Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers.

. . .

The Compliance Guide reveals, for example, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash file.

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

. . .

The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.

via Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Creating new out of old...

EPMD Sample Map

Wolfram Research is claiming that each page of results returned by the Wolfram Alpha engine is a unique, copyrightable work, like a report or term paper. That makes Wolfram Alpha different not just from classic search engines, but from most software. While software companies routinely retain sole ownership of their software and license it to users, Wolfram Research has taken the additional step of claiming ownership of the output of the software itself. It’s a bold assertion, and one that could have significant ramifications for the software industry as a whole.

What a terrible, horrible, awful idea. Copyright protection exists, in large part, to provide an incentive for people to produce creative work. Were there no copyright, the argument goes, then people wouldn’t pursue artistic endeavors. Others would copy and cash in, making the time/energy/skill investment a waste. Granting and enforcing copyright protection, then, can be seen as society recognizing the value of such work and forcing a period of exclusive use to reward effort with an opportunity to profit.

Protecting automated results as creative output absolutely defeats the incentive mechanism, for then not only is the underlying software protected, but so too is that software’s output… even if all that software is doing is filtering and/or re-ordering and presenting others’ content.

Start allowing this sort of protection and an infinite loop is quickly created. Great for Wolfram|Alpha, terrible for everyone else.

Keep warm using intestines and The Force.

As has become tradition, Internet-based companies and web celebrities (webbrities?) answered Halloween's treat with April Fools tricks. Some favorites from 2009...

Think Geek

Online retailer Think Geek has developed a reputation over the last few years as one of the best pranksters in the Tubes. Each year, they list a number of fake products, complete with full descriptions and photos. Response to their pixellated tie was so great that they actually created and sold that item. I'm still waiting for their "auto-donation to your enemy" alarm clock -- talk about a sure way to force your booty outta bed!

And 2009 is no different. The gem of the crop this year? The Tauntaun Sleeping Bag!

This high-quality sleeping bag looks just like a Tauntaun, complete with saddle, internal intestines and glowing lightsaber zipper pull. Now when your kids tell you their favorite Star Wars movie is "Attack of the Clones" you can nestle the wee-ones snug in simulated Tauntaun fur while regaling them with the amazing tale of "Empire Strikes Back".

Use the glowing lightsaber zipper pull on the Tauntaun sleeping bag to illustrate how Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker from certain death in the freezing climate of Hoth by slitting open the belly of a dead Tauntaun and placing Luke inside the stinking (but warm) carcass. If your kids don't change their tune on which Star Wars film is the greatest ever, you can do your best Jar Jar impression until they repent.

EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sent out an Onion-esque, sarcasm-laden version of their newsletter, including these gems:

AP Sues Artist for Being Unable to Draw From Memory

The AP has brought a suit against the artist Shepard Fairey for calling himself a political artist while being unable to draw a realistic likeness of public figures from memory.

Fairey had previously sued AP to establish his fair use rights to an AP news photograph he used as the basis for his iconic "Hope" poster of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. AP has now filed counter-suit, claiming Fairey has no right to produce posters in support of politicians that he cannot draw without reference.

"Mr Fairey claims he is an artist with the right to comment on public issues such as the presidential election," said AP attorney Skip Stones. "But Mr. Fairey apparently requires a photo to work from in order to create a lifelike image of a public figure such as Mr. Obama. Clearly, he has no business engaging in graphic political commentary of any kind." . . .

Click here for more on Shepard Fairey and the AP.

The EFF also announced a new "look" for their newsletter:

As part of our policy to keep on the "frontier" of exciting new Internet developments, starting next week we'll be sending a special "effktr" edition to all subscribers from whose personal information we can derive their Twitter
accounts and/or cellphone numbers. Effktr has all the news and analysis you expect from EFFector, but with most of the vowels taken out and the remaining text compressed to 140 characters or less. To give you an idea of what to expect, here's what our "beta" effktr readers received last week:

OMG EFF GREP FBI, TSA, NSL! NIX TOR JAIL +! NIX CELL LOG GANK! CNET AX SGHN! AXL N /- WTF? WRNR DMCA KIDS LOL! NO MIL CYBER! ATT GET ACTA!

Our new service is opt-out: if you'd like to not receive our new format, please email "tl;dr" to april1@eff.org by the end of today.

Google

Google loves to take part in April Fools fun, however their attempts have always been hit or miss, often winding up more corny than funny. This year, for example, they announced CADIE, an artificial intelligence. Overall? Corny. But thanks to their typical thorough development of the idea, a couple of the sub-parts of the CADIE idea are winners.

