Charles Curley's Weblog

"Patent trolls" were bad enough. Now there are "copyright trolls," and one in particular is suing anyone who has quoted content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (LVRJ).

So says "Brad" at Wendy McElroy.com in the first of two articles. Apparently, seen how well patent trolls like SCO have done, companies are buying up the content of web sites and suing people who quote them.

Now you would think (if you aren't a lawyer) that quoting the articles in controversy would be "fair use". But fair use is an "affirmative defense", meaning it's up to the defendants to raise the issue, after they've been sued and shelled out the big bucks for attorneys and other costs. So in many cases it would be cheaper to buy a license to the material than defend a law suit. Hence the term "copyright troll".

In response "Brad" and Ms McElroy are boycotting the LVJR and other sites where the copyright is owned by copyright troll company Righthaven LLC. (No, I'm not going to link to them.) "Brad"'s second article deals with how to boycott the LVRJ and other Righthaven sites. You, gentle reader, might do the same.

One effect of their boycott is that Ms McElroy, a leading libertarian thinker and writer, is now unable to link to columns for the LVJR by Vin Suprynowicz, another leading libertarian thinker and writer. The irony being that libertarians generally uphold property rights. If you want to see some of those columns, sorry, you'll have to google for them.

Assume, for a moment, that the web site you've signed onto actually keeps to its privacy policy. So you give them sensitive data, such as a credit card number. Or, in some parts of the world, the simple fact that you're gay. So far so good.

Now, what happens when they go bankrupt? The database to which you have contributed is an asset of the bankrupt company. It will go to the creditors. And they are not bound by any privacy policy. Worse, often the original credits have sold the debt to debt collection agencies, who often have all the moral compunctions of a shark.

All the more reason to keep your sensitive data to yourself.

Call centre spivs get dose of their own medicine

A small telco has decided to turn the tables on irritating unsolicited calls by setting up a block of dummy phone numbers that play messages to trick marketers into lenghty and pointless sales pitches.

The wheeze is the work of Andrews and Arnold (AAISP), a small business provider, and was prompted by a deluge of unsolicited calls to its office lines over the past month.

The firm has reserved a block of four million VoIP lines for the prank. All are registered with the Telephone Preference Service, so any unsolicited marketing calls they get are likely to be the result of illegal use of autodialler software.

So says the Register. Not having four milion spare lines handy, my policy is a bit different. Still, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of jerks.

So far, violating a commercial terms of service is a matter of civil law. The penalties are likely to be monetary damages, and the standard of judgment is "a preponderance of the evidence". If Facebook gets their way, it will be a criminal offense, where the standard of judgment is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and the cops can come to your door with hand cuffs.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes on its blog:

In its suit against Power Ventures, Facebook claims that the tool violates criminal law because Facebook's terms of service ban users from accessing their information through "automated means."

Er, isn't using a computer "automated means"? What about using a Perl script and a cron job to update one's facebook account? How about using a front end for several social networking sites, like gwibber, found inter alia on Ubuntu 10.4 "good buddy"? Never mind that Facebook supplies a means of automating access through its API.

But that's a mere cavail. The EFF continues:

This is not an esoteric business issue, because the legal theories Facebook is pushing forward would make it a crime not to comply with terms of service.

The EEF's amicus brief in the case argues:

Amicus believes that merely providing a tool to assist an authorized user in accessing his or her own data in a novel manner cannot and should not form the basis for criminal liability. To hold otherwise, as Facebook urges this Court to do, will create a massive expansion of the scope of California criminal law, hinging liability on arbitrary and often confusing terms chosen by websites in the contracts of adhesion they present to users or in their cease and desist letters, thus giving these private parties immense power to decide when criminal liability attaches. This creates both legal uncertainty and the risk of capricious enforcement.

Exactly so.

Anyone can write a cease and desist letter. Sending one does not create any criminal liability. It is at most a threat to sue, i.e. a threat of civil action.

Facebook argues that it is criminal for Power to continue to scrape Facebook's web site because Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to Power. But it isn't Power using the "automated means" to access the user data, it is Power's end users. Has Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to Power's users? I suspect not.

Not that I need one, but this seems to me to be a sufficient reason to avoid using Facebook.

Thanks to WendyMcElroy.com for bringing this issue to my attention.

A few changes to the gnome-gps program article. The substantive changes are:

• Better handling when the GPS receiver going AWOL, say from the user unplugging it.
• More and better error messages in the progress bar.

Wednesday I mentioned Dan Gillmor's observation about Apple's "centrally controlled computing ecosystem". Of course, Apple isn't the first to do this sort of thing. Microsoft wants to know when you swap out a motherboard, which is none of their business. Amazon has shown that it can yank books from the Kindle, by — ironically — yanking copies of 1984 and Animal Farm. Techno-illiterate and chair of the Senate Homeland Security committee Joe Lieberman wants to install a "kill switch" on the Internet. Oh, and create a new bureaucracy for his committee to oversee budgets and appointments.

Now Google joins the parade. It appears Google has built the ability to yank an application into its telephone OS, Android.

But Android is based on Linux. How long before someone writes a "kill switch killer"? And if someone did, would you put it on your phone?

