Left to chance

stavros-59 writes “Australia’s internet censorship watchdog, ACMA, uses an internet classification system originally intended for children’s PC filters. ACMA has now made what must be the most amazing recent decisions of the whole bizarre censorship debate. The Register today has a story about ACMA’s decision to force Apple to withdraw their ITMS gift feature from Australia on the basis that MA+ (over 15 and maybe sex) rated movies could not be given to children using the gift cards. The films are also banned on the internet but not at local video/DVD stores as detailed in this Whirlpool Forum post. At the same time, the photographic work of Robert Mapplethorpe (not for the fainthearted) has been classified as PG (Parental Guidance) by the Classification Board — which is not part of ACMA, but an agency under the Attorney General’s Department.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How should city transit authorities treat independent software developers who make use of public schedule data? What approach results in the best experience for their passengers and customers?

Two models appear to be emerging to answer this question. One, typified by New York City’s MTA and Washington, DC’s WMATA, sees schedule and related data as valuable intellectual property, to be zealously protected, licensed and monetized. So far, the results of this approach appear to have been bad press, irate passengers, wasted money and stymied innovation.

The other model, typified by San Francisco’s SFMTA and Portland’s TriMet, holds that encouraging independent developers to make free use of schedule information can both save the city money and foster innovative applications. As SFMTA’s Timothy Moore told Streetsblog: “We’ve put (SFMTA) in front of customers in so many places that we wouldn’t be able to do on our own. We basically can’t envision every beneficial use for this public data and frankly transit agencies in general don’t have the vision. We don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources.”

In 2009, we’ve seen interesting developments in each of these four cities:

In New York City, developer Chris Schoenfeld created StationStops, an iPhone app that provided schedule information for Metro North, NYC’s largest commuter rail system. The app ran smoothly until earlier this summer, when NYMTA contacted Schoenfeld to claim ownership of the schedule data and demand $5,000 in advance “royalties” on Schoenfeld’s revenue.

Schoenfeld wisely recognized this as nonsense: Copyright law simply does not apply to publicly-available factual information. But when he declined to pay the licensing fees, NYMTA sent a takedown notice to Apple, demanding that StationStops be banned from the iPhone. Apple, of course, complied.

NYMTA’s extortionate actions censored a helpful and perfectly legal use of their data. The results have been bad for their reputation and bad for their passengers. Connecticut’s Stamford Advocate put it well: the MTA “should just leave (Schoenfeld) alone and let him make an honest buck by providing a useful service.”

In Washington, DC, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) seems to be working hard to learn exactly the wrong lessons from NYC’s example. After an online petition drive by DC transit activists, WMATA reluctantly opened their data to developers earlier this year. But they also allocated $500,000 (yes, that’s five hundred thousand dollars,) for a study which they say “will give us a firm idea as to the commercial value of intellectual property like scheduling information.”

We’ll save them the trouble: While it’s possible they may be able to wrench some value from their trademarks (even though this tactic, too, has backfired embarassingly for NYMTA,) there is no economic value in their schedule information. Any attempt to restrict others’ use of this data is baseless and counterproductive. They’ve already opened their schedule data — if they’re smart, they’ll keep it that way.

Here in San Francisco, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) has made great strides towards a first-rate open transit data system, and is setting an example that other transit authorities should aspire to. Schedule data has long been available from the SFMTA in the excellent Google Transit Feed Specification format. And websites like SFMTA Labs and the BART Developer Center encourage and help developers to make use of the data.

However, this silver cloud does have a dark lining: While SFMTA itself has refrained from sending baseless takedown notices, a corporation called NextBus Information Services (NBIS) hasn’t been so wise. In 2008, developer Steven Peterson created an iPhone application called Routesy, which provides passengers with real-time updates of bus and train locations and arrival times. Then, last month, NBIS contacted Peterson, claimed ownership of the real-time arrival data, and demanded that Routesy be discontinued. When Peterson refused, NBIS asked Apple to ban Routesy from the iTunes App Store. Apple, of course, complied.

NBIS, like the NYC MTA, appears guilty of copyfraud. They’ve been unable to produce any proof that they do, in fact, own the data in question. SFMTA, to their credit, quickly clarified the situation, telling SFAppeal.com that “Muni owns the data in question and that the public is, of course, entitled to access it.” Thanks in part to that statement, Peterson’s lawyer was finally able to persuade Apple to restore Routesy to the iTunes App Store. (Though similar skirmishes with NBIS appear to be occuring in other cities.)

Finally, in Portland, Oregon, TriMet was one of the earliest transit authorities in the US to adopt an open data program and encourage independent developers. The result is a healthy and competitive application market that speaks for itself: Over 25 different mobile applications from different developers make creative use of the data. And, the open data program enabled Portland Airport to display real-time train arrival information at their baggage claims — with no additional work required on TriMet’s part. TriMet’s Bibiana McHugh explains: “Before, we would have needed to work with a technical team for the airport to make this happen, but with developer.trimet.org, we just make the information available once and our work is done.”

