Bayosphere

Yesterday’s huge rally in tech stocks was good news for people who were seeing their investments dry up and options go under water (interesting pair of metaphors, eh?). But as the Mercury News’ Matt Marshall points out, big numbers of insider “lockups” will expire soon, and that could be a major drag on the market.

Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk, Journalism and Privacy

I’m heading out to the East Coast today for the national conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors, an annual event where reporters gather to share ideas, break bread and offer mutual support. Many of my personal heroes in this business attend the IRE conference, and I’m glad to be paticipating on a panel where several of us will discuss some of the Web’s reporting tools.

One of the ironies I constantly confront in journalism is the tension between my professional wish to be able to discover information about people and my worries that privacy is increasingly threatened — often by some of the same tools reporters use. If it comes down to a test of journalists’ wishes and people’s fundamental privacy, my colleagues and I will lose, however.

But some public officials are using the public angst over privacy to shield data that should be public — real estate transaction records, for example. If these records are kept under wraps, several things will happen. Doing comparison shopping for homes will become impossible. And you won’t know if your assessment is too high, because you won’t know what your neighbor’s house cost. That’s a relatively small example, actually, and I’m working on a column about other kinds of data that should remain public.

What do you think?

More on the Patent Problem

Dale Dougherty makes some excellent points. The issue is greater than reforming the patent system, however. It’s protecting what is most valuable about the Internet—almost in the same way the environmental movement has had to fight commercial developers.

From the “Statement of Privacy” at a major online auto dealer:

There will be times, such as when you submit an application, request a quote, enter a contest or sweepstakes, purchase a product, etc., when we will need to obtain personally identifiable information from you or about you. Such personally identifiable information may include your name, home address, e-mail address, telephone number, social security number, income, credit references, etc. The information we receive about you or from you may be used by us or shared by us with our corporate affiliates, agents, vendors and others to help process or complete a transaction; to comply with any law, regulation, audit or court order; to help improve our website or the products or services we offer; for research; to better understand our customers’ needs; to develop new offerings; and to alert you to new products and services in which you may be interested. We may also combine information you provide us with information about you that is available to us internally or from other sources.

Translation: We will do any damn thing we please with your personal information.

The Ticketmaster Monopoly Grows

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division is so preoccupied with the Microsoft case that it ignores equally nasty monopolists. Case in point is Ticketmaster, one of the worst of the batch, which is scooping up competitors (AP) with no apparent attention from the trustbusters.

The Un-PC

Reuters: Gateway picks Transmeta chip for AOL devices.
Dan Bricklin: PCs vs. appliances.

Who’s Behind the Sleazy E-mail, Fax, Site, Etc.

The Whois command is a gift to anyone who wants to find out more about the owner of a Web site, as I note in my Tuesday column.

As I say in the column, I’m a big fan of Sam Spade.org, one of the best sites for tracking spammers. Excellently done. (It’s incidentally a great example of how the Internet has become the primary computing platform. I used to have to run these tools from a command line, and hope the programs came with the OS.)

Tell me the tricks you use for this kind of thing.

David Epstein writes: A couple of years ago I started receiving unsolicited faxes that asked my opinion on some big public issues (gun control, taxes, education). As I recall, I could reply to the poll by calling and 800- number. In order to stop this I had to call another 800- number. I realized that the primary purpose of the unsolicited faxes was to link a voice number with myfax line number. Rather than give them this information, I called the number from my phone using *67 to block the caller ID information. The call was rejected. I then called from a payphone. That call was rejected. Finally, I called FROM MY FAX MACHINE. (I gave them a piece of information they already had). The call was accepted, and I have not been bothered since.

David Glynn says: www.geektools.com — The best thing about geektools is that it can link you up to ARIN, to allowyou to find out who provided the IP addresses of annoying network losers. Nothing like a few phone calls from the provider of the core of their network access to straighten out the most willful miscreant.

Tom Mulhern: I have been against spam and have fought it for years. I have had my emailaddress for a long time and knew how to not get on spammer’s lists, whichworked fine. Then someone went through the registry and now my once spamfree email address is no longer. So here are the things I have come acrossand use in fighting spam:
http://www.suespammers.org/ The name says it all.
http://spamcop.net My favorite. I have a paid account and a free one. Golook at this one.
http://www.tcpalaw.com/cites.htm About Junk Faxes. Same type of people asspammers. Scum.
http://www.junkmail.org some good information here.

