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*HOT* Tech News And Downloads, I Would Read This Thread And Post Any Good Info
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AfterDawn Addict
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10. July 2006 @ 11:55 |
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Warner Bros movies at $2.75
p2p news / p2pnet: The fact that, thanks to the Net and p2p communications, 'consumers' are becoming customers with free choice, again, is starting to have a marked impact on outmoded corporate business models, still locked tight into the physical 1970s and '80s although the companies are now in the digital 21st century.
Outrageous Hollywood prices have been forced down in one country at least.
Warner Bros is now selling ?selected? movies for a mere $2.75 in major Chinese cities, ?aiming to carve out a market for relatively affordable but high-quality, legitimate versions of movies in a sea of counterfeit products selling for less than a dollar,? says Associated Press.
"The reason why piracy's come along is that there weren't enough products at the right price soon enough," the story has Tony Vaughan, managing director of CAV Warner Home Entertainment Co, Warner Bros' joint venture distribution company in China, in a marvel of convoluted comment.
And there's been another innovation.
?Companies that once relied on lawsuits and police raids are diversifying their strategies, turning to competitive pricing and trying out new technologies to even up seemingly overwhelming odds,? says the story.
Competitive pricing? New technologies? Wash your mouth out!
It seems the movie industry is discovering a truth its brethren over in Corporate Music Land are slowly learning, at their customers' expense, of course, namely:
You can't sue people into buying shoddily produced, formulaic, over-priced product.
?Warner is also experimenting with releases in China's provincial cities of cheaper, simply packaged DVDs that sell for under $1.85,? continues AP.
Software and media companies, meanwhile, ?are running into other hurdles as they develop new encryption and so-called digital rights management technologies meant to prevent excessive copying on personal computers,? says the story, adding:
?Sony BMG Music Entertainment faced lawsuits over flawed CD copy protection software that opened a potential security vulnerability when it was automatically installed on computers. Sony settled a number of lawsuits and offered a one-click 'uninstall' application to remove the copy protection program.?
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AfterDawn Addict
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10. July 2006 @ 11:57 |
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Sanitizing movies illegal says judge
7/10/2006 1:59:46 PM, by Eric Bangeman
If you like your major motion pictures without cusswords and nudity, you may be out of luck. A federal judge in Colorado has ruled that it is illegal for third-parites to edit and release sanitized versions of movies.
Some background: a couple of years ago, we reported on a company called CleanFlicks which had drawn the ire of the motion picture industry. Based in Utah, CleanFlicks uses a homegrown system to check DVDs for questionable material and cleanse it from the movie. One of the results was a version of Good Will Hunting with 125 f-bombs and other colorful expletives muted.
When the technology was shown to a group of directors and other Hollywood types, they were furious. They felt that CleanFlicks and other companies offering the same sort of service were at best, undermining the artistic integrity of their films. The sanitizers argued that there was a strong demand for their services and that their edits were covered under Fair Use. Soon enough, a handful of companies offering movies appeared. Predictably, lawsuits ensued.
In his ruling, US District Court Judge Richard Matsch sided with the Directors Guild of America. He has handed down a permanent injunction prohibiting CleanFlicks, CleanFilms, Family Flix USA, and others from selling or renting the "cleaned-up" movies. In addition, the companies have five days to hand over every sanitized disc and videotape in their inventories to the studios for immediate destruction.
According to the judge, it is up to the moviemakers to decide who their film was appropriate for and tailor it accordingly. "Whether these films should be edited in a manner that would make them acceptable to more of the public playing on a DVD in a home environment is more than merely a matter of marketing; it is a question of what audience the copyright owner wants to reach," he wrote in his ruling. "What is protected are the creator's rights to protect its creation in the form in which it was created."
An appeal is possible, although one of the defendants?FamilyFlix?has already shut down operations. In the meantime, those who find cursing and nudity in movies unacceptable are advised to simply not watch films that contain content they find objectionable.
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10. July 2006 @ 12:00 |
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Why the iPod isn't Creative
7/10/2006 2:16:17 PM, by Clint Ecker
According to documents filed by Creative with the United States International Trade Commission in mid-May, Steve Jobs approached a Creative employee at MacWorld 2001 to talk shop about Creative's then flagship product, the Nomad Jukebox. What begun at this innocuous meeting may well have led to the creation of a digital audio empire that could have rivaled what Apple has put together on its own. On the other hand, it may have also led to stunning failure for both parties.
In the past few months, one of Apple's biggest rivals in the digital audio player space, Creative, has begun competing with Apple using legal tactics. Looking back before the birth of the iPod, Creative had a significant lead on Apple, with almost a full year's experience in developing and selling hard-disk-based players. What is almost completely unknown, however, is that Apple was willing to work with Creative to develop an Apple-licensed player as opposed to building their own from scratch.
According to Creative's legal filings (available via PACER) with the US International Trade Commission, Apple had originally sought to license Creative's IP and create the iPod on Creative's platform. The filings reveal that Apple was unsure that this scheme was going to be profitable in the long run, and proposed the radical (for Apple) idea of partnering with Creative to create a digital audio player. Creative decided against joining forces, and the rest is history.
While one might be quick to assume that a merger between the two companies would have led to a marriage punctuated with hundred dollar bills falling from the mirrored ceiling of their honeymoon suite, it may also be that a mating of these two wildly different corporations would have been destined for failure. Apple's reckless abandon coupled with Creative's bulky hardware and stodgy corporate culture would likely have resulted in clashes of personality, among other things.
As it stands, Apple scored big when Creative turned down their proposal, freeing them up to engineer the iPod as they had envisioned it, rather than working off of one of Creative's prototyped designs?or using Creative's patented IP, as the lawsuits allege.
Creative and Apple's relations were dotted by pithy remarks and under-the-belt jabs until this lawsuit business reared its head. Apple was able to take a radically different approach to marketing, growing their market while making a lot of money. As a result, the iPod has become synonymous with the portable digital audio player market. Today, Creative and Apple stand with patent lawsuits loaded, waiting for the other to flinch first?unless they can come to a settlement themselves.
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10. July 2006 @ 18:54 |
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Lite-On to push HD-DVD and Blu-ray players in 2H
Posted by Dan Bell on 11 July 2006 - 03:55 - Source: DigiTimes
DigiTimes news service is reporting that Lite-On will make promotion of both blue laser format products, a high priority in the second half of this year. They best hurry.. it's already here. But, the good news for us is, it looks like the pressure is already on to drop those sky high prices! How do you do that? Volume!
Lite-On IT plans to work with Toshiba to launch HD-DVD players at prices less than US$1,000 in the beginning of August while aiming to ship 50,000 Blu-ray players per month before year-end, according to the Chinese-language Apple Daily.
Wow, can we really expect this many of these players to be needed so soon? We have to wonder if this isn't going to be an interesting holiday buyer season. Let's not forget though, you will still need something to watch this high def content on, so those monitor prices will have to drop as well, or most people will not need these fancy players just yet.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13661
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AfterDawn Addict
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11. July 2006 @ 05:59 |
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now will ye love Sony DRM Rootkit Virus corporation
now ye can get DRM,porn and a Rootkit Virus all at the same time from sony!!!!!!
Sony inks deal with porn firm
p2p news / p2pnet: Warner Bros recently revealed it had climbed into bed with GUBA, a company specializing in online porn searches.
Now Sony Pictures has done the same.
?You may well know that some of the best porn gets circulated on newsgroups," says Supervert. But, "You need a news reader, and often you miss some of the best posts, or you end up with just fragments of a series." And, "That's where GUBA comes in. GUBA archives all the porn from newsgroups. Rather than pay for a news account, you pay for a GUBA account and bingo! You have access to all that porn. Good deal!"
The Warner deal with Guba bore remarkable similarities to the one the MPAA made with BitTorrent and Guba said it, too, had agreed, ?to start filtering copyright and obscene content and institute tougher security measures after talks with the Motion Picture Association of America," said the Associated Press at the time.
?Sony Pictures has agreed to offer a 100 of the studio's feature-length films on Guba's online store,? says ZDNet News, also opining that of online video-sharing sites, ?Guba is the only one offering a means to legally download movies over the Internet?.
Expect Viacom, Fox, NBC Universal and Disney, the remaining four of the Big Six Hollywood studios, to soon follow suit.
Meanwhile, like Warner, Sony believes it'll be able to milk gullible online movie lovers for $20 for ?newer releases? with a $10 starting price for ?older? titles.
Will it succeed? Well, as the saying goes, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Windows Media is the designated format.
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11. July 2006 @ 06:27 |
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UFO HACKER TELLS WHAT HE FOUND
By Nigel Watson| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jun, 21, 2006
The search for proof of the existence of UFOs landed Gary McKinnon in a world of trouble.
After allegedly hacking into NASA websites -- where he says he found images of what looked like extraterrestrial spaceships -- the 40-year-old Briton faces extradition to the United States from his North London home. If convicted, McKinnon could receive a 70-year prison term and up to $2 million in fines.
Final paperwork in the case is due this week, after which the British home secretary will rule on the extradition request.
