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The CyberSitter Diaper Change, from The Netly News
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[From this morning's Netly News. Check out the HTML version of the article at netlynews.com for links to the threatening letters, etc. --Declan] The Netly News http://netlynews.com/ December 20, 1996 The CyberSitter Diaper Change By Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) Brian Milburn is angry. The president of Solid Oak Software, makers of the CyberSitter Net-filtering software, has seen his company's product come under heavy fire this year. Its offense? Critics say that CyberSitter has reached far beyond its mandate of porn-blocking and instead has censored innocuous, even invaluable web sites. I admit I'm one of its critics. In a CyberWire Dispatch that Brock Meeks and I published in July, we revealed that the censorware bans such places as the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the online home of the National Organization for Women. Our Dispatch showed the world -- or at least our readers -- that the makers of CyberSitter have a clear political agenda. The article prompted follow-ups in CyberTimes and the National Law Journal and an editorial in the Washington Post with an exchange of letters to the editor between a NOW executive and a representative of Focus on the Family, a conservative group that markets CyberSitter. To Milburn's mind, our act of revealing the truth about his company's product was, literally, criminal. In August, he told us that he had asked the U.S. Department of Justice to launch a criminal investigation into the publication of our article. He was particularly upset with one paragraph that included a fragment of his database demonstrating that CyberSitter expressly bans info about gay society and culture. He wrote: "Your willful reverse engineering and subsequent publishing of copyrighted source code is a clear violation of US Copyright law. While we would easily prevail in a civil court in seeking damages... we will seek felony criminal prosecution under 17 USCS sect 503(a) of the Copyright Act, and are preparing documentation to submit with the criminal complaint to FBI [sic]." Milburn was upset because CyberSitter's database is scrambled to prevent kiddies from grabbing addresses of porn sites from it. It's lightweight encryption, sure, but just enough to frustrate Junior. The scrambled database also allows Solid Oak to add and delete banned sites without the user's knowledge -- something that we believe is a dangerous practice. Now, I should point out here that neither I nor Brock did the actual decrypting; we had received a copy of the descrambled filter list from a confidential source. In any event, Dispatch's attorneys replied to Milburn, saying that the article was "protected by the full force of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution" and fell squarely within the copyright act's "fair use" provisions. We never heard back from him or the FBI. But that nastygram from Milburn wasn't his last. As criticism of CyberSitter becomes more intense, he's stepped up his counterattacks, threatening legal action, blocking critics' sites, or both. Take Bennett Haselton, a college student who cobbled together a site called Peacefire in August. This fall he started an anti-CyberSitter page that listed some of the more controversial actions of the software. Milburn complained. On December 6 he wrote to Haselton's Internet provider, Media3 Technologies, and tried to persuade them to give Peacefire the boot. His e-mail said: "One of your subscribers has made it his mission in life to defame our product as he appearantly [sic] has a problem with parents wishing to filter their children's access to the internet." Another charge was that Haselton had linked to a copy of our Dispatch. Solid Oak then added Peacefire and Media3 to its list of blocked sites. To Marc Kanter, Solid Oak's marketing director, it was necessary. "The site directly has links to areas that have our source code decoded on it.... There's no reason that our users should be able to go to sites that effectually inactivate our program," he said. Milburn also accused Haselton of reverse-engineering CyberSitter to get the text of its database -- that is, of being the confidential source for the CyberWire Dispatch. "Reverse engineering had to have been done in order to get the information, and we believe Mr. Haselton was the one who did it," Milburn wrote. Note to Millburn: Haselton wasn't our source. Then there's the case of Glen Roberts. His web page giving instructions on how to disable CyberSitter is now banned -- as is his Internet service provider. That's because CyberSitter differs from its competitors CyberPatrol and SurfWatch, which can restrict access by URL; instead, CyberSitter has to block access to the entire ripco.com domain. So what's my problem, really? If people don't want to use CyberSitter or other nanny apps, they don't have to. It's voluntary. It's effective. It protects children, and it sure is better than the Communications Decency Act. I have one major objection to all of the software filters currently on the market: Consumers have no way of knowing what's being blocked. Without knowing what's on the filter list, parents can't know what Junior will or won't be seeing. When reporters who try to reveal that information are faced with potential criminal investigations, the press's ability to shed light on these companies is threatened. Such programs also give parents near-complete control over what their children can and can't read. Traditionally, kids have been able to browse the stacks of a library away from parental supervision. But when the library is online, access can be completely controlled by censorware. Pity the closeted gay son of homophobic parents, prevented by CyberSitter from accessing soc.support.youth.lesbian-gay-bi. Finally, it's a kind of intellectual bait-and-switch. The "smut blockers" grab power by playing to porn, then they wield it to advance a right-wing, conservative agenda. Family values activists would never have been able to pass a law that blocks as many sites as CyberSitter does. Besides censoring alt.censorship, it also blocks dozens of ISPs and university sites such as well.com, zoom.com, anon.penet.fi, best.com, webpower.com, ftp.std.com, cts.com, gwis2.seas.gwu.edu, hss.cmu.edu, c2.org, echonyc.com and accounting.com. Now, sadly, some libraries are using it. Solid Oak claims 900,000 registered users. ###

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Re: Ebonics
by drose＠AZStarNet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> wrote: >In order to remain compliant with the new California law requiring >increased use of "Ebonics," the new academic name for "Black English" (and >known by honkey mofos as "ghetto jive"). Apparently the coloreds have had >enough of "standard English" and its repression of their culture. To meet >the requirements of this new law, 10% of my posts from now on will be >written as best I can manage in the Ebonic language. ("Ebonics" elided) There's got to be a better way than Ebonizing manually. First there was the Canadianizer, eh, hoser? Then there was Zippy (www.metahtml.com/demos/zippy/) which is terrific for Willy/Freeh/Reno speeches. We really need an Ebonizer (TM)! BTW, Tim's not kidding about the Oakland, CA school system. Check your regular news source.

