware by any company you do business with. Computer makers would be free to load spyware on a machine before delivering it to you. The federal bill would preempt any stronger state laws. And it takes away any private right to sue companies that use spyware against you.

Democrats who try to package themselves as pro-security are going to have a hard time defending a vote for this bill. Spyware opens up your computer—yes, the computer you used to prepare your tax return, the computer you use when you send your credit card information to online merchants—to anyone, without notice, without consent. Republicans, the perennial defenders of states’ rights, are doubly hypocritical, since they take away the right of states to give stronger protection to their citizens.

This is a contemptible giveaway to corporations, entirely at your expense. Embarrass your Representative about it.

The MPAA and RIAA just won’t quit in their effort to get your computer to serve their interests. Congress is being pushed to make the Broadcast Flag law, and they’ve got 20 members of the House to back them up.

The Broadcast Flag is an example of how big corporations work. They all talk the free-market talk, but when they can’t get what they want from the “free” market, then they go for government intervention every time. In the case of movie and record companies, they got a completely one-sided rewrite of copyright law, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that allows them to take down anyone’s web site with no due process. The resulting abuses were entirely predictable: if someone criticizes the corporation, just trump up an allegation of copyright infringement and the critics disappear.

Similarly, the Broadcast Flag would make it mandatory for your computer hardware to copy-protect anything you record off television or radio. You’d never buy crippled hardware of your own free will, of course—which is how “free” markets are supposed to work—so they want to make it illegal for you to buy hardware that is not crippled.

Let them know that nobody but a few rich corporations want this bill.

Another capitalist criminal has been found out, and is presently a fugitive from the law. Massachusetts businessman Jay Echouafni paid for distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) against his competitors. The attacks took down his competitors’ web sites and caused millions of dollars in losses.

Public commons or corporate tollway? Nigel McFarlane writes that the new browser war is Microsoft versus the Web.

Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web. The new browser war may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their polished eye-candy interfaces, but it’s really about Microsoft versus the W3C. Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s blocking tactic: never to be properly web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun, and Longhorn technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it.

The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities. Part of the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the services with any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites, news, online retailers, and so on. When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites. Over there will be the future Longhorn-based proprietary global infrastructurea global version of the early Novell NetWare, a sort of stock market/CNN fusion for content delivery. For Microsoft, the best possible outcome is for the standards-based web to be reduced to the profitless: a few idealistic hippies, some idle perverts, and the disaffected. Few others will want to go there; so every day there will be fewer traditional websites, every day less relevance.