Today in my series of photos from my travels: an adver-barge sailing down the Yangtze Huang Pu river with a giant illuminated billboard on it, steaming past enormous white-elephant skyscrapers (so tall and heavy that they're actually sinking in places!), skinned with illuminated advertising. Link

Hurrah! The Telecom Immunity Bill -- which will let the phone companies off the hook for helping the NSA to illegally spy on Americans -- is dying in Congress, thanks to your calls and letters.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez, "Harry Reid just announced that given the complexity and contentiousness of immunity (which he says he backs Dodd in opposing) the bill will be taken off the floor, and not return before the holidays. Your calls, your letters, and Dodds' filibustering did their work. Now we need to keep the pressure up, and keep telecom immunity off the table forever."

Here's the thing: EFF and others are suing the telecoms for participating in the wiretapping program. These lawsuits are the best chance we have of getting the details of the program into the public, so we can finally find out what the NSA have been doing to us all these years. The reason the government wants to grant the telecoms immunity is to keep the dirty laundry in the closet -- to keep us from finding out how they've been breaking the law.

If we stop telecom immunity, we'll probably get to call the NSA and the government to account, too. If the telecoms get immunized, the government could get a walk as well. Link

See also:
Senate set to forgive telcos for spying on Americans with the NSA: TAKE ACTION NOW!
EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
William Gibson on NSA wiretapping
StopTheSpying: Tell the Dems to keep AT&T on the hook for NSA wiretapping
Time's Joe Klein gets everything wrong in column about NSA domestic spying
Congress: don't cripple the suit against the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program
NSA domestic spying: reaction from a crypto mail-list moderator
NSA's domestic data-mining ops gathered vast troves of info
NSA spies on US: calls, emails intercepted without warrants
Data mining prompted fight over NSA domestic spying program
ACLU map of NSA's domestic phone, 'net surveillance
Liveblogging court hearings: NSA's spying, AT&T's alleged complicity
AT&T built warrantless wiretap rooms for the NSA
CALL CONGRESS NOW: NSA wiretapping to be legalized THIS WEEK!
Schneier op-ed on unchecked presidential power, NSA spying
Government appeals its loss in NSA/ATT domestic spying case
Act NOW to keep NSA cases in public court

Oliver August, a freelance investigative journalist living in China, describes the incompetence and bungling of the bureaucrats who run China's storied -- and expensive -- Great Firewall of China. In the fight between Chinese people and the Firewall, the people are winning. There's even a group of active entrepreneurs who'll give you Firewall-busting lessons.

From these students I learned that censorship is not only easy to subvert, but sometimes it subverts itself. Each week, for example, Beijing's propaganda department updates a list of banned stories. Available to senior journalists at government-controlled news outlets, the list includes scandals, protests, and sackings across the country. Newspapers are not allowed to report on them, but some journalists post the lists online, telling you all you need to know.

The system is self-defeating in other ways as well: Twelve national government bodies share responsibility for the Internet, and all of them have separate political and commercial interests. In some cases, departmental budgets are financed through revenue from online businesses, so it's often in their interests to loosen restrictions. Furthermore, the Great Firewall is besieged by bureaucratic infighting and incompetence that results in exceptions and loopholes.

One day, I received an official summons from the Public Security Bureau, asking me to present myself at the national headquarters. When I turned up, I saw hundreds of bikes covered in dust, as if their riders had gone into the building and never come out.

I was met by two uniformed officers who led me to a windowless room. They came straight to the point: Had I been in touch with Wang Dan, an exiled dissident living in Boston? Yes, I said. I had exchanged emails with him — but had not yet published a story (so how did they know?). Was I aware, they continued, of the rule requiring foreign journalists to ask for official permission to interview Chinese citizens? "Yes," I said. Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. "There is a problem," I told the officers. "Wang Dan has become an American citizen." The officers were silent. "In the future," I said, "which government department should I ask for permission to email and interview him?" Confused and sheepish, they let me leave, and I found myself back by the dusty bikes. So these were the bureaucrats guarding the mighty Great Firewall? Even police departments working in the same building were not talking to each other. Otherwise they would have known that Wang Dan was in fact still carrying a Chinese passport, as I later found out.

Link

Declan McCullough is discussing a recent lawsuit where a guy brought his computer to Circuit City to have a new DVD drive installed. The technician who did the installation then wanted to test it out the software that came with it by playing a video. The tech found a video file on the hard drive and played it... only to discover that the video was child pornography. He called the police and the guy was arrested. The question before the court was whether or not the technician had a legal right to open a file on the hard drive. While the lower court said no, an appeals court has said that it was acceptable, because the guy had given access to the computer and the technician wasn't randomly searching, but was performing a test in a "commercially accepted manner." Of course, that seems a little odd too. If the job was to install a DVD player -- shouldn't the test have involved a DVD rather than a local file? However, it's hard to argue against the ruling too strongly. The guy did know what was on his computer and handed it to others, knowing they'd have access to the machine.

