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Comment Spam

February 17, 2004 by

I enabled user comments on this site several months ago, and on the whole I’ve been quite happy with the results. But I’ve had an increasing problem with comment spam, comments submitted to advertise products unrelated to my original postings. Many of these spam comments seem to be trying to leech off of my good Google page-rank, by causing my pages to link to theirs.

I’m fighting back technologically, but that’s a pain in the neck and will just lead the spammers to invent workarounds. So here’s a question for my lawyer readers: Is there anything I can do legally about this? Suppose, for instance, that I made people agree to simple Terms of Use before they posted a comment, and the Terms gave me some legal recourse against anybody who posted spam. It’s my site, and it seems to me that I should have the right to impose reasonable conditions on comment posters. I don’t know how effective this would be at actually stopping the spam, but it’s interesting to consider nonetheless.

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U.S. Exports DMCA to Australia

February 16, 2004 by

Kim Weatherall notes that in the recent “Free Trade” Agreement between the U.S. and Australia, the Aussies agreed to implement a DMCA-like law, and to extend their term of copyright. Needless to say, these are both bad ideas. Kim offers a long post recounting the history of this issue in Australia.

I only wonder what the U.S. negotiators had to give up, or what other Australian concession they had to forgo, in order to cement these unfortunate provisions.

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More Journal Editors Have Declared Independence

February 15, 2004 by

In response to my previous post about the revolt by the editors of the Journal of Algorithms, Peter Suber points out that journal editors have “declared independence” before, at least twelve times. Peter’s blog, Open Access News is a great source for news about the trend toward open access to scholarly publications.

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NYT On "Hacking" Car Engines

February 13, 2004 by

In today’s New York Times, Jim Motavalli writes about people who tinker with, or replace, the software controlling their car engines. Some people do this to improve engine power or fuel efficiency, and some do it out of curiosity.

In a now-standard abuse of terminology, the article labels this as “hacking”. Worse yet is this sentence: “Perhaps inevitably, the hacker culture has also produced automotive pirates who buy legitimate chips from makers then copy the programming onto blank chips, selling the results at sharp discounts.” There you have it: tinkering is “hacking”, and “hacking” leads to copyright infringement, “perhaps inevitably”.

Sadly, the article misses a much more obvious link to the time-honored American tradition of automotive tinkering.

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Windows Source Code Leaked?

February 12, 2004 by

Neowin is reporting that the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT4 has been leaked to the Internet. I haven’t looked at the code, and I won’t, so I can’t tell you whether the report is accurate. But based on the fragmentary information available, it appears more likely than not that the leak is real. If there was a leak, what are the consequences?

First, whoever leaked the code is obviously in big trouble. And Microsoft might respond by reducing the number of people who get to see the code, a number that had been increasing lately. In fact, a leak is not too surprising given how widely Microsoft distributed the source code.

Second, the leak will do some damage to the security of Windows machines, but it’s not clear how much. There’s a longstanding debate about the security implications of open source development. Source code access makes it easier to find security bugs. With open source, you make it easier for honest outsiders to find bugs, which is good, but you also make it easier for malicious outsiders to find bugs, which is bad. This kind of leak give us the worst of both worlds: honest outsiders will avoid looking at the stolen code, while malicious outsiders use the code; so you get the security drawbacks of open source without the security benefits. This will only matter, though, if the bad guys would otherwise have trouble finding bugs, which may not be the case.

UPDATE (February 13): The Associated Press is reporting that the source code leak did occur.

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