McKinnon, whose extensive search through U.S. computer networks was allegedly conducted between February 2001 and March 2002, picked a particularly poor time to expose U.S. national security failings in light of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
McKinnon tells what he found and discusses the motivation behind his online adventures in this exclusive phone interview with Wired News.
Wired News: What was your motive or inspiration for carrying out your computer hacking? Was it the War Games movie?
Gary McKinnon: This is a bit of a red herring. I have seen it but I wasn't inspired by it. My main inspiration was The Hacker's Handbook by Hugo Cornwall. The first edition that I read was too full of information.... It had to be banned, and it was reissued without the sensitive stuff in it.
WN: Without this book would you have been able to do it?
McKinnon: I would have done it anyway because I used the internet to get useful information. The book just kick-started me. Hacking for me was just a means to an end.
WN: In what way?
McKinnon: I knew that governments suppressed antigravity, UFO-related technologies, free energy or what they call zero-point energy. This should not be kept hidden from the public when pensioners can't pay their fuel bills.
WN: Did you find anything in your search for evidence of UFOs?
McKinnon: Certainly did. There is The Disclosure Project.
The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.
This is the Smoking Gun! Learn more »
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
This is a book with 400 testimonials from everyone from air traffic controllers to those responsible for launching nuclear missiles. Very credible witnesses. They talk about reverse-(engineered) technology taken from captured or destroyed alien craft.
WN: Like the Roswell incident of 1947?
McKinnon: I assume that was the first and assume there have been others. These relied-upon people have given solid evidence.
WN: What sort of evidence?
McKinnon: A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files.
My dialup 56K connection was very slow trying to download one of these picture files. As this was happening, I had remote control of their desktop, and by adjusting it to 4-bit color and low screen resolution, I was able to briefly see one of these pictures. It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side. There were no visible seams or riveting. There was no reference to the size of the object and the picture was taken presumably by a satellite looking down on it. The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created. Because I was using a Java application, I could only get a screenshot of the picture -- it did not go into my temporary internet files. At my crowning moment, someone at NASA discovered what I was doing and I was disconnected.
I also got access to Excel spreadsheets. One was titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers." It contained names and ranks of U.S. Air Force personnel who are not registered anywhere else. It also contained information about ship-to-ship transfers, but I've never seen the names of these ships noted anywhere else.
WN: Could this have been some sort of military strategy game or outline of hypothetical situations?
McKinnon: The military want to have military dominance of space. What I found could be a game -- it's hard to know for certain.
WN: Some say that you have given the UFO motivation for your hacking as a distraction from more nefarious activities.
McKinnon: I was looking before and after 9/11. If I had wanted to distract anyone, I would not have chosen ufology, as this opens me up to ridicule.
WN: Tell me about your experiences with law enforcement and the procedures you have gone through.
McKinnon: I was arrested by the British National Hi Tech Crime Unit in March 2002. They held me in custody for about six or seven hours. My own computer and ones I was fixing for other people were taken away. The other machines were eventually returned, but they kept my hard drive that was sent to the U.S. It was November 2002 when the U.S. Department of Justice started their efforts to extradite me.
WN: The British Crown Prosecution Service dropped charges against you because your activities did not involve British computers.
McKinnon: I was to be officially charged in 2003 but a warrant wasn't given until 2004.... In June or July 2005, I was scooped from the street by Scotland Yard. I was kept at Belgravia Police Station overnight. I just wore what I had on when I was out; I didn't get a chance to wear a suit in court. I was given police bail.
WN: When will they make a decision about extradition?
McKinnon: It's down to the Home Secretary, John Reid. The deadline for representations is 21 June 2006. Even after that date, it could be as much as 11 months for him to decide on my fate.
WN: How have you been coping?
McKinnon: God, it's very worrying and stressful. It's been worse because I'm unemployed. I worked on and off in IT, contracting and stuff, before this, but no one will touch me with a large barge pole now.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 11. July 2006 @ 06:27
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AfterDawn Addict
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11. July 2006 @ 06:36 |
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PRIVATE FOLDER..........Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 is a useful tool for you to protect your private data when your friends, colleagues, kids or other people share your PC or account. With this tool, you will get one password protected folder called 'My Private Folder' in your account to save your personal files. The following hardware and software are required to run Microsoft Private Folder 1.0: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Professional Edition and Media Center Edition with SP2, Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor. Please note: Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 is provided specifically for genuine Windows customers, and requires genuine Windows validation in order to download. The software is free, and does not come with product support.....(free).....GO THERE!
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/offers/Details.aspx?displaylang=...
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11. July 2006 @ 07:30 |
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Big Music hope for the future
p2p news / p2pnet: Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and Sony BMG, under federal and state investigation in the US, continue to accuse their own customers of being thieves and criminals, using spurious lawsuits to try to terrify them into kick-starting the as-yet undeveloped corporate online music market.
The labels have had zero luck with their bizarre sue 'em all marketing campaigns, but a trend offering hope for the future is emerging in Britain.
And it harks back to the past.
Once upon a time 45s, those shiny, round vinyl things with big holes in the centre - 45s - were where it was at. They were called singles.
Corporate downloads barely make a blip in the graphs compared to what's happening in the real world of online music where indie sites and the p2p networks rule. However, digital downloads, ?will regularly break the one-million- a-week barrier this year as music fans push sales of singles to their highest for six years,? says The Herald.
Yes, singles.
Stacked against the fact that this May, globally, the number of p2p users simultaneously logged on to the p2p networks at any given moment was 9,735,661, as p2p research firm Big Champagne told p2pnet, four million corporate downloads a month doesn't amount to a hill of beans. But it does amount to a start, albeit it a tiny one.
This ?digital revolution,? as the Herald is somehow able to call it, and which it says is, ?currently rejuvenating the music industry,? will result in 50 million-plus singles being downloaded this year.
But the interesting this is it's, ?bolstered by the grey downloader, or the over-50s buyer, many of whom are replacing their vinyl collections,? says the story, going on:
?For the first time many more obscure singles are available since they were originally issued in the 1960s or 1970s as bands and individual artists as well as record companies broaden online back catalogues.
?A total of 16.7 million singles were downloaded or sold in shops in the second quarter of 2006, according to new figures yesterday from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
?It represents a lean back towards the single, sales of which dropped with the onset of internet file-sharing and CD-burning in the 1990s.?
David Belcher, Saga FM DJ and Herald writer, is quoted as saying:
"For the over-50s, the range is always growing. Whereas before you could only replace CDs of your old vinyl and those were essentially what the record companies had sold you already and you were only getting the big selling artists.
"Now you are getting the artists themselves. A lot of them have got the rights back to the material that the labels didn't want to reissue. Among those veteran musicians attracting the attention of the more mature internet users are the Rolling Stones ..."
(Thanks, Nell)
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11. July 2006 @ 07:35 |
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Like a Virgin?
p2p news view / p2pnet: ?Free filesharing is killing the music industry?, say the experts in the industry. But while they?re chasing, arresting, and suing innocent people for sharing legally purchased ?product?, the real pirates are making a mint. And some of them are sailing under false flags.
The newest pirate is Virgin Records, which was recently found guilty by the Paris Tribunal of Commerce, of music piracy. They admittedly downloading a Madonna song, ?Hung Up?, from a France Télécom website ? which had exclusive rights to distribute the song for a week, cracked the DRM, and resold it on their own website.
"This is an amazing case of simple piracy", Hervé Payan, senior vice president for content partnership and service at France Télécom, said.
According to the International Herald Tribune, ?Virgin said it had the interests of digital music consumers at heart when it broke the exclusive arrangement.?
Since when does a multinational corporation have the ?interests of digital music consumers at heart?? Their main concern has always been firmly rooted in profiteering and stuffing shareholders? pockets at any price ? including theft and piracy. The consumer has nothing to do with what motivates the entertainment industry.
The company was ordered to pay ?600,000, or $754,000, in damages. No one went to prison. No one lost his or her home or job. And the company was not forced into bankruptcy or to close down.
In stark contrast, any private person who's ?caught? sharing music gets a subpoena and stands an excellent chance of having their homes searched and computers confiscated (including personal and private documents and data having nothing to do with the subpoena).
In short, any one of the 19,000+ people who have been victimized by the music cartels, pilloried and ?found guilty? of piracy in the lamescream press faces the prospect of bankruptcy, total financial ruin, and a possible prison sentence if they don?t agree to pay an out of court settlement, which would have the same financial effect.
But Virgin justifies its actions this way: "We have always been ahead of the others posing questions that look to the interests of consumers," according to Laurent Fiscal, a director of the store.
If that were used as the defence by any of the 19,000 Big Music victims currently being sued, no doubt each and every one of them would be forced to sell their homes and possessions to help pay their court costs and subsequent fines, no matter that nothing was stolen and no one made a profit (as real pirates like Virgin did).
And if Big Music had anything to say about it, they?d also be put into stocks, or drawn and quartered in the town square.
Pirates like Virgin steal and profit from their criminal activities.
