Friday, December 10, 1999

12/10/99 12:18:51 PM

• Is eToys paying in market cap for bullying etoy? By now you know that online toy retailer eToys, an Idealab company, has taken a group of European artists to court and stripped them of the domain name etoy.com, which the artists' collective owned years before eToys even existed. Here's the first press account of the fiasco. This in-depth report by "Claire Barliant" was published in the Village Voice on 1 December. (A nearly identical story by "Claire Adamsick" appeared the same day in the TwinCities City Pages.) See here for a seemingly complete and up-to-date list of media coverage on eToys/etoy. (Thanks to TBTF Irregular Ted Byfield, whose research provided these links.)

  This David-and-Goliath story may have found a resonance among that part of the public that invests in Internet stocks. Here is a comparison over the last three months of eToys' (NASD: ETYS) stock performance compared to an index of Internet stocks. Until very recent days the price behavior of eToys visibly followed the same trends as the rest of the Net stocks. Until 2 December. See this close-up of the last 10 days.

  The conjecture that eToys' impolitesse may have impacted their stock price started a lively debate on the TBTF Irregulars private mailing list and drew concentrated scorn from Declan McCullagh on his politech list. I've archived some of these comments on this Take It Offline forum and invite your thoughts on the matter. Simply visit the link above and weigh in.

Wednesday, December 08, 1999

12/8/99 5:33:29 PM

• Software patents See also 1999-08-30, 06-14, 02-15, 01-26, 01-13, 1998-12-15, 08-31, 05-18, 05-11, 04-27, 03-09, more...

  Patent issued for psychographic profiling of users. TBTF Irregular Gary Stock sends word of a development that nicely blends two longtime TBTF concerns: worrisome patents and vanishing consumer privacy. The online marketer Be Free has been awarded a second business-method patent. US Patent No. 5,991,735, titled Computer Program Apparatus for Determining Behavioral Profiles of a Computer User. According to the company it covers any method for the "passive creation of viewer profiles." So watch out, all you spammers foisting email cookies on the innocent and unwashed.

  Funny, if you search the IBM database for patents issued in the name of Be Free's co-founder, Tom Gerace, you find the company's patents mixed in with 5 others involving the processing of paint sludge. Do you suppose this coincidence is meaningful?

Monday, December 06, 1999

12/6/99 3:24:25 PM

• Credible claim of a GSM attack -- 100M cell-phone users' privacy at risk. Adi Shamir (the "S" in RSA) and a colleague have developed a method of decoding GSM cell-phone traffic, protected by the A5/1 encryption algorithm, in real-time on a PC. Nearly 100 million European cell-phone users rely on GSM A5/1 for their privacy, and about 130M more worldwide use a weaker version, A5/2. Here is the Shamir/Biryukov paper in Postscript form (292K) and in HTML (text 44K, six images 163K).

  A poster to the Cryptography list speculated whether the A5/1 algorithm has weaknesses built into it by design:

  Other than better funding, the NSA has the advantage over us "outsiders" in that the NSA or their European counterparts designed A5/1 and A5/2. They didn't have to find a compromise. They had the luxury of being able to engineer it in. Our 5 clock cycles attack against A5/2 only works because several properties of the cipher come together just right. Chance? Many doubt it. We can only wait and see if similar "fortunate coincidences" play a role in the new attack against A5/1.

  This story was picked up by the NY Times and Wired on Tuesday, and I wrote about it that day for the Industry Standard's Media Grok here.

12/6/99 9:53:49 AM

• What is "in plain sight?" In the US, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (against unreasonable searches and seizures) restricts police executing a search warrant in a person's home to looking for evidence of a particular, narrowly defined crime. They can't go trolling for evidence of unrelated offences; they can't even seize and attempt to use such evidence unless it is discovered in plain sight.

  So when law enforcement officials seize a computer under a search warrent, what does in plain sight mean with regard to a hard disk? This Washington Post article airs some recent cases in which the courts have grappled with this issue. As in many other questions of cyberspace law, according to law professor A. Michael Froomkin,

  Our traditional Fourth Amendment thinking doesn't map well into high-tech information gathering.

Sunday, December 05, 1999

12/5/99 2:39:48 PM

• Fast. Free. False. This is the tagline for the new FNwire service, which looks to be setting up camp on The Onion's territory. This Future News wire brings you business and technology news that might happen, but probably won't. Headlining the first issue is Death's filing for an IPO, complete with SEC form S-1 Seems somewhat derivitive of The Onion's earlier piece on the IPO of Anabaena, "a photosynthesizing, nitrogen-fixing algae with 1999 revenues estimated at $0 billion."