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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.

It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."

The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down.

Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion.

I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.

I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry?

There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.

So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks.

I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas.

Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference.

What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??

Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC Magazine has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC Magazine has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

otakuj462 sends in an important followup to this morning's story on telecom immunity legislation. "Senator Chris Dodd won a temporary victory today after his threats of a filibuster forced Democratic leadership to push back consideration of a measure that would grant immunity to telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless surveillance... [T]he threat of Dodd's filibuster... persuaded Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, to table the act until January. A compromise on the immunity will ostensibly be worked out in the interim period."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patrick has just tipped me off that IKEA impresses us with an elastic (em-based) layout. Try resizing text if you're not sure what that means. Nicely done! Now if I could just figure out where this extra hex nut goes... #

Here at Techdirt, we've been paywall skeptics for a long time, and the last year has given us a lot of examples to support that view, as company after company has dropped their paywalls. Jim Harper points us to the latest example of a failed paywall-based business model, although this one is a little sadder than the others we've covered: TechDaily, an in-depth tech news service for the inside-the-beltway crowd, has announced that it will close up shop early next year. TechDaily's paywall was a lot higher than the other paywalls we've seen fall this year: Jim Harper reports that a year's subscription could set you back more than a thousand bucks. In the late 1990s, that was worth the money to the well-compensated lobbyists who depended on it to stay abreast of the latest developments in the regulatory issues affecting their clients, but it appears that competition has intensified and TechDaily wasn't able to hold onto enough subscribers to stay in business. Jim switched to the dramatically cheaper (but still not free) Tech Law Journal long ago. And others may have concluded that they could get enough information from blogs and mainstream news sites that it wasn't worth the extra money for TechDaily's exclusive coverage. I suspect that the biggest weakness of TechDaily's business model was that it's extremely difficult to grow your subscriber base when you've got such a high paywall. Traffic growth on the web requires that you be part of the conversation, and a high paywall means that not only will ordinary readers not be able to read your stories, but a lot of bloggers (including me) won't either. Which means that even if you've got a great product (which by all accounts TechDaily did) very few people are going to find out about it, and even fewer will be willing to shell out the thousand bucks it costs to find out if it's worth the hype.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Stony Stevenson sends word of the beta availability of a software-as-a-service version of OpenOffice 2.3, brought to us by Mandriva Linux creator Gael Duval. According to Ars, this package "easily offers the most features of any online office suite," though it "lacks the collaborative or document-sharing features of competitors like Google Docs or even Microsoft's Office Live Workspace." "To create this feature-rich environment, Online OpenOffice.org requires a modern browser with JavaScript and the Sun Java Runtime Environment version 1.4+ plug-in. The setup has been tested in Firefox 1.5 and above, IE6 and 7, and even Safari, though Ubuntu users are specifically warned that they must be using the Sun Java (Sun JRE) plug-in or the current implementation of Online OpenOffice.org won't work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Saul Hansell over at the NY Times has a thought-provoking piece asking if Amazon should buy eBay. While the two have been competitors for some time, Hansell is exactly right in pointing out that Amazon has continued to innovate and adapt, while eBay has basically held steady. eBay built up a tremendous business and has basically managed to keep that going without killing it -- but has done little of note that's new or interesting in a long time. It's recent purchases have been rather hard to understand, from Skype to Stumbleupon, and so far, haven't helped eBay very much at all. Meanwhile, Amazon keeps on innovating, improving its overall shopping experience while successfully moving into offering a variety of compelling web services (made even more compelling with the recent addition of its new database offering).

The real question might be what would Amazon do with eBay if it controlled it. There's something to be said for just having access to all those eBay users -- but could Amazon then turn them (and eBay itself) into something even more compelling? Or would tinkering with eBay be more trouble than it's worth? It might also raise questions about what Amazon would do with Skype. If anything, it seems like any such move would be quite risky. Merging two large companies with unique cultures is astoundingly difficult and often causes a lot more problems than bargained for. Amazon has been trying out a lot of innovative things lately, and trying to digest a company like eBay would risk a tremendous distraction that could hurt those projects.

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Kevin Cook does a nice job of documenting his building of a 93", 45 lb., K-motor rocket, done as part of his Level 3 high-power rocketry certification.