Filesharers don?t steal a thing and make no profit whatsoever.
That?s a big difference.
catflap - p2pnet
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11. July 2006 @ 08:04 |
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iPod mPod saga continues
p2p news / p2pnet: According to The New York Times, Microsoft wants to do a number on Apple by producing an iPod killer. But, contradicts the BBC, that's not the way it is.
?Microsoft has said reports that the company is planning an MP3 player to rival the iPod are based on 'speculation and rumours',? it says.
But iPod versus mPod is too good to drop and elements of the mainstream media are still treating it as a virtual fait accomplit.
?Microsoft is indeed developing a digital-media player to compete with Apple's iPod, and there's much more to the story,? says The Seattle Times' Brier Dudley.
"Microsoft isn't commenting, saying what's being developed is actually a complete line of Xbox-branded digital-media products, including Argo, a device that plays media, a software media player and an online media service? and being developed within the Xbox group under Xbox co-founder J Allard.
?His team includes people who previously worked on MSN Music, an online music service that had a promising debut in 2004 but fell victim to Microsoft's dithering over its music strategy,? says the story, going on, ?Now the company is firmly behind Argo. It has committed hundreds of millions to produce and market the devices.?
And, the mPod will be Wi-Fi capable, says Dudley.
With that in mind, Microsoft and Apple are in a, ?desperate behind-the-scenes race to develop a new generation of personal music and video players in time for Christmas, with Microsoft, the biggest name in software, aiming to finally break the dominance of the mighty iPod,? declares The Independent.
?It already looks as though the winner could be the first to develop a wireless player, where songs can be downloaded without having to plug the equipment into a personal computer.?
Moreover, ?Apple is also said to be closing in on a new product launch in collaboration with Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry, plus a new version of the video iPod,? says the story, adding:
?The secrecy surrounding both sides' product development project reflects the high stakes being played for. Apple is selling about 3 million iPods every month and sales of the devices are expected to top $8bn (£4.3bn) this year. It makes a further $2bn in revenues from music sales through its iTunes online music store. Microsoft, whose MSN network of websites also sells music, is determined to move back in from the sidelines of this market.?
Meanwhile, ?Microsoft's mobile player probably will look like an iPod but with a larger screen,? says James Coates in The Los Angeles Times.
?It will access a huge Microsoft-sanctioned version of Apple's online music store for 99-cent downloads using the Windows Media Player 11, Microsoft's version of Apple's iTunes music software.?
And it looks as though it'll also do an Apple, using DRM to make sure consumers only consume what they're told to consume..
Apple iTunes are for iPods alone. Similarly, having cost the now standard rip-off dollar per download, ?Apparently the only music [files] that the Media Player will permit sharing will be tunes acquired from Microsoft's store" to prevent, "swapping pirated music files,? says Coates, adding:
?Remember that this same software is the program that you will use to play sounds and videos on your PC. There will be no escaping the Media Player when the next Microsoft operating system arrives."
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11. July 2006 @ 08:06 |
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Not all consumers are bootleggers
p2p news view / p2pnet: A Los Angeles Times OpEd is a must-read, says Canadian Net and IP expert professor Michael Geist.
Why is it so important? It discusses, ?the dangers associated with current 'copyright' proposals before the U.S. Congress,? he points out.
Because what the entertainment industry wants, ?isn't merely protection from piracy; it's after increased leverage to protect its business models,? says the LA Times, going on:
That's why lawmakers must bear in mind the balance needed between copyright holders' interests and the public's, something Congress has not done well lately. In 1998, it gave copyright holders broad power to block legitimate uses of works, even those in the public domain, through the use of electronic locks that impede copying of digital products. And that same year, it prolonged the public domain's starvation diet by extending copyrights an additional 20 years, to 70 years beyond the death of the creator.
The movie and music industries have similar interests, but their agendas this year are distinct. The major studios want to alter digital TV receivers, recorders and home networks to stop shows from being redistributed indiscriminately online - a proposal that has won grudging support from some consumer-electronics and high-tech firms. They also want to redesign computers, set-top boxes and other products to ensure that the limits placed on digital videos are not removed when the data are converted from digital to analog. This approach could deter people from making a permanent copy of a pay-per-view movie, but it also could make it hard for digital movie buyers to create backup copies or transfer videos to portable players.
The music industry, meanwhile, is focusing its fire on satellite and digital radio services that make it easy for listeners to record and save individual songs. Those recorders don't fuel piracy, given that federal law already requires them to include a form of anti-piracy technology. Instead, a more immediate effect of the industry-backed proposals would be to give labels and music publishers more control over listeners' ability to record broadcasts, while helping them collect more money from XM, Sirius and other digital music businesses.
Clearly, the industry-backed proposals would do more than just defend copyrighted works from pirates. They also would impinge on devices that have legitimate uses and steer the development of technology, cutting off some innovation.
As they weigh the entertainment industry's pleas, lawmakers shouldn't assume all consumers are bootleggers and every digital device is a hand grenade aimed at Hollywood. [Our emphasis.]
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11. July 2006 @ 09:53 |
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FireFox continues gains at Internet Explorer's expense
7/11/2006 11:44:33 AM, by Eric Bangeman
It was almost two years ago to the day that we reported on Internet Explorer's first-ever drop in browser market share. At the time, IE usage had dropped from 94.8 percent at the beginning of 2004 to 93.9 percent a few months later. As FireFox approached the big 1.0 milestone, its market share continued to soar, and it passed the 10 percent barrier in October 2005.
Web analytics firm OneStat.com is now reporting that FireFox has grabbed an almost 13 percent market share worldwide, while IE has dropped to just over 83 percent. Firefox's current 12.93 percent market share is up from 11.51 percent in November 2005, while Internet Explorer is down almost 2.5 percentage points. In the US, IE has dipped below the 80 percent mark, down to 79.78 percent, while FireFox has 15.82 percent of the market.
OneStat.com measures browser usage by looking at the traffic at its clients' web sites. The figures from sites using the company's commercial traffic analysis package are combined to come up with numbers that represent the average number of visits from a particular browser. According to TheCounter.com, while IE 5 and 6 combine for 84 percent market share, FireFox has just 10 percent and Safari 2 percent. That's a significant gain for FireFox, which had just 6 percent at the beginning of the year by TheCounter.com's stats.
Here at Ars, the picture is a bit different. A quick glance at our stats shows that FireFox is the most popular browser with our readers, with 41.92 percent. Internet Explorer accounts for 29.1 percent with Safari at 9.9 percent and Opera at 2.45 percent.
Source: OneStat.com
FireFox is even stronger in other parts of the world. In particular, the browser accounts for 39.02 percent of all web traffic tracked by OneStat.com in Germany, with IE sitting at 55.99 percent. FireFox has also broken the 20 percent barrier in Italy and Australia.
With new browsers in the offing from both Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation, those numbers may be shaken up a bit once Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2.0 ship (beta candidate 1 of FireFox 2.0 was released yesterday) later this year. Of course, Internet Explorer is a more radical change from its predecessor, while FireFox 2.0 is a more evolutionary revision. Whether IE 7's new features and improved security settings will be enough to stop the defections to alternatives remains to be seen.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060711-7234.html
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11. July 2006 @ 09:58 |
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Movie studios expand online distribution, still forbid DVD burning
7/11/2006 12:05:12 PM, by Nate Anderson
Movie studios are showing themselves increasingly willing to put their films up for sale and rental on the Internet?and not just through sites that they own or control. The most recent example comes from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which has just inked a deal with online video distributor GUBA. GUBA becomes the first "video sharing community" to get access to the Sony catalog of films, but don't think that "sharing" means "free."
GUBA plans to charge 20 bucks to download new features and a ten spot for films from the back catalog. Though the service initially has only 100 Sony films, this will be expanded to 500 within the next year. The films are protected by Microsoft DRM (sorry, Mac users), and they're only viewable on a Windows computer (or an HTPC hooked up to a television). As is usual with this type of setup, no DVD burns will be allowed.
In some ways, GUBA is an odd choice for a Sony partner. Much of the site is a YouTube-style assortment of zany videos, which means that you can have a link to a man who can touch his eye with his tongue on the same page as the link to Underworld: Evolution. Such pairings can make the site feel a bit schizophrenic, but GUBA has done a good job of making it simple to look for either free or premium content.
GUBA has made quite a name for themselves the last few months. In addition to scoring the recent Sony deal, the site also announced a partnership with Time Warner in June. Warner, like Sony, has shown a willingness to experiment when it comes to Internet distribution, though they've been doing it longer than Sony has.
Warner already has a deal in place with one-time pariah BitTorrent. The plan to offer DRMed movies to users through BitTorrent's efficient distribution system is a telling admission of the legal uses of peer-to-peer technology, though studio insistence upon strict DRM controls and a lack of DVD-burning options make the service no more attractibe than GUBA.
Warner has also been active in Europe, partnering with another peer-to-peer company there to offer movie downloads. Such moves are excellent news for consumers, but not for the reason you might expect. What's exciting about the recent announcements is that they show the movie studios have learned their lesson from the music business and are determined to provide good legal alternatives to piracy right from the start.