First, CADIE's blog is just... genius. Second, CADIE allows for Gmail Autopilot:

The easiest email could possibly be.

As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.

Slick Deals

Full Auto machine guns on sale

• Buy these guns now before Obama bans them again!!!
• Got a saw for the kids.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

. . .

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

Fox to fans: "I'll eat your babies, bitch!"

After a brilliant musical finale to Season 3, Fox, in their infinite wisdom, has said screw you to the die hard fans who have supported Always Sunny and have ordered all three seasons removed from Hulu.

This is a show that got it's start when  its stars/creators filmed a pilot with their home camera (for the cost of the videotapes) and got them to the head of fledgling cable network FX, who took a chance on the young comedic-genuses.

Hulu originally took the videos down asap and without warning to users. Below is their apology. Still, however, they say nothing about why Fox removed the show.

Can't Fox just say "we want to force fans to overpay for dvds" and be done with it? I'd even be fine with this policy if I thought The Gang was getting a big slice of the pie (as Frank would say) ... but I'm pretty sure that any extra coin is headed straight to the pockets of Fox execs. Bastards.

Hulu's apology:

Customer trust is hard won, easily lost.

On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.'' We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu's opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we've added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well.

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia'' were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ''Sunny'' episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I'd like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case - FX Networks - was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009.

Via Hulu - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

[Update: Saw a commercial during the Battlestar Galactica "season" premiere tonight -- Always Sunny has been moved to FanCast, where recent episodes will be available. Sadly, FanCast currently does not recognize Google's Chrome browser and gives an "out of date browser" error.]

Under current law, [Network Operators] can block certain files or Web sites for their subscribers, or slow or obstruct certain applications. And they do, albeit pretty rarely. Network providers have censored anti-Bush comments from an online Pearl Jam concert, refused to allow a text-messaging program from the pro-choice group Naral (saying it was “unsavory”), blocked access to the Internet phone service (and direct competitor) Vonage and selectively throttled online traffic that was using the BitTorrent protocol.

And what is likely to happen without government regulation? What if the operators are free to do what they want to "optimize traffic" over their network? 

[Network Operators] won’t be blocking anything per se — we’ll never know what we’re not getting — they’ll just be leapfrogging today’s technology with a new, higher-bandwidth network where they get to be the gatekeepers and toll collectors. The superlative new video on offer will be available from (surprise, surprise) them, or companies who’ve paid them for the privilege of access to their customers. If this model sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s how cable TV operates.

We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it.

For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I remember the first time I used Google. I'd been a Yahoo! search user, but always felt that limited and frustrated when I attempted to search for something. At my dot-com job one day I became frustrated when unable to find an answer to a simple coding question. My co-worker, a skilled programmer by day and drummer by night, saw what I was doing and said "Worst!" - his catch phrase. "Man, why are you using Yahoo? Try Google. I just heard about it for a buddy, and I ain't goin' back."

I entered w-w-w-.-g-o-o-g-l-e-.-c-o-m into my fancy, new, IE-whoopin' Netscape browser. The logo, a search box, and a plain white background appeared on my screen. I typed in the same search I'd tried earlier. Google returned a plain, clean list of results. I clicked on the first one and had my answer. Game over.

Sure, people have concerns about the data they collect from users, but so long as they stick with their Mission, we'll all be alright. And Google will continue to improve. My birthday was yesterday. C's birthday is Sunday. Good to know that we're bookends to the endless repository of information named Google. Happy Birthday!

One of her most important tasks is to head up reviews of copyright law to ensure that it continues to operate fairly in the face of ever-changing technology. She is also required by law to oversee periodic reviews of anti-circumvention rules, most notably the DMCA, to decide whether it's necessary to specify narrow exemptions.

Regarding the DMCA, Ms. Peters is not a fan of the Safe Harbor found in Section 512. This section requires that copyright holders (Viacom, for example) notify hosts of content on the Internet (YouTube, to name one) before the host must take down copyrighted content that has been posted by users. Only if the host fails to respond to these requests can the host be liable for participating in copyright infringement.

The Safe Harbor is a cornerstone of Google's argument in fighting high-profile copyright lawsuits, including one brought by Viacom, against its YouTube subsidiary.

While an expert in the arena of copyright law, Ms. Peters is a technology novice. She does not own a computer for personal use, and considers herself a Luddite.

Of the DMCA, she says:

Shouldn't you have to filter? Shouldn't you have to take reasonable steps to make sure illegal stuff that went up comes down? . . . I think there are some issues.