On Friday, May 3, 2002, at 07:58 AM, Steve Schear wrote: > [An example of why intelligent appliances in the home, not based on > open source may be dangerous. Spyware Inside (sm) ] > > Court orders video spying > SONICBLUE TO SURVEY CUSTOMER RECORDERS > By Dawn C. Chmielewski > Mercury News > > A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on > thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every show they > record, every commercial they skip and every program they send > electronically to a friend. > > http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/3189274.htm >
Good catch. This has several implications and connections (to our kinds of issues): 1.The "no links to actual user names" is as solid as the "no links to Japanese-ancestry" Census results from 1940. Expect data mining to occur, expect damage lawsuits to name actual user names. 2. This shows that if a technical capability exists, in this case things like key clicks, channel changes, programs watched, programs recorded, etc., then some bunch of judges and bureaucrats and corporate shills WILL seek to use that information. The corporate shills may be mostly interested in targetting users with certain data-mine characteristics for advertising and special offers, but the cops and narcs will of course be interested in compiling dossiers for control purposes. (There's a connection with the themes we just discussed about data mining and subobject classifiers, but I won't get into this now.) 3. As always, never trust the laws of man. Thinking the bureaucrats, cops, narcs, and corporate shills will protect privacy is silly. (BTW, expect our European members to natter on about how Data Privacy Laws and Ombudsmen and all that statist rot will prevent occurrences like this TiVO/Replay/UltimateTV situation...until President LePen uses France's Minitel or Son of Minitel to deduce where the Jews and Muslims are living and which sites they are visiting...and so it goes.) 4. Publicity of this SonicBlue court case may scare the sheeple in interesting ways. 5. This may cause inventors and hackers to devise ways to spoof the SonicBlue boxes...or accelerate outright piracy. Which would you rather have, a Big Brother-enabled SonicBlue box or a pirate box with no links to Sonic Blue and the court-ordered spying? (As a wild but slim possibility, a clever shyster might even defend his piracy-accused client with a "necessity" defense.) 6. All in all, just another brick in the wall. We don't need no thoughts control. --Tim May "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." --John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General