Unfortunately, the actual services that have been rolled out are underwhelming unless you own an HTPC. Even then, they aren't a great deal when you consider that picking up the DVD costs about the same price and offers more flexibility and portability. When movie studios finally discover the magic combination of price and DRM that makes their product compelling to consumers, online distribution could become a lucrative alternative to traditional retail. That day has not yet arrived.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060711-7235.html
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AfterDawn Addict
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11. July 2006 @ 10:25 |
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Magic mushrooms really cause 'spiritual' experiences
* 05:01 11 July 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Roxanne Khamsi
?Magic? mushrooms really do have a spiritual effect on people, according to the most rigorous look yet at this aspect of the fungus's active ingredient.
About one-third of volunteers in the carefully controlled new study had a ?complete? mystical experience after taking psilocybin, with half of them describing their encounter as the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes.
However, psilocybin use has been associated with side effects such as severe paranoia, nervousness and unwanted flashbacks and so experts warn against experimentation. ?Once you?ve started down the path, you might not like where it ends,? comments Herbert Kleber, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, US. ?These are powerful agents that are just as likely to do harm as to do good.?
Psilocybin is found in mushrooms such as the liberty cap (Psilocybe semilanceata and about 186 other species. Hippies embraced the compound during the 1960s, after its mind-altering potential was touted by Timothy Leary, then a researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But as its use grew, US lawmakers took action. It is now generally illegal to sell or possess psilocybin drugs in the US.
Demonised compound
But Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and his colleagues believe there is a need to revisit the biological effects of psilocybin, which have been virtually ignored by the scientific community for about 40 years. ?It so traumatised our society that we?ve demonised this compound,? he says.
Griffiths's team recruited 36 healthy volunteers who had not experimented with the drug before. They were informed that they would receive a hallucinogen but did not know in which of two or three sessions they would receive it. Each session was separated by two months.
They either received a substantial dose ? about 30 milligrams ? of psilocybin or a similar dose of an "active" placebo, Ritalin. The latter has a stimulating effect but is not known as a hallucinogen. An inactive placebo would be easy to identify by the volunteers when compared to psilocybin, which could bias the experiences they reported.
The researchers used psychological questionnaires and found that 22 of the 36 volunteers had a ?complete? mystical experience after taking psilocybin ? far more than the four who reported this type of experience after taking Ritalin.
More than one-third of the volunteers said that their encounter with psilocybin was the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes ? no person given Ritalin said the same. Experts say the study is the most rigorous study of psilocybin?s potential to elicit spiritual feelings because it is the first to use an active control.
Spiritual shortcut
However, more than 20% of the participants described their psilocybin sessions as dominated by negative feelings such as anxiety. And while psilocybin appears to mimic the brain signalling-chemical serotonin, its precise action on mind function remains elusive.
Griffiths says that in the future psilocybin might have a therapeutic use, perhaps helping people who have just learned they have cancer come to terms with the news. But he is quick to add that ?the therapeutic application is very speculative?.
?My guess is that there will be people saying ?You?re looking for a spiritual shortcut?? says Griffiths. He stresses that the drug is no replacement for the mental health benefits of continuous personal reflection: ?There?s all the difference in the world between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life.?
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11. July 2006 @ 10:45 |
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Microsoft puts end to Windows 98 support
By Munir Kotadia
Special to CNET News.com
Published: July 11, 2006, 9:32 AM PDT
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From Tuesday, Microsoft will no longer issue security updates or provide support for Windows 98 and Windows ME, which are still being used by more than 50 million people.
Eight years after launching Windows 98, Microsoft is finally washing its hands of updating and plugging security gaps in the aging operating system.
The software giant originally planned to pull the plug in January 2004, but decided to extend support because of the increasing competition from Linux.
This time round, Microsoft is hoping that the remaining users of Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition will upgrade to Windows XP, according to Peter Watson, chief security advisor, Microsoft Australia.
If Microsoft sees a Win9x attack in the wild in the next few months, we would not be surprised if they issued a fix.
--Michael Silver, research vp of client platforms, Gartner
"Microsoft works closely with leading retailers to undertake promotions such as upgrade discounts to encourage users to upgrade to Windows XP," Watson told ZDNet Australia.
Analyst firms estimate that there are still between 50 million and 70 million computers running Windows 95, 98 or ME.
AND DDP IS ONE OF THOSE IN THE ABOVE LIST
Hardest hit by the cancellation of support will be home users and schools, according to Michael Silver, research vice president of client platforms at research group Gartner, who agrees that support has been extended to fight off the threat from Linux.
"Consumers and schools will be most affected by this announcement because they will no longer get security fixes," Silver told ZDNet Australia. "I suspect that Microsoft's original extension of the Windows 98 support date a couple of years ago was, in part, to make sure Linux was not brought in to replace these systems."
Silver believes that as far as the overall security landscape goes, the prospect of millions of unsupported PCs is a "cause for concern." In addition, he said Microsoft may be pressured into creating a fix if there is a serious virus outbreak.
"Microsoft has not fixed every hole in Win9x, but I'm not sure they've been attacked, either. If Microsoft sees a Win9x attack in the wild in the next few months, we would not be surprised if they issued a fix--wide-scale outages are not good for their customers or for Microsoft--but since there is no automatic update, users may not be able to get the fix in time," said Silver.
Silver believes that some users may decide to switch to Linux instead of upgrading to XP, but he said existing applications that require Windows are likely to stop a mass-migration.
"School PCs are likely more at risk. Win9x PCs used regularly on the Internet need up to date security software. Some of these users--companies, schools and governments--may switch to Linux or Mac, but application issues often makes that an expensive option," Silver said.
Dropping support justified
Microsoft's Watson said consumers have the choice to use any version of Windows and dismissed any suggestion that Microsoft has a responsibility to secure older versions of its software.
"This issue is not unique to the IT industry. For example, there are many people on the road who choose to drive the latest cars with the latest safety features, such as ABS brakes and air bags. But at the same time, there are many others who are happy driving their cars which may not have these features," he said.
"It is not the responsibility of automotive manufacturers to have their customers acquire the latest technology. This is the same issue for makers of mobile phones, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs, fridges, radios and so on," Watson said.
However, Watson said Microsoft would try to "encourage" users of Win9x systems to upgrade to XP.
"Microsoft encourages users to upgrade to Windows XP and provides information which helps educate users on the benefits of upgrading, but it is ultimately the customer's choice," he added.
Gartner's Silver said that although there are still millions of Windows 9x users, compared with alternative operating system vendors, Microsoft's support schedules are still "better than most."
"Most software vendors and hardware vendors are no longer developing Win9x drivers for their new products--and have not been for some time now. Further, most free Linux distributions are supported for a year, some for two. Microsoft has supported Win98 for eight years, 98SE for seven years, and Windows ME for six years," he said.
"These do not meet Microsoft's current enterprise standard of 10 years--they shipped before the 10-year policy--but they're better than most," Silver added.
Munir Kotadia of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+puts+end+to+Windows+98+support/2100...
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AfterDawn Addict
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11. July 2006 @ 11:03 |
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MPAA sucker panel
p2p news / p2pnet: The entertainment cartels are running one scam after another in their desperate efforts to turn former consumers, who are steadily reverting to customer status, back into brainless cash-cows.
Consumers have no ability to think for themselves and are led like cows to the slaughter to ingurgitate inferior, over-priced 'product' endlessly churned out by the corporations.
Customers, on the other hand, are individuals with free will who choose whether or not to avail themselves of corporate offerings, their choices based on whether or not said product is worth buying in the first place.
Which it usually isn't.
The cartels don't like customers because not only do they exercise intelligent choice, they also exhibit an unfortunate tendency to look to the competition for alternatives.
So the cartels don't like competition, either, and are therefore doing everything within their very considerable powers to crush anything and everything they don't own and/or control.
How can we find out what to hit the marks with? - is the single most important question facing not only the entertainment cartels, but all corporations whose success [read shareholder profits] depends entirely on being able to continue scamming you and I into buying stuff we really don't want and definitely don't need.
A mark is someone who's the intended victim of a swindler and the MPAA, owned by the venal Big Six Hollywood movie studios, thinks it's found a great way to not only get into the minds of marks (that's you), but also to have them do all the work!
It's organizing something called My Movie Muse, an online ?consumer panel? through which it'll get marks to, ?periodically participate in online surveys about all things related to the movies?.
They'll be expected to provide priceless data (which'll be passed along the line to third party affiliates) ?from theater attendance to home video rental and advertisements to piracy?.
For starters, an unnamed research firm will, ?provide some of the original participants to ensure a range of input from an age and geographic standpoint,? says the MPAA. But eventually, it hopes it'll suck in enough people so the studios won't have to actually pay to get marks to take part in the 'surveys'.
So what kind of data will the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) collect about you?
?MyMovieMuse survey website, participants in MyMovieMuse surveys are asked to provide some Personal Information (e-mail address, state and zip code, gender, age, marital status, education, race/ethnicity, type of employer and income, motion picture viewing habits, and opinions about the motion picture industry and about types of motion pictures),? it says.
