Damned DDoS...

Tried for a while to log onto LJ last night, but gave it up as a bad deal. The LJ status site says it's because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. I'm sitting here, looking at my DSL modem, and am satisfied (more or less) that my location is not contributing... I think (an intermittent burst of activity, with 4-5 seconds between bursts, but that could just as likely be be incoming traffic, looking for a way in).

Went over to Aziz's place yesterday afternoon and found it occupied. Very strange. The people there - from Poland - seemed to know all about what happened, and had packed all of Aziz's things, which Drew and I proceeded to load into Aziz's car.

Drew mentioned some murky rumor going around that we were "in cahoots" with Aziz and his roommate. I'd like to sit down and have a civil conversation with the brain-dead, scrofulous animal that goes around saying such things.

Scroom

* * *I got my 7 pages of translation in yesterday, including one page that was... unpleasant, owing to a lot of construction-specific terminology. In any event, at such a rate (7 pages per day), I shall have the job done on time.

Gotta go.

Cheers...

Feeling more focused...

As evidenced by the fact that I have fulfilled my self-assigned quota of pages, plus one page.

So far.... :^)

That's the good news. Upon reviewing my self-assigned quota, I find that I really have to do 9 pages a day (instead of 7), to allow for review time on the due date.

So, actually, I am a page behind... but I'm still happy. I can probably do another 5 pages, but I won't.

(Gee, isn't this drivel interesting?)

* * *Every once in a while, the kids drive out to California to visit Shannon's folks.

I wouldn't mention it if they hadn't left about an hour and a half ago. Godspeed.

(Of course, that means I'll have to be at the store a bit more tomorrow and Saturday, especially since Jody is starting to tickle my "unreliable" button.)

Cheers...

UPDATE: As of 9:15 pm, I've exceeded my quota and translated 12 pages. A preliminary gander at tomorrow's material shows that it may repeat a lot of today's stuff, but I'll wait until tomorrow to see for sure.

Who needs a court order?

According to a report in Ha'aretz, the online auction house eBay has "recorded and documented every iota of data that has come through the web site since it first went online in 1995. Every time someone makes a bid, sells and item, writes about someone else, even when the company cancels a sale for whatever reason - it documents all of the pertinent information."

That sounds like a pretty tall order, but it's what an eBay representative named Sullivan said at a cybercrime conference recently. Now, taken by itself, the fact that eBay keeps a record of everything you do may not seem like much. But the fact that it willingly will provide this information to law enforcement is somewhat unsettling.

Continues the article:

"We don't make you show a subpoena, except in exceptional cases," Sullivan told his listeners. "When someone uses our site and clicks on the `I Agree' button, it is as if he agrees to let us submit all of his data to the legal authorities. Which means that if you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details - all without having to produce a court order. We want law enforcement people to spend time on our site," he adds. He says he receives about 200 such requests a month, most of them unofficial requests in the form of an email or fax.

The meaning is clear. One fax to eBay from a lawman - police investigator, NSA, FBI or CIA employee, National Park ranger - and eBay sends back the user's full name, email address, home address, mailing address, home telephone number, name of company where seller is employed and user nickname. What's more, eBay will send the history of items he has browsed, feedbacks received, bids he has made, prices he has paid, and even messages sent in the site's various discussion groups. 

And with its recent acquisition of PayPal, eBay can now merge information about the goods trail with the money trail," according to attorney Nimrod Kozlovski, author of "The Computer and the Legal Process." Continues Kozlovski: 

Thus, in spite of the protective mechanisms of the law against disclosure of details on transactions, eBay is in a position to analyze the full set of data and 'advise' investigators when it might be 'worthwhile' for them to ask for a subpoena to disclose the details of a financial transaction. Essentially, this bypasses the rules on non-disclosure of details of financial transactions and the confidentiality of the banker-client relationship.

I've been registered with eBay since 1998 and although I have absolutely nothing to hide regarding anything I've done there, I find this "privacy" policy disturbing. It seems tailor-made for fishing expeditions.

After all is said and done, this story about eBay's "flexible" privacy policy (as well as other stories about misdirected e-mails, etc.) allows us to formulate the following general rule:

Don't do anything on your computer you wouldn't want your significant other, parents, friends, minister, boss, coworkers, neighbors, police, or government to know about.

That ought to about cover it, don't you think?

* * *

At the other edge of the spectrum, Slashdot reports that a bookstore owner in Vermont will gladly purge purchase records at a customer's request. Notes the linked article:

"When the CIA comes and asks what you've read because they're suspicious of you, we can't tell them because we don't have it," store co-owner Michael Katzenberg said. "That's just a basic right, to be able to read what you want without fear that somebody is looking over your shoulder to see what you're reading."

The Patriot Act approved after the 2001 terrorist attacks allows government agents to seek court orders to seize records "for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

Such court orders cannot be challenged like a traditional subpoena. In fact, bookstores and libraries are barred from telling anyone if they get one.

The provisions of the Patriot Act may sound good in the context of the war on terror, but the state's natural tendency to aggrandize power (by, for example, expanding the scope of what falls under "terror" investigations) and its ability (and desire) to keep track of what you're reading reminds me strongly of the time I applied for a library card in the then Soviet Union (I had an extended work assignment there, for a U.S. company).

Digression: Don't think that creative minds in government won't expand the scope of what falls under "terror" investigations. We've already seen the drug problem linked to terrorism, so it's not a far reach to assume that soon, the provisions of the Patriot Act (and siblings) will be used to pursue the "war on drugs." I think a "reasonable" case can also be made for including many other government efforts (e.g., the fight against illegal immigration) under the umbrella of the "war on terror."

It's going to be an interesting millennium.

Cheers...