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Re: Executing Encrypted Code
by AwakenToMe＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In a message dated 96-12-20 18:51:28 EST, you write: << How about the extra hard drive space you have to purchase because you can't just keep one copy on a server anymore? >> Well... considering most apps for client server (on the client machine) arent _huge_ (memory is so damn cheap anyway) Why on earth(forgive me if I am truly missing a point here) would you put all the copies on the server?

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Yiddish humor
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

How do you call a "cypher punk" without AIDS? Gay gezund. How do you call a "cypher punk" with AIDS? Gay in drer. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Re: Van Eck articles
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Looking for: > >"Protective Measures Against Compromising Electromagnetic Radiation Emitted by >Video Display Terminals" by Professor Erhard Moller, Aachen University, 1990 >(no source citation) I have a copy of the original German version of this, I can snail mail a copy if anyone wants to translate it. It has lots of graphs and diagrams which probably won't scan very well, and it will need translation before most of the people on the list can make any use of it. I know there are English versions floating around, but I've never seen one. BTW the work was done in the early '80's, not 1990. Peter.

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nyetscape 3.x bug
by Psionic Damage 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anybody noticed that netscape 3.x has a bug that brings the last page that I was on onto the next page that I go to, do I need to delete a history file or something, or does anybody have the answer to resolving this problem. Sincerely, PsiD pSIONIC dAMAGE Zer0 Faith Inc. www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/2608 H/P/A/V/C ANTIVIRUS/COUNTERSECURITY "ONLY THE ELITE SURVIVE!"

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Re: Executing Encrypted Code
by ph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:19 PM 12/20/1996, Andrew Loewenstern wrote: >Hal Finney writes: >> The answer presumably is that the software manufacturer will >> sell software with such limits for much less than he will sell >> unlimited software. That's because software piracy is such >> a major problem, and this way he can be protected against >> piracy from this copy of his program. So people with these >> CPU's can buy their software a lot cheaper. > I believe this is a pipedream. As it stands now, virtually all of the > software that requires special hardware dongles is ridiculously expensive, > even compared to similar offerings from other companies. Why do you think this is? I don't understand why I would buy a more expensive package that required a dongle rather than a less expensive package which does not. This is mysterious. Peter Hendrickson ph(a)netcom.com

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Re: Executing Encrypted Code
by ph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:29 PM 12/20/1996, Bill Frantz wrote: >At 11:52 AM -0800 12/20/96, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >> If it's worthwhile having a backup processor around, then you just have >> to spend a little more to have backup software, too. > I thought your model was cheap processors and expensive software. I.e.,. > The cost of the software is greater than the cost of the hardware. Sounds > like more than just "a little more". There's no reason why one software package would cost more than the machine. I was assuming you didn't need your whole software library to finish the report. I would expect software prices to drop because everybody using the software would be paying for it. I would also expect more kinds of software to become available. At any rate, I just don't see this as a major problem. Does anybody know how often processors break down these days? My guess is that it is less common than getting into a car accident and much less common than all the other factors that make reports late. If companies started metering software, then this problem pretty much evaporates. >> If the old copy protection just worked, it would have been widely accepted. > Again, there is a complex infrastructure which offers the customer no > obvious benefit. The obvious benefit is that when you purchase software you don't have to pay for software development for the people who don't pay. Few people find this objectionable in principle. It is not out of the question for software vendors to sell two versions of the same software. One is the piracy-free version and the other is the copy-as-much-as-you-can version. I would expect the piracy-free version to be substantially cheaper. (Of course, it is not out of the question that piracy boosts sales by advertising the product. We haven't seen a good experiment for determining this.) > I disagree that copy protection would have been widely accepted, even had > it worked smoothly. In fact, this scheme can be characterized as a scheme > to make copy protection work. Your characterization is accurate. Ignoring the particulars of this scheme, it would certainly be neat if people could sell software without it being pirated. Peter Hendrickson ph(a)netcom.com

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Get All The Phrack Issues
by varange＠crl.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For a ton of (mis)information, read Phrack. Rather than downloading an issue at a time, get it all at: http://www.crl.com/~varange/maillists/phrack.zip 0d0a text formatted. If you have a lot of paper: unzip -c phrack > /dev/lp0 Or something like: pkunzip -c phrack > prn -- Cheers!

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Re: Code+Data separation
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>At 12:08 PM -0800 12/19/96, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >>Are there any modern processors which keep the code and data separated? > A Harvard architecture is a common feature of signal processing chips. A number of japanese DSP chips (especailly for image processing) in the early 90's used this approach. I believe some earlier models in the TI 34000 series did also. Not sure about the current crop. -- Steve

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