Mac, no; Linux yes. (Wikipedia via Salon)

There are any number of arguments one can make for Linux. Technical superiority. Security. etc. But there is a much deeper one, which Slate's Dan Gillmor articulates as follows:

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells -- and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has "made mistakes" in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The "enlightened dictator" is fiction. And dangerous.

"[A] direct repudiation of its own history…", indeed. Recall that the Apple II was an open system. The peripheral connectors were documented. The OS was well documented. Anyone could and did write software for the thing. Your correspondent ported Forth to it. Apple competed with S-100 bus computers, which were, if anything, even more open. What killed both of them off was time, technological growth, and the IBM PC, another very open product.

The first Macs were closed boxes. No expansion slots, and no choice in operating systems. The IBM PC competed rings around it, which Apple effectively admitted when they added NuBus expansion slots and later went to Intel's PCI bus.

The PC was so open that IBM lost control of the thing, and smaller, nimbler, more innovative companies out-competed IBM in a market IBM created. IBM's attempt at a command-and-control ecology, the PS2, failed so miserably that you can be forgiven for thinking that "PS2" stands for "Play Station 2".

It will be interesting to follow Mr. Gillmor's adventures. But I wonder if he will apply the lesson more broadly, from computer and software markets to whole economies.

Vuvuzela 2010 Logo.

Well, another contender for the coveted tile of "World's Most Useless Software Product". I've already describe the North Korean "Red Star" operating system as a major contender.

Comes now the Vuvuzela 2010 application for the iPhone, by maal4.nl. It puts the raucous sound of the plastic horn onto your iPhone, iPod or iPad. Just what you needed to annoy the <BLAT> out of everyone for several cubicles around.

The app cranks out about 90 decibels, compared to as much as 127 for the real thing. "But you can always hook your iPhone up to an amplifier," says co-designer Lyan van Furth, ever so helpfully.

Users grabbed only a few thousand copies before World Cup play started in South Africa. Since then, downloads have shot into the millions. And world fame has found the developers. Who may come to wish it hadn't.

Meanwhile, support for banning the vuvuzela at the World Cup is running more than nine to one.

This app is so mind-bogglingly stupid that maybe it will get iPhones banned. In which case it won't be such a useless product, will it?

I have just had an instructive exercise in disaster recovery involving Amanda.

I have been using amanda to back up, first to tape, now to virtual tape (hard drive), for years, and offsite backups for several years. However, I was running out of room on my main backup drive, a USB external drive. So I ordered three new one terabyte Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drives, one for my main backup drive, and the other two for offsite use.

I like the drives. Being 2½" drives, they are powered from the host USB port. So no external power supply. They also fit in one's pocket, which makes it easy to transport them to one's offsite location. I also like the fact that they are SATA drives with adapters for various other interfaces, in this case USB. Should I ever want a faster interface, I can get an adapter cable (assuming Seagate still offers them…).

So far, so good. Unfortunately the main backup drive started going south five days ago. I tried various tricks to get it to straighten out and fly right, but to no avail. Today I finally gave up on it. It died during this morning's backups, leaving 12 GB on the holding disk. I have an unused 30 GB partition on each of the three new drives; I couldn't even fsck that.

I put the old main drive back in service. This involved creating a symlink called /media/backs to point to the real backup drive. That done, the actual drive in service is transparent to the offsite backup script. That completes the process I had begun with the symlink /media/offsite for the two (now four) offsite drives.

I had put the new main backup drive into service only a few days ago. So I had several days worth of backups on the offsite drives that weren't on the old main backup drive. I was able to copy those from the current offsite drive, e.g.:

cd /media/backs/amanda/DailySet1
cp -rp /media/offsite/myob/amanda/DailySet1/info .
cp -rp /media/offsite/myob/amanda/DailySet1/data .
for i in $(seq 1 4) ; do echo $i ; rm slot$i/* ; done
for i in $(seq 1 4) ; do echo $i ; cp -rp /media/offsite/myob/amanda/DailySet1/slot${i}/* slot${i} ; done

That done, several checks indicate that things are OK, including running amverify and amcheck. Now for the acid test: can I run amflush successfully?

This morning's backups were to slot 5. I should have checked: the tape status file, tapelist, had slot 5 marked as used before I ran amflush. I should have marked it as unused and recycled it. So for one complete dump cycle slot 5 will have old useless data in it. No great loss.

This morning's backup failed while writing a total backup to the virtual tape. Was all of that saved and successfully copied from the holding disk to the replacement virtual tape? The amflush report indicates that all of the dumps were successfully sent to tape, and amrecover was able to pull the complete dump. So, yes, amanda is robust enough to have its storage medium go south in the middle of a long backup and recover successfully.

If the holding area had also been on the backup disk, I would have lost this morning's backups entirely. In this case, that would be no great loss. I could have run amrmtape on the "tape" holding the failed backup, and amanda would have recovered. But this preserves a day's backups, adding to amanda's robustness.

Conclusions:

• Be prepared.
• This is another reason (aside from performance and drive longevity) to have your holding disk and virtual tapes on different drives.
• Use symlinks for replaceable components.
• Virtual tapes allow you to use standard tools like ls and du on your data.
• amanda is robust enough to have its storage medium go south in the middle of a long backup and recover successfully.
• Back up your backups. (Paranoids live longer.)
• Do your backups assiduously.
• Offsite backups aren't just for disaster recovery.

Requiescat in pace, Martin Gardner.