Tom Geller: You might be interested in a site I run, a legal resource about spam law at <http://www.suespammers.org>. Besides listing existing laws, it gives tips on using small-claims courts, names of lawyers who’ll take antispam cases, and the like. The mailing list is a good place to trade information (and let off steam), and I offer yourname@suespammers.org POP3 mailboxes to all comers. You know, if the page at <http://www.suepmammers.org/pop3/pop3list.shtml> gets scraped and spammed, I as the server owner can sue for over $5K ($50/address)… We in California are fortunate to have one of the best laws in the country — <http://www.suespammers.org/ca/bpc_17538-45.shtml> — and I assume you’re familiar with the fight for a decent national law <http://www.suespammers.org/us>.

Rough Justice for Microsoft

Having thoroughly persuaded a federal judge that it’s an incorrigible monopolist, Microsoft is on the verge of being ordered to split up into at least two pieces. That would be a genuine threat to the company’s Next Generation Windows Services initiative, which I discussed in my Sunday column — and it would be supremely ironic.

The annual Vortex conference, held in southern California, brings together some major players in the telecommunications field. In the top picture, FCC Chairman William Kennard is chatting with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Kholsa. Below, 3Com CEO Eric Benhamou watches valley legend Philippe Kahn on one of the monitors in the hallway outside the main conference hall.

Like most conferences, some of the best stuff tends to be outside the formal sessions. You can catch up with people you don’t see regularly. For reporters this is a great help.

eBay and “Trespassers”

eBay has won a key battle (Wired News) against Bidder’s Edge, the service that gives consumers a portal into various auction sites. I hope this decision is overturned.

eBay is acting more and more like a monopolist, befitting its dominant position in the online auction market. The company is inviting scrutiny from the Justice Department and states.

Shades of Stanley Sporkin.

He comes to mind in the wake of U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s actions today in a Washington courtroom, where Jackson — who replaced Sporkin as the judge overseeing Microsoft antitrust matters — all but said he was leaning toward a much more thorough breakup of Microsoft than the one proposed by the government. Jackson asked for a revised breakup proposal (AP), and indicated he’s thinking more along the lines of a three-way breakup than splitting the company into the two pieces advocated by the government.

Now let’s go back to 1994-5, when Judge Sporkin, presented with a consent decree agreed to by the Justice Department and Microsoft, said it was too soft on the company. Sporkin was ultimately overruled by an appeals court and thrown off the case.

Acknowledged, it isn’t the same thing now. Jackson has presided over a long trial. He’s basing his rulings on a huge factual record. He clearly has the authority to impose whatever remedies he feels necessary and legal. But his preemptory refusal to give Microsoft more time to make a case against a breakup, plus his latest, hurry-up demand for a revised breakup plan, are getting too close to judicial fiat for my taste. I wonder if he’s inviting the appeals panel to overrule him, too.

I’ll have more in special column here later.

Honk if You Can’t Read This

Ponder the logic of the following e-mail message, which arrived today:

Subject: ListBot Warning

This is an automatically generated message created by the ListBotsystem.

This is a warning message to let you know that your mail is bouncing.If this email reaches you, then please disregard this message.

Thanks!

Sincerely,

The MSN ListBot Team

Our esteemed lawmakers are at it again, in the process of passing laws that severely curtail fundamental freedoms. This time they’re going after what’s left of the Fourth Amendment, with a proposal to drastically expand government powers to conduct secret searches, as I note in my Tuesday column. (They’re also targeting the First Amendment, but those provisions seem blatantly unconstitutional.)

If you care about your fundamental liberties, you need to call your member of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senators — today — to tell them not to let this happen. If your member happens to be on the House Judiciary Committee, all the better, because that committee is scheduled to bring up one of the offending bills in a meeting tomorrow.

Here’s a link to the Judiciary membership roster.

To find your own member of Congress, visit Congress.org and type in your zip code in the “Find Your Reps” area near the top of the page. You’ll see pictures of your representative and U.S. senators. Click on “info” under each picture for the phone numbers of their Capitol offices and the district offices in your state.

Online Privacy Get FTC Support

Forgive me for modest skepticism, but I doubt the Federal Trade Commission’s desire to regulate online privacy (AP) will get far this election year. It’s still a welcome break from the agency’s previous policy of hearing and seeing no evil.

Congress has an even bigger issue to address. Privacy in general is eroding at an ever-quickening rate, and offline companies such as credit bureaus and catalog marketers are at least as dangerous as the online folks — and they have a lot more data to sell. Meanwhile, phone companies are claiming the right to sell or trade your calling records.