If other government data-sets are any indication, the transit apps we’ve seen so far are just the beginning of what’s possible. Just take a look at the impressive winners of Sunlight Foundation’s Apps For America contest.

For reasons both legal and practical, transit authorities should follow the lead of SFMTA, TriMet and the Obama Administration’s Data.gov, and allow independent developers to freely use their data. The results so far have been a better deal for passengers and taxpayers alike.

Original article at EFF.org

I found this pretty interesting, to find out names of sources that a journalist talked to about the government’s secret wiretapping of Americans without court orders, federal investigators are using phone records. So they look to the phone companies for names to find out who talked to the Times about the investigation into how the Feds used the phone companies to spy on its citizens.

In the leak investigation, Justice Department officials are using phone records in an Arlington, Va. federal grand jury proceeding to ferret out James Risen’s sources, according to the New York Times. One presumes the government is using subpoenas or National Security Letters to get Risen or his suspected sources’ phone records, then hauling former government officials in front of the grand jury. But given that this Administration operates on the belief that the Fourth Amendment does not apply during wartime, that the Justice Department is not pursuing criminal charges against officials involved in wiretapping Americans without court approval and that the Administration claims to have King-like powers in the Time of Terror, the presumption that legal process was involved might be quaint.

And so explains my reluctance to even look at an iPhone, considering buying one could lock you in a contract with AT&T until 2010! To learn what that gets you, check the ongoing AT&T coverage at eff.org.

Hushmail was always known as a secure, private webmail company that markets itself by saying that “…not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer.” But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies that are able to convince a Canadian court to serve a court order on the company.” So while the stored email is protected by the user’s passphrase, if this passphrase is authorized serverside by the user logging in via SSL the user is not using the more secure method with the Java Applet that they provide to have the passphrase encrypted (and I suspect hashed) before it’s sent over the wire. The advantage of the later approach is that the server never has the chance to see the ‘real’ password, but the user(s) gave up the ghost when they used the the SSL practice, which I suspect they never thought would lead to their downfall, especially when you look at how Hushmail markets themselves. So while not having to install that Java Applet is more convenient, it’s clearly less secure, “The rub of that option is that Hushmail has — even if only for a brief moment — a copy of your pass phrase. As they disclose in the technical comparison of the two options, this means that an attacker with access to Hushmail’s servers can get at the passphrase and thus all of the messages.” Read more…

Update: so someone started a petition on the Apple forums proposing that Apple either build iTunes for Linux, or they ‘unlock’ the locked database they introduced. Want to see the thread? Well it was here, but apparently Apple saw fit to remove it. That, along with their firmware upgrades to the iPhone that would undo (or even brick) previously modified phones, it’s pretty obvious they don’t want to have ‘open’ products. Check Digg for more coverage/commentary.

After being excited about the new iPod’s released by Apple just weeks ago, now we’re hearing that they may contain code to lock people out of their own devices. BoingBoing picks up the story, “The latest iPods have a cryptographic “checksum” in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn’t exist — like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players. Notice that this has nothing to do with piracy – this is about Apple limiting the choices available to people who buy their iPod hardware.” I know that as a Linux user I’m certainly in the minority of computer users, however Linux has been seen as a true alternative to Windows by some of Apple’s biggest competitors, Dell and HP. Additionally, it’s amazing that with the recent momentum towards opening up digital rights in their distribution of (some) DRM free songs from the iTunes store that Apple would choose to limit their customer’s choice by limiting how they can use your device. This is exactly what we’re concerned about when we say Digital Rights. How do you have rights if something you buy has limits on how you can use it? Now some are speculating that the lack of DRM is the reason Apple wants to lock their iPods down, “It’s hard to understand why Apple would do this, but the most likely explanations are that Apple wants to be sure that competitors can’t build their own players to load up iPods — now that half of the major labels have gone DRM free, it’s conceivable that we’d get a Rhapsody or Amazon player that automatically loaded the non-DRM tracks they sold you on your iPod (again, note that this has nothing to do with preventing piracy — this is about preventing competition with the iTunes Store).”

There are reports of what is going on, as far as a technical level, “At the very start of the database, a couple of what appear to be SHA1 hashes have been inserted which appear to lock the iTunes database to one particular iPod and prevent any modification of the database file. If you try to do either of these, the hashes will not match and the iPod will report that it contains “0 songs” when the iTunesDB would otherwise be perfectly adequate.” Of course it’s pretty much assumed that some hackers will be able to get around this, but then any ‘updates’ released by Apple will fill these holes as they appear. So while this is hardly the first time a big company has tried to lock in customers, it comes somewhat unexpected from a company like Apple. I saw a sticker at Defcon that summed up all of the digital rights concern with the simple phrase, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” and that’s true on many levels. Here’s hoping that Apple will think about how their new scheme limit’s their users’ digital rights, and has an ‘update’ that returns them to the freedom they deserve. Otherwise I, and I’m sure many more, users will migrate to another audio player.