Kevin Cook's Red and Black "Sky Attack" Level 3 Certification Project - [via] Link

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has experienced some criticism for its handling of its bid to have OOXML accepted as an ISO standard, including the use of financial incentives to affect the Swedish national vote, which resulted in Sweden reversing its pro-Microsoft position; and failing to honor a promise to relinquish control of the OOXML specification if it gained ISO status. A few days ago Groklaw published an article that raises questions about Microsoft's influence on the upcoming February vote, citing concerns with the limitation of discussions of patent issues, public accountability of the process, and even irregularities with choosing the size of the room so as to limit the delegates opposed to OOXML ISO status, as had been done in the past."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

butterwise writes to mention that astronomers have, for the first time, witnessed a super-massive black hole hitting a nearby galaxy with a "death-star-like" beam of energy. The story also has a video with simulations, pictures, and explanations. "The 'death star galaxy,' as NASA astronomers called it, could obliterate the atmospheres of planets but also trigger the birth of stars in the wake of its destructive beam. Fortunately, the cosmic violence is a safe distance from our own neck of the cosmos."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Various sports organizations seem to have taken a page from the RIAA and the MPAA over the last few years, stupidly thinking that it makes sense to try to cash in on every little segment of their events, even if it hurts the promotional value of those events, killing off fan interest in the process. We'd mentioned earlier this year how the NFL was claiming that it could control how reporters reported on NFL players and events. Soon after that, we wrote about how the organizers of the Rugby World Cup faced a boycott from reporters, after they tried to put restrictions on the reporting as well. In both cases, the sporting leagues are claiming they can do this because they own the "intellectual property" rights on the events -- which is a total bastardization of the purpose of copyright. It's never been meant to restrict how reporters could report on the events.

However, that's not stopping more sporting event organizers from salivating at the chance to control the press some more. A bunch of them have now banded together to form an organization (no, we are not kidding) to push for worldwide treaties that would recognize their intellectual property rights over game events. The group claims it needs to do this to "protect and promote the special nature of sport." Oh really? And just letting reporters, say, report on these events doesn't protect or promote the nature of sport? It seems more likely that these sports organizations are trying to put these restrictions on reporters for a variety of reasons -- from covering up negative stories to forcing reporters to act as advertisers for sponsors of the sport. Either way, it goes well beyond the purpose of any intellectual property law -- and hopefully politicians aren't blinded by "the special nature of sport" into agreeing to any kind of restrictions on reporting on those events.

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Linux.com's Tina Gasperson recently had the chance to sit down and talk with Thomas Howe, a small shop owner working to help implement open source telephony solutions. "Howe says open code is the key to highly customizable phone systems that truly meet the needs of individual companies. 'The telecom world has typically been a very closed environment. In terms of technology and deployment, they control every aspect of the experience. The idea of being open and allowing customers to have control is a radical thought.' But that is just what Howe is doing. Howe bases his custom communications solutions on Asterisk, the popular full-featured open source telephony engine that many companies are adopting as they move away from legacy phone systems in an effort to save money and gain more control over their infrastructure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wealthy LA businessman and Republican bigwig David Fleming financed a docudrama that promotes medical marijuana. His wife Jean, who uses marijuana daily to ease symptoms manuscript post-poloio syndrome, co-wrote the script and produced the film, called "Smoke Screen."

"The War on Drugs has cost the American taxpayer $1 trillion since 1972," [Fleming] said. "We're paying $69 billion a year to make a health problem into a criminal one."

That's the libertarian side of him talking - he's also a board member of the Reason Foundation. But while Fleming can go on at length about drug stats from a policy standpoint, he's also got a personal stake.

His wife, a former Miss Illinois turned actress, suffers debilitating pain from post-polio syndrome. Several months ago, she obtained a prescription for medical marijuana. At night, she takes a few drops of liquid THC or snacks on a pot brownie to ease the pain.

"Here's Jeannie, well-to-do and a pillar of society, using marijuana," Fleming said.

"And I could be thrown in prison by Bush," she interjected.

That's Bush as in President George W. - the one who named her husband as a trustee for the James Madison Foundation, a group of politicians, jurists and two private citizens that hands out scholarships for teachers. Fleming has a photo of him and the president in his office.

The couple have an unusual marriage. He hangs with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. She wears a Barack Obama T-shirt. The two disagree on many political issues, but they vehemently agree about the need for drug-policy reform.

"Look, I'm an old lady, so I can say what I want to," she said. "In the '60s, I used to go to parties where cocaine was passed around and snorted. Nothing ever went up my nose, but I smoked marijuana."

Link (Via Reason)