Yes, it’s all going online, making access to individual dossiers even easier than before. But it’s vital to remember, in any look at the question of privacy, that the problems are not solely about Internet companies.

Another Online Retailer in Trouble

I’m sorry for the employees of Toysmart, the online store that was shut down (AP) by parent company Disney. I’m not sorry for the message this sends — that rationality is becoming part of the economic cyber-scene.

Microsoft is trying to force the Slashdot site to remove postings regarding Microsoft’s attempted co-opting of the Kerberos security standard.

Here’s Slashdot’s reply.

Digital Millennium Copyright Enforcement

The first of two days of hearings on the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act got under way yesterday at Stanford University. Librarians and academics got the floor the first day to explain why this law is terrible and why, even if it’s constitutional (a dubious proposition, by some accounts), some exceptions should be carved out.

Coverage:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department’s antitrust staff has raised serious objections to the proposed MCI WorldCom merger with Sprint. That’s excellent news, provided the antitrust chief, Joel Klein, follows the reported recommendations.

This merger has been a lousy idea from Day One. It would concentrate far too much power in the hands of a single company. But the Justice Department, Federal Communications Commission and other agencies have been supine in their oversight of the rampant merger mania in telecommunications. It’s no wonder that these giant companies got the idea they could create even bigger ones.

If the department formally objects to this one, it will send a vital message.

AOL: Guts of a Burglar

In the mid-1990s, America Online relied on blatantly improper accounting methods to make the company’s financial results look much better than they actually were. The strategy worked, because by the time the company was forced to be more honest it had achieved the critical mass it needed to survive.

Years later, the Securities and Exchange Comission got AOL to offer what doesn’t amount even to a slap on the wrist, as the Mercury News’ Scott Herhold notes in his Stocks.Comment column today.

Bottom line, apparently: What’s acceptable is what you can get away with.

The federal Copyright Office is holding hearings tomorrow and Friday at Stanford University on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s onerous provision banning the use of any technology that can be used to circumvent copy protections on digital materials. The intellectual-property industry is using this provision to ban “fair use” — including your fundamental right to make copies for personal use of material you’ve purchased. The circumvention section doesn’t take effect until October pending these hearings on what material, if any, should be temporarily exempted.

Just about every organization with the slightest sense of the public good, including libraries, opposes this outrageous law and is appalled by the far-reaching nature of the anti-circumvention provision. A protest will take place before the hearing. I urge you to join it if you have the time.

More on Microsoft’s Limited Memory

Our favorite monopolist has gone on a PR and legal rampage following government’s proposed breakup of the company. Microsoft’s courtroom response was the usual in-your-face stuff. Then Time magazine landed a poor-widdle-Microsoft column by Bill Gates. Now it’s Newsweek’s turn with Steve Ballmer, who whines about the unfairness of it all. Whoever wrote these pieces didn’t do much homework.

John Wharton, a longtime technology pro, notes some of the company’s more flagrant misrepresentations in this note.

The Mercury News’ quarterly venture capital survey, Money Tree, showed the usual incredible growth. Notice the proximity of the words “usual” and “incredible” — words that don’t belong together.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still think risk matters. And I wonder if the venture capital boom could turn into a venture capital bust. More in my Sunday column.

Security, Security, Security

ZDNet: Tough love for Microsoft users: How many times do users of Windows need to be kicked in the head?

Microsoft and the Past

Microsoft’s brazen twisting of history continues to amaze me.

In its objections to the government’s breakup proposals, the company recalls the AT&T breakup (New York Times) with great trepidation. But the history it cites is not exactly true, the Times points out, also noting some inaccuracies on the part of the Justice Department.

What’s amazing, though, is that no one bothers to note the key thing that is not parallel in this situation. AT&T was a regulated monopoly before it was broken up. Microsoft today is an unregulated monopoly.

Surely, therefore, Microsoft will concede that it should be regulated if it’s not broken up? Yeah, right.

See also: NTK notes that Bill Gates’ recent pleadings in Time Magazine, in which he says a breakup would cause terrible damage, are also remarkably contrary to history.

Meet Randy Linden, founder and chief technology officer at Bleem Inc., a Los Angeles company that has done some incredibly creative things technically. In the process it has become the object of Sony’s wrath — and when multinational control freak like Sony gets mad, it plays very rough.

Bleem has produced emulation software that lets you run Sony’s PlayStation games on PCs and, in a phenomenal-sounding upcoming version, on Sega’s Dreamcast machines. The PC version sparked a lawsuit by Sony. So far, Bleem has been prevailing in court against a company many times its size. May it continue to prevail.