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Is BayTSP a Cyber-Trespasser?

February 11, 2004 by

Next week in my “IT and the Law” course, we’re discussing cyber-trespass. Reading the course materials got me to wondering whether BayTSP might be a cyber-trespasser.

BayTSP is a small company that works for copyright holders, monitoring the contents of P2P networks. Among other things, they query individual computers on the P2P networks, to see what they contain. Are those queries trespasses?

The closest case is probably eBay v. Bidder’s Edge, in which a Federal judge granted a preliminary injunction that stopped Bidder’s Edge from using a web crawler to access eBay’s site. The judge found it likely that the automated accesses by Bidder’s Edge to eBay’s site were trespasses. And it wasn’t that Bidder’s Edge was hammering eBay’s site with so many requests that the site’s reliability or response time were affected – the impact of the accesses was minimal, but the judge found that that was enough to get over the legal bar.

To be precise, eBay claimed that the accesses constituted “trespass to chattels”, a legal term that is defined roughly as intentionally messing around with somebody else’s stuff in a way that causes damage. It’s a step, but not a huge one, from the Bidder’s Edge ruling to a claim that BayTSP’s activity constitutes trespass to chattels. It’s far from certain that a court would take that step; and bear in mind that the Bidder’s Edge ruling was criticized by many at the time.

BayTSP argues that what they are doing is legitimate, because P2P users are publishing the information for anybody to see, and BayTSP is only doing what any member of the public could do. That argument seems pretty strong. But Bidder’s Edge made the same argument, and it wasn’t enough to save them.

My guess is that a lawsuit against BayTSP, even if brought by a sympathetic plaintiff, would be a long shot. And I think such a lawsuit probably should fail, just as the Bidder’s Edge ruling should have gone the other way.

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"Hacking" Revisited

February 10, 2004 by

I wrote yesterday about the degradation of the term “hacking”. Today, the perfect illustration of my point turned up: a Hacker’s Hall of Fame published by The Learning Channel. It includes legitimate uber-programmers like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, along with computer criminals like Kevin Mitnick and Vladimir Levin. Putting those guys on the same list is an insult to Thompson and Ritchie.

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Journal of Algorithms Editorial Board Revolts

February 9, 2004 by

The editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms has resigned en masse, to protest what they call price-gouging by Elsevier, the company that publishes the journal. The journal’s annual subscription price had risen to $700, which is beyond the reach of many libraries, not to mention individuals.

The resigning board includes very distinguished computer scientists such as Donald Knuth. They have announced their intention to work on a new journal, Transactions on Algorithms, to be published by ACM, the leading professional society for computer scientists.

It’s surprising that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. The value of a journal comes from the quality of articles in it; and this quality derives mostly from the reputations of the editorial board members and the work they do in choosing and editing articles. If a journal’s management takes a direction that the scientists on the editorial board don’t like, there is something they can do about it!

Elsevier says they will find a new board and continue publishing the journal, but it’s hard to imagine that anybody in the field will take it seriously anymore.

Computer scientists are lucky, in that most of our best journals and conference proceedings are published by our professional societies at reasonable prices and terms. The new Transactions on Algorithms will be yet another example.

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Time to Retire "Hacking"

February 9, 2004 by

Many confidential documents are posted mistakenly on the web, allowing strangers to find them via search engines, according to a front-page article by Yuki Noguchi in today’s Washington Post. I had thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not.

The most striking aspect of the article, to me at least, is that doing web searches for such material is called “Google hacking.” This is yet another step in the slow decay of the once-useful word “hack”, whose meaning is now so vague that it is best avoided altogether.

Originally, “hacker” was a term of respect, applied only to the greatest of (law-abiding) software craftsmen. The first stage of the term’s decline began when online intruders started calling themselves “hackers,” and the press began using the term “hacking” to refer to computer intrusions. This usage tends to reinforce the (often false) impression that intrusions require great technical skill.

As a shorthand term for illegal computer intrusions, “hacking” was at least useful. But the second phase of its decline has drained away even that meaning, as “hacking” has lost its tie to illegality and has become a general-purpose label of disapproval that can be slapped onto almost any activity. Nowadays almost any lawsuit over on-line activity involves an accusation of “hacking,” and the term has become a favorite of lobbyists seeking to ban previously accepted practices. Who would oppose a ban on hacking?

Calling something “hacking” conveys nothing more than the speaker’s disapproval of it. If you’re trying to communicate clearly, it’s time to retire “hacking” from your lexicon. If you don’t like what somebody is doing, tell us why.

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Why I Love Diebold

February 6, 2004 by

One of the challenges of blogging is finding things to write about. If you want to keep a loyal audience, you have to write regularly; and sometimes it’s hard to come up with several topics a week. Happily, whenever the well is about to run dry, I can always count on Diebold to fail a test or do something ridiculous. Thanks, guys!

The Diebold travesty du jour comes from Elise Ackerman’s story in today’s San Jose Mercury-News. The story recounts Diebold’s response, in California, to the recent Raba report, which demonstrated that Diebold e-voting systems were prone to several serious security attacks.

The story quotes Diebold’s spokesman:

Diebold representative David Bear said Thursday that the integrity of next month’s election was not at risk. “I think it’s important to reflect that the Maryland Department of Legislative Services concluded based on the Raba report that the election could be held successfully without any changes to the Diebold software,” he said. “They went on to say the software accurately counts votes cast.”

Here’s the opinion of authors of the Raba report, according to the New York Times:

Authors of the [Raba] report

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