It makes no mention of what it'll do with these data if someone ? let's say the US government ? decides the material will come in handy to protect America against the Terrorist Threat, or anything else the Cheney / Bush administration may dream up now, or in the future.
Stay tuned.
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AfterDawn Addict
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11. July 2006 @ 15:23 |
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House approves online gambling ban
7/11/2006 3:53:11 PM, by Eric Bangeman
Legislating "immoral" activity on the Internet has been a popular pastime for as almost as long we've been online. The latest salvo in the 'Net legislation war comes in the form of a bill that would make life difficult for online gamblers in the US. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act fo 2006, which was introduced last year, passed today by a 317-93 margin. It attempts to address online gambling by prohibiting wire transfers, "payment system instruments," and credit cards from being used as payment methods for online gambling sites.
Online gambling has been a growth industry for the past several years. Sports books have been popular for some time. More recently, the popularity of Texas Hold 'Em has led to the rise of a number of poker sites, some of which are pay to play. Worldwide, Internet gambling sites are estimated to take in upwards of US$12 billion annually. Half of that US$12 billion comes from gamblers in the US, and the impact of raising the bar higher for online wagering has many gambling firms outside the US concerned.
Unfortunately for opponents of online gambling, the prospects for similar legislation in the Senate are murky. There have been no comprehensive antigambling bills introduced to the Senate yet, although the possibility exists that an amendment barring online gambling could be tacked on to legislation currently under consideration. With the Senate becoming more preoccupied with fall elections, thay may not happen this year.
Unlike other legislative attempts to regulate the Internet, this one could actually have a significant effect. Instead of trying to outlaw gambling sites (many of which are based outside the US), the bill makes processing or facilitating payments to them illegal. As a result, would-be gamblers would be unable to use their credit cards, debit cards, or make direct transfers from their US bank accounts to pay gambling sites. There are always ways around prohibitions like that, but the legislation will likely have the desired effect on casual gamblers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060711-7239.html
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AfterDawn Addict
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12. July 2006 @ 04:00 |
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good morning all'
today i is having steak and eggs for breakfast
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gerry1
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12. July 2006 @ 04:16 |
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Good morning Ireland and everyone. As always, after April, it's iced coffee for me and a blueberry muffin from a Mennonite bakery along the route to work (eveyone calls them amish but they aren't).
Speaking of the Pennsylvania Dutch, how about some scrapple with ye breakfast Ireland? Not originating from this area, I won't even go near it!
Hmmm...seem to be having a problem with my nasty scrapple pic! I keep clicking on the scrapple in photobucket yet my mum pictured above keeps coming up and I wouldn't want anyone to think I've made scrapple of my mum!
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 12. July 2006 @ 04:22
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12. July 2006 @ 04:21 |
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good morning gerry1
Scrapple is a food in which the cornmeal and flour, often buckwheat flour, is simmered with pork scraps and trimmings, then formed into a loaf. Small scraps of meat left over from butchering, too small to be used or sold elsewhere, were transformed into scrapple to avoid waste, a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition.
Scrapple is typically made of hog offal, such as the head, eyes, heart, liver, bladder, and other scraps, which are boiled with any bones attached (often the entire head), to make a broth. Once cooked, bones and fat are discarded, the meat is reserved, and (dry) cornmeal is boiled in the broth to make a mush. The meat, finely minced, is returned, and seasonings, typically sage, thyme, savory, and others, are added. The mush is cast into loaves, and allowed to cool thoroughly until gelled. The proportions and seasoning are very much a matter of the region and the cook's taste.
Commercial scrapple often contains these traditional ingredients, with a distinctive flavor to each brand, though homemade recipes often specify more genteel cuts of pork, with a consequently blander taste. A few manufacturers have introduced beef and turkey varieties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple
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AfterDawn Addict
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12. July 2006 @ 04:25 |
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how about some head cheese for breakfast
Head cheese (AmE) is in fact not a cheese, but rather a terrine of meat from the head of a calf or pig (sometimes a sheep or cow) that would not otherwise be considered appealing. It may also include meat from the feet and heart. It is usually eaten cold or at room temperature as a luncheon meat.
Historically the cleaned (all organs removed) head was simmered to produce a gelatin (which would form from the bone marrow) containing any incidental meat which came off the head. The more modern method involves adding gelatin to meat, which is then cooked in a mold.
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gerry1
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12. July 2006 @ 04:31 |
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LMAO! That's just disgusting...and here I poke fun at our Brit friends for their black pudding!
I have a friend whose family left the mennonite church (they were very wealthy and had had quite enough of the humility thing); anyway, I had stuffed/roasted pig stomach once ... took all I had to force it down LOL!
I'd seen head cheese but never knew what it was short of its reputation: that's on the same list as scrapple and pig stomach on my "do not eat" list.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 12. July 2006 @ 04:33
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AfterDawn Addict
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12. July 2006 @ 05:05 |
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Aargh, head cheese it makes my stomach rebel thinking about it. Now scrapple is not bad. You are right gerry there is a difference between Amish and Mennonite, I have both in my area. The Mennonite are a little more willing to accept modern conveniences than the Amish.
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AfterDawn Addict
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12. July 2006 @ 05:30 |
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Tiscali tells Hollywood to poke it
p2p news / p2pnet: One of the two UK ISPs ordered by the Big Six movie studios to turn in the IDs of users targeted for copyright infringement action has told Hollydud to poke it.
The BPI (British Phonographic Industry ), owned by Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, is demanding that Tiscali and Cable & Wireless freeze 59 client accounts whos owners are said to have shared files with each other.
Seventeen are Tiscali customers, but only one of them appears to be in immediate danger and Tiscali says it's contacted the account holder asking for an explanation within seven days. But, "Should we not receive an adequate explanation during such period, we shall suspend the user's account pending resolution of your investigation, assuming by that time we have received evidence from you of a link between the user account and the IP address at the relevant time," states the ISP.
more here
http://p2pnet.net/story/9323
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janrocks
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12. July 2006 @ 05:52 |
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Sorry this is huge but the information is interesting in the context of misuse/abuse and the rights of the user.
ARTICLE: CYBERCRIME'S SCOPE: INTERPRETING "ACCESS" AND "AUTHORIZATION" IN COMPUTER MISUSE STATUTES
78 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1596, November, 2003
Orin S. Kerr
?
Unauthorized Access Statutes as an Answer to the
Problem of Computer Misuse
Congress and all fifty state legislatures responded to the difficulties of prosecuting computer misuse as a property crime by enacting new computer crime statutes. Florida passed the first state statute in 1978; the final state to enact a statute was Vermont in May 1999. Congress enacted the first federal computer crime law in 1984, broadened it considerably in 1986, and then updated it in various ways in 1990, 1994, 1996, and 2001. While no two statutes are identical, all share the common trigger of "access without authorization" or "unauthorized access" to computers, sometimes in tandem with its close cousin, "exceeding authorized access" to computers. In most cases, the statutes prohibit accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access as a necessary but not sufficient element of criminal liability, and then create several specific offenses by combining this base with various additional statutory requirements. In other words, most statutes start with the basic building block of "unauthorized access" to computers, and then add additional elements to the offense to deal with specific types of computer misuse.
The influential federal computer crime statute codified at 18 U. S. C. 1030 provides a good example. The statute includes seven distinct crimes, listed in 1030(a)(1) through (a)(7), almost all of which are triggered by "access without authorization" to computers. For example, one crime prohibits unauthorized access to government computers, another prohibits unauthorized access to computers that results in damage, and a third prohibits unauthorized access or exceeding authorized access to computers such that the user obtains private information.
But what does the trigger of unauthorized access mean? What exactly do these statutes prohibit? ? Trespass statutes prohibit entering property without license or privilege; computer crime statutes prohibit accessing a computer without authorization. But at this point the similarities cease.
1. Access
Consider the actus reus of the computer crime statutes, "accessing a computer. " What does it mean to "access" a computer? Obviously a computer user does not access a computer by physically getting inside the computer. Some other principle must govern. But what principle should that be? One approach would look at computers from the standpoint of virtual reality, and try to draw analogies between using a computer and entering real property. We could say that access hinges on whether the user has made a virtual entrance into the computer. For example, imagine a user tries to use a password-protected computer network and is confronted by a screen that requires a valid username and password to proceed. We might say that this screen is akin to a lock on a front door, and that entering a username and password is like using a key to open the lock. This approach suggests that a user who enters a valid username and password has accessed the computer, but a user who inputs an incorrect name or password has been denied access.
Similarly, we could say that visiting a publicly accessible website is something like visiting an open store in the physical world. Determining whether access has occurred then depends on whether visiting an open store can be deemed "entering" in the physical world. The correct answer is not obvious: Visiting a website could be seen as equivalent to viewing a shop window from a public street rather than actually entering the store. But at a conceptual level, the analogy to virtual space provides one heuristic to understand what it means to "access" a computer.
The virtual analogy does not provide the only tool, however. We can also look at the question of access from the standpoint of physical reality, in which we recognize that computers are simply machines that communicate with each other by sending and receiving information. For example, when a user visits a website, the user's computer sends requests to the computer that hosts the website asking the computer to send back computer files; when the files are returned to the user, the user's computer reassembles the files and presents them in the form of a website. If we focus on how computers operate, we can interpret access by looking to whether a user has sent communications that have physically entered the computer. For example, one standard could be that a user accesses a computer when she sends a command to that computer instructing the computer to perform a task, and the computer performs the request as instructed. Another standard could be that a user accesses a computer when the user sends a command requesting information in return and the computer responds by sending back information to the user. In this sense, accessing a computer is no different from simply using a computer.
Notably, physical-world standards and virtual-world standards can produce different outcomes. Imagine a user wishes to log on to a password-protected computer, and sends a request to the computer asking it to send back the page that prompts the user to enter a username and password. The computer complies, sending the page back to the user. This would not access the computer from a virtual perspective, as it would be something like walking up to a locked door but not yet trying the key. From a physical-world perspective, however, the request would be an access; the user sent a command to the computer and received the desired response. Similarly, consider whether sending an e-mail accesses the computers of the recipient's Internet service provider. From a virtual perspective, the answer would seem to be no; a user who sends an e-mail to the ISP does not understand herself to have "entered" the ISP. From a physical perspective, however, the answer seems to be yes; the user has in fact sent a communication to the ISP that its servers received and processed.
Which standard governs? The statutes themselves offer little guidance. Most computer crime statutes (including the federal statute) do not define access, and most statutes that do include a definition shed little light on these questions. In the handful of cases that have interpreted the meaning of access, however, courts have at one point or another suggested every one of these possible interpretations of access.
2. Authorization
Even greater ambiguities surface when we consider what it means for access to be without authorization. The concept of authorization seems clear in the case of traditional trespass statutes, which presume that people have a right to be where they are, and often require posted notice in that place instructing them that they cannot enter or remain there. The statutes also require that the trespasser knows that she is without license or privilege to enter or remain on the premises. The relevant authorization relates solely to physical presence in that location, and can be evaluated readily because most people understand the social norms that govern whether someone has permission to be present on another person's property. Everyone knows that a tall fence with an orange "No Trespassing" sign means to stay out.
The concept of authorization to access a computer is more difficult, as the following example shows. Imagine that a college student tasked with writing a research paper on the Ku Klux Klan decides to conduct her research using the Internet. She logs on to her AOL account, which is governed by a Terms of Service agreement containing the following clause: "You may not use your AOL account to post, transmit, or promote any unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, hateful, racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable content. " Once connected to the Internet, she finds a web site hosted by a KKK chapter. The main page contains a click-through agreement: "Only white supremacists are authorized to access this site," the agreement states. "Access by people who are not white supremacists is unauthorized. By clicking 'I agree,' you agree that you are a white supremacist. " Although she is not a white supremacist, she clicks "I Agree" and examines the site. The site contains links to other Klan-related sites, and when she clicks on one of the links, she is connected to a university-hosted site about the history of the Klan that asks her to enter a username and password. Although she does not have an account with the university, she guesses a username and password correctly, and the site grants her access to its contents. She then copies some of the information contained in the site, and e-mails it to her best friend, who previously has told her to stop e-mailing her information about her KKK research project.
Assuming that our student has "accessed" all four of the computers used in this example, which of these acts of access were "without authorization?" Did the student access AOL's computers without authorization because she used AOL to "transmit . . . hateful . . . or otherwise objectionable content" in violation of AOL's Terms of Service? Did she access the Klan's computers without authorization because she was not a white supremacist? Did she access the university's computer without authorization by guessing the username and password, entering disguised as a legitimate user? Finally, did she access her friend's computer without authorization by sending her friend the e-mail after her friend had told her not to send it?
More broadly, who and what determines whether access is authorized, and under what circumstances? Can a computer owner set the scope of authorization by contractual language? Or do these standards derive from the social norms of Internet users? The statutes are silent on these questions: The phrase "without authorization" generally is left undefined.
B. Judicial Interpretations of Access
Only a handful of judicial decisions interpret what it means to access a computer, or when that access is without authorization. Even the few cases reflect the broad range of available interpretations. ? Perhaps the most comprehensive discussion of "access" appears in a Kansas Supreme Court case from 1996, State v. Allen. Allen had used his computer repeatedly to dial up a Southwestern Bell Telephone computer that controlled long-distance telephone switches and could be manipulated to allow a user to place free long-distance calls. When Allen dialed up the Bell computers, he was confronted with a prompt requiring him to enter a username and password. Investigators speculated that Allen had guessed a password correctly and later erased the proof of his activity by deleting the logs. However, the forensic evidence established only that Allen had repeatedly dialed up the Bell computers and viewed the password prompt. Allen was charged with accessing the Bell computer without authorization in violation of the Kansas computer crime statute.
Before the Kansas Supreme Court, Allen argued that there was no evidence he had actually accessed the Bell computer. The government relied on the broad statutory definition of access, fairly common among early state computer crime statutes, which stated that access means "to approach, instruct, communicate with, store data in, retrieve data from, or otherwise make use of any resources of a computer. " The court responded that this definition was so broad that if taken seriously it would render the statute unconstitutionally vague. If "access" really meant "to approach," the court noted, "any unauthorized physical proximity to a computer could constitute a crime. " In light of its overbreadth, the court refused to apply the definition, concluding that "the plain and ordinary meaning should apply rather than a tortured translation of the definition that is provided. " The court explained:
Webster's defines "access" as "freedom or ability to obtain or make use of. " This is similar to the construction used by the trial court to find that no evidence showed that Allen had gained access to Southwestern Bell's computers. Until Allen proceeded beyond the initial banner and entered appropriate passwords, he could not be said to have had the ability to make use of Southwestern Bell's computers or obtain anything. Therefore, he cannot be said to have gained access to Southwestern Bell's computer systems as gaining access is commonly understood.
This concept of "access" appears to adopt the virtual reality approach, in which the correct username and password grants a user access to the files "inside" the computer, but the wrong username and password denies the user that access. Absent evidence that Allen had passed through the password prompt to find the information inside, he had not actually accessed the Bell computer.
A federal district court suggested a similar approach in Moulton v. VC3, a civil dispute between two computer security companies. The Moulton case harnessed a civil remedy added to the federal computer crime statute in 1994 to provide additional protection for computer misuse victims. One company sued the second when an employee of the second company performed a "port scan" on the first company's computers. A port scan is a common network security test that sends a query to each open port on the target computer to see if that port is open and ready to receive incoming traffic. A port is a sort of electronic door, and an open port is akin to an open door and therefore a possible security vulnerability. When scanned, an open port will return a message to the requesting computer instructing it that it is open; a closed port will return an error message. Consistent with Allen, the Moulton court concluded without analysis that the second company's port scan did not access the first company's computer.
While both Moulton and Allen suggest that accessing a computer is limited to uses that in a virtual sense get "inside" the computer, two other opinions have adopted a significantly broader approach. Consider the Washington Supreme Court's decision in State v. Riley. The facts of Riley closely resemble those of Allen. Joseph Riley had configured his computer to dial up the computers of the Northwest Telco Corporation and guess random passwords; a correct password allowed the user to place free long-distance telephone calls. The evidence showed that Riley repeatedly had dialed the Telco access number and guessed passwords, although it was unclear whether he had guessed correctly and placed free calls.
Riley argued on appeal that he had not accessed the Telco computers. The Washington statute contained a definition of "access" essentially identical to that in the Kansas statute from Allen. In Riley, however, the court relied on the statutory definition to conclude that Riley had in fact accessed the Telco computers:
Riley's repeated attempts to discover access codes by sequentially entering random 6-digit numbers constitute "approaching" or "otherwise making use of any resources of a computer. " The switch is a computer. Long distance calls are processed through the switch. Riley was approaching the switch each time he entered the general access number, followed by a random 6-digit number representing a customer access code, and a destination number. Therefore, Riley's conduct satisfied the statutory definition of "access" and so was properly treated as computer trespass.
It is possible to interpret the difference between Allen and Riley as simply the difference between one court that followed a common statutory definition of access and another that did not, or perhaps the difference between proof that a defendant guessed passwords and proof that he merely viewed the logon prompt. I think something else is afoot, however. In Allen, the court viewed computers as virtual spaces, and accessing the computer as akin to getting inside the space. Although the Riley court does not make its standard clear, it appeared to see computers more as physical machines, and accessing the computer as sending a communication to that machine. As a result, the conduct that did not constitute access in Allen did so in Riley.
An even broader interpretation of access appears in a civil decision, America Online v. National Health Care Discount, Inc. (NHCD) This case is one of several civil cases brought by AOL against spammers, senders of bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail. In this dispute, AOL sued NHCD, a company that sells discount health care plans, for hiring a spammer to send bulk e-mails about NHCD to AOL customers. AOL contended that by harvesting e-mail addresses and sending e-mail to AOL customers in violation of AOL's terms of service, the spammers had accessed AOL's computers without authorization. AOL moved for summary judgment, prompting the court to consider whether a computer user "accesses" another computer when he sends e-mail to that computer. The court answered in the affirmative, offering an expansive interpretation of "access":
The CFAA does not define "access," but the general definition of the word, as a transitive verb, is to "gain access to. " "Access," in this context, means to exercise the "freedom or ability to . . . make use of" something. . . . For purposes of the CFAA, when someone sends an e-mail message from his or her own computer, and the message then is transmitted through a number of other computers until it reaches its destination, the sender is making use of all of those computers, and is therefore "accessing" them.
Although the NHCD court relied on the same dictionary definition of "access" as had the Allen court, the court in NHCD reached a quite different interpretation of its meaning. To the NHCD court, access is a physical world concept, not a virtual world concept: The question is not whether the sender of the communication gains a virtual entrance into the computer from the sender's standpoint, but whether the communication itself is transmitted through the computer. As a result, sending an e-mail through a computer accesses the computer even if a user might not perceive the interaction as an access. Despite the common term, and even common statutory and dictionary definitions, the few courts to have interpreted access have reached inconsistent conclusions.
C. Judicial Interpretations of Authorization
Courts have faced even greater difficulties trying to interpret the meaning of authorization. The cases construing authorization fall into three categories: First, the leading case of United States v. Morris; second, cases involving employee use of an employer's computer against the employer's interests; and third, cases involving breaches of contractual relationships between users and computer owners. The three categories reflect increasingly broad constructions of the scope of computer crime statutes.
1. Morris and the Intended Function Test
The earliest significant case interpreting authorization is the Second Circuit's opinion in United States v. Morris, sometimes known as the Internet worm case. The Morris case introduced the "intended function" test of authorization.
Robert Tappan Morris was a graduate student at Cornell in the late 1980s who authored a computer program known as a "worm" which was designed to exploit several weaknesses in Internet security. Morris hoped that the code would spread across the then-nascent Internet to illustrate four common security flaws: a bug in common e-mail software, SENDMAIL; a bug in an Internet query function known as the "finger daemon"; a design flaw that allowed computers to use privileges on one computer to obtain privileges on another; and the use of simple, easy-to-guess passwords. Morris designed the code so that it would try various of these means of infecting its targets, and then once it succeeded it would try other computers. Morris released the worm from a computer at MIT on November 2, 1988, but the worm quickly spread out of control and replicated itself so often that it eventually shut down a good portion of the early Internet. Morris was charged with violating 18 U. S. C. 1030(a)(5)(A), which at the time prohibited "intentionally accessing a Federal interest computer without authorization" if damage resulted. A jury convicted Morris at trial.
On appeal, Morris argued that his computer access was not without authorization because he had rights to access several of the infected computers, including computers at Cornell, Harvard, and Berkeley - schools where Morris apparently held legitimate accounts. Morris based his argument on a distinction between two closely related types of abuse of authorization: access "without authorization" and access that "exceeds authorized access. " Some unauthorized access statutes prohibit only access without authorization; others prohibit both access without authorization and access that exceeds authorization. Although courts have struggled to distinguish between these two phrases, prohibitions against exceeding authorization appear to reflect concerns that users with some rights to access a computer network could otherwise use those limited rights as an absolute defense to further computer misuse. For example, an employee could hack her employer's computer and see her employer's secret files, but later claim that her limited rights to use the computer at work granted her authorization to access the computer, so that access by her could not be without authorization.
Morris drew support from a 1986 Senate report authored in support of the 1986 amendments that expanded 18 U. S. C. 1030 from its original narrow form into the broader statute it remains today. The Senate report had suggested a difference between access without authorization and exceeding authorized access based on the difference between "insiders" and "outsiders. " Insiders were those with rights to access computers in some circumstances (such as employees), whereas outsiders had no rights to access computers at all (such as hackers). The report seemed to presume an Allen-like understanding of access, in which a user "accessed" a computer by getting inside the computer with a username and password. The report then suggested that in cases in which Congress prohibited accessing a computer without authorization but did not prohibit exceeding authorized access, it intended to prohibit the acts of outsiders but not insiders. Morris reasoned that because he had several legitimate Internet accounts, he was an Internet insider and could not be convicted of accessing Internet computers without authorization.
It is worth noting that there are several complex issues lurking (or at least potentially lurking) within Morris's appeal. The worm spread across the Internet, and the government accused Morris of accessing computers without authorization. This raised important questions of interpreting access; had Morris committed one act of access when he had logged on and sent the worm, for example, or did each replication of the worm constitute a separate access by him? It also raised questions about how to divide a network of computers into individual computers for the purpose of the statute. However, Morris based his appeal solely on the question of authorization. Accepting the government's theory that he had caused the worm to access many different computers, Morris argued only that because he had authorization to access some federal interest computers, he had not accessed any computers entirely without authorization.
The Second Circuit rejected Morris's argument. While statutes that only prohibited access without authorization may have been "aimed" at outsiders, the court reasoned:
Congress was not drawing a bright line between those who have some access to any federal interest computer and those who have none. Congress contemplated that individuals with access to some federal interest computers would be subject to liability under the computer fraud provisions for gaining unauthorized access to other federal interest computers.
The court then introduced and applied a new standard for determining when access was unauthorized: the intended function test. According to the court, Morris had accessed computers without authorization because he had used weaknesses in several programs to obtain access in unintended ways. As the court put it, Morris did not use those programs "in any way related to their intended function. " The SENDMAIL program was an e-mail program, and the finger daemon was designed to let users query information about other users. However, Morris "did not send or read mail nor discover information about other users; instead he found holes in both programs that permitted him a special and unauthorized access route into other computers. "
Although the court did not elaborate on its standard, the intended function test appears to derive largely from a sense of social norms in the community of computer users. Under these norms, software designers design programs to perform certain tasks, and network providers enable the programs to allow users to perform those tasks. Providers implicitly authorize users to use their computers to perform the intended functions, but implicitly do not authorize users to exploit weaknesses in the programs that allow them to perform unintended functions. When a user exploits weaknesses in a program and uses a function in an unintended way to access a computer, the thinking goes, that access is "without authorization. "
2. Employee Misconduct Cases
Several cases have examined the meaning of authorization in the context of employee misconduct. In these cases, employees used their employers' computers in ways that exceeded the scope of their employment without violating the Morris intended function test.
Perhaps the most remarkable of these cases is Shurgard Storage Centers, Inc. v. Safeguard Self Storage, Inc. , which introduced an agency theory of authorization. Shurgard involved a civil dispute between two business competitors in the self-storage business. According to the complaint, the defendant lured away several of the plaintiff's employees, including an employee named Eric Leland who had access to the plaintiff's confidential business plan and other trade secrets. Before leaving the plaintiff's company, Leland e-mailed several of the plaintiff's trade secrets and other proprietary information to the defendant. The plaintiff later sued the defendant under 18 U. S. C. 1030(a)(2)(C), on the theory that Leland had "intentionally accessed [the plaintiff's] computer without authorization," or in excess of authorization, and thereby obtained information from the plaintiff's computer in violation of the federal unauthorized access statute. The defendant then moved to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), on the ground that Leland had not accessed the plaintiff's computers without authorization or in excess of authorization.
The district court disagreed. The court adopted the plaintiff's theory of authorization, which was that "the authorization for its . . . employees ended when the employees began acting as agents for the defendant. " The court found its guidance in the Restatement (Second) of Agency: "Unless otherwise agreed, the authority of an agent terminates, if, without knowledge of the principal, he acquires adverse interests or if he is otherwise guilty of a serious breach of loyalty to the principal. " Applying this standard, the court concluded that the defendant's employees "lost their authorization and were 'without authorization' when they allegedly obtained and sent the proprietary information to the defendant via e-mail. " In support of its holding, the court turned to the CFAA's legislative history, which the court argued showed a congressional design broadly to prohibit computer misuse, especially where intellectual property rights were at issue. Notably, however, the court did not refer to the 1986 legislative history discussed extensively in Morris, did not mention the Morris intended function test, and did not explain why agency law standards should govern computer misuse law.
Shurgard's agency theory of authorization is strikingly broad. Under Shurgard, whenever an employee uses a computer for reasons contrary to an employer's interest, the employee does not act as the employer's agent and therefore is accessing the employer's computers without authorization. Motive determines whether access is authorized or unauthorized. Given that the federal computer crime statute uses access without authorization as the trigger for often-serious criminal liability, the apparent effect of Shurgard is to criminalize an employee's use of an employer's computer for anything other than work-related activities.
Courts have adopted slightly narrower interpretations of unauthorized access in criminal employee misconduct cases. Recall the First Circuit's decision in United States v. Czubinski, where an IRS employee browsed computerized tax returns of his friends and enemies despite workplace rules that he could only access the database for work-related reasons. Czubinski was charged under both property-based statutes and 18 U. S. C. 1030. Although the court rejected both counts of the indictment against Czubinski for reasons not relevant here, the court noted in passing that Czubinski had "unquestionably exceeded authorized access" to the IRS computer for purposes of section 1030. The comment is dicta, but appears to reflect a watered-down version of Shurgard. Like Shurgard, this language in Czubinski suggests that employers have a right to limit their employees' use of company computers to work solely motivated by a desire to serve the company. Czubinski had exceeded his authorized access by accessing the IRS computers for personal reasons when employees were allowed to access the computer only for official reasons.
A Georgia state court applied a similar standard in Fugarino v. State. Fugarino involved a computer trespass statute that prohibits use of a computer with knowledge that the use is without authority, and with intent to damage data. Sam Fugarino was a computer programmer whose behavior at work became increasingly bizarre. When Fugarino learned that another employee had been hired at the company, Fugarino became enraged, telling another employee that the company's code was "his product, that no one else was going to work on his code, that nobody was going to take his place and that he was 'going to take his code with him. '" Fugarino then started deleting sections of code from the employer's network. When the employer confronted him, Fugarino told the employer that "the blood of his dead son" was in the code and that the owner "would never get to make any money from that code. "
On appeal following his conviction, Fugarino argued that his conduct was not knowingly without authority. The Georgia court disagreed. Fugarino lacked authority because "the owner of the company . . . did not give Fugarino authority or permission to delete portions of the company's program. " Further, "the vindictive and retaliatory manner in which Fugarino deleted large amounts of computer code" demonstrated that he knew that he lacked authority to delete the code. Although the precise statutory text differs slightly from the federal statute, the opinion echoes Shurgard and Czubinski. Fugarino was a computer programmer who presumably had the authority to delete files for work-related reasons. By deleting files to spite his employer, however, Fugarino implicitly ventured beyond the scope of his authority and into the zone of unauthorized use.
State v. Olson reveals a roughly similar approach, albeit one that led to a reversal of the defendant's conviction. Laurence Olson was a police officer who used a police computer database to access and print out driver's license photographs of female college students who attended the nearby University of Washington. Olson was tried and convicted of accessing a government computer without authorization in violation of Washington's computer trespass statute. On appeal, he argued that his access was not explicitly unauthorized.
The court evaluated Olson's claim by examining the workplace rules that governed Olson's conduct. After reviewing the trial record, the court concluded that while "certain uses of retrieved data were against departmental policy, [the record] did not show that permission to access the computer was conditioned on the uses made of the data. " The court reversed the conviction. The fact that Olson apparently had accessed the computer for personal reasons did not make his access unauthorized, the court reasoned, because only the personal use and not the access itself violated an explicit workplace rule. Once again, this seems to be Shurgard-lite: The primary difference between Olson and Shurgard is that under Olson the employer must make the limits on computer access explicit.
The sole employee misconduct case rejecting such an approach to authorization is a Maryland case, Briggs v. State. In this case, a court dismissed the conviction of a disgruntled computer system administrator who had password-protected important files on his employer's network using passwords unknown to his employer. Shortly before he resigned, Briggs had placed the password-protected files in a subdirectory named "ha-ha he-he. " The password protection left his employer unable to read the files, and when the employer later asked Briggs for the password, Briggs claimed that he had forgotten it. The State charged Briggs with unauthorized access to his employer's computer, reasoning that Briggs was not authorized to access the computer "in such a way as to interrupt the operation of the computer services of the system. " The court disagreed, reasoning that as a system administrator, Briggs was in fact authorized to access his employer's computer. While Briggs had done something he was not supposed to do, he did not lack authorization to access the computer (although, the court noted, he might have exceeded his authorized access, something that the Maryland statute did not prohibit). In contrast with Shurgard, the Briggs court based authorization on conduct rather than motive. The fact that Briggs did not have his employer's interest at heart when he accessed the computer did not make his access without authorization.
3. Contractual Cases
The final and most fascinating set of cases interpreting authorization involves contracts governing the use of computers. In these cases, two parties are bound by a contract that implicitly or explicitly regulates access to a computer, and one side uses the computer in a way that arguably breaches the contract. The question: Does the breach of contract make the access unauthorized? The remarkable answer, at least in civil cases: Yes.
The most important of these cases is the recent decision by the First Circuit in EF Cultural Travel BV v. Explorica, Inc. Explorica involves another civil dispute between two business competitors - in this case, the well-established student travel business, EF, and an upstart competitor, Explorica. Explorica's vice president, Philip Gormley, was a former vice president at EF who had signed a confidentiality agreement with EF promising not to disclose any of EF's "technical, business, or financial information, the use or disclosure of which might reasonably be construed to be contrary to the interests of EF. " When Gormley arrived at Explorica, he decided that Explorica could compete with EF by undercutting EF's prices available from its public website.
Gormley instructed a computer consultant to design an automated "scraper" program that could query EF's website for tour prices and then send the EF price list to Explorica. Each use of the scraper sent 30,000 queries to the EF computer. Explorica used the scraper twice, enough to allow it to learn and then undercut EF's tour prices, all unbeknownst to EF. When EF learned of the scraper program, it sought a preliminary injunction against Explorica's use of the scraper on the ground that (among other things) it violated the federal unauthorized access statute by accessing EF's computers either without authorization or by exceeding authorized access. The district court agreed, reasoning that use of the scraper was so far beyond the "reasonable expectations" of EF that it was clearly unauthorized.
On appeal, the First Circuit affirmed the district court's injunction, concluding that the use of the scraper likely violated the statute because its use implicitly breached the confidentiality agreement that Gormley had signed with EF. The court reasoned that Gormley's decision to use a scraper on EF's site (as well as his help designing the scraper) relied on his insider's knowledge of EF's website and business practices. However, Gormley had signed a contract with EF promising not to disclose any information about EF in a way that might be against EF's interests. Because the scraper was used against EF's interests, the court reasoned, Explorica's use of the scraper relied on information obtained in violation of the contractual agreement. As a result, use of the scraper exceeded authorized access to EF's computer and violated 1030. The opinion acknowledged that any user could manually query the EF website to learn EF's prices, but concluded that the scraper's "wholesale" approach "reeks of use - and, indeed, abuse - of proprietary information that goes beyond any authorized use of EF's website. " Although the reasoning in Explorica is opaque, if not tortured, the court appears to base the question of authorization on whether the conduct surrounding the access breached the confidentiality agreement. The agreement formed a contract, and access that at least implicitly breached the contract exceeded authorization.
A district court in Virginia took a similar approach in America Online v. LCGM, Inc. , a civil case brought by America Online against a spammer. The spammer had purchased an AOL account and used it (along with special software programs) to collect the e- mail addresses of thousands of AOL users. AOL's Terms of Service expressly prohibited AOL members from harvesting e-mail addresses, however, and AOL argued that by violating the Terms of Service the spammer had accessed AOL without authorization. The district court agreed, with exactly one sentence of analysis: "Defendant's actions violated AOL's Terms of Service, and as such was [sic] unauthorized. "
Although Explorica and LCGM offer remarkably broad interpretations of unauthorized access statutes, the award for the broadest interpretation goes to Judge Jones of the Southern District of New York for his decision in Register. com v. Verio. The facts of Verio resemble those of Explorica. As in Explorica, the defendant in Verio used an automated program to send queries to a database maintained by a business competitor, the plaintiff. Specifically, employees of the Internet service provider Verio used a search robot to query the publicly available WHOIS database (a database of names and contact information for domain name registrants ) maintained by Register . com. The Verio search robot gathered contact information about Register. com's customers, and Verio employees would then contact Register. com customers and invite them to switch service providers from Register. com to Verio. Register. com sued Verio, and moved for a preliminary injunction against the use of the search robots on the ground (among others) that Verio's use of the search robot constituted an unauthorized access of Register. com's database.
The district court agreed. Unlike the court in LCGM, however, the Verio court did not rely on a breach of the plaintiff's terms of use; the court concluded that the plaintiff's use of the robot did not actually breach any terms of use that Register. com had enacted. Instead, the court concluded that the mere fact that Register. com had decided to sue Verio meant that Verio's use of the search robot was without authorization. "Because Register. com objects to Verio's use of search robots," the court held, "they represent an unauthorized access to the [Register. com] WHOIS database. " The fact that the computer owner had decided to object to the defendant's use of its computer after the conduct occurred made the access to the computer "without authorization. "
It is possible to see Explorica, LCGM, and Verio as merely civil cases about abusive business practices. In all three cases, plaintiffs sued to block defendants from misusing and potentially damaging their computers, and courts perhaps understandably found a basis for stopping the arguably unfair practices. In the course of reaching these decisions, however, the courts also established important interpretations of "authorization" that presumably will apply equally to cases interpreting the same text in a criminal prosecution. By using the law to aid sympathetic plaintiffs, the courts inadvertently have handed prosecutors a broad and powerful tool to punish breaches of contracts relating to computer use. Nearly any use of a computer that is against the interests of its owner is an "access" to the computer either "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" under these precedents, triggering severe criminal penalties.
D. Why Courts Have Struggled to Interpret Unauthorized Access
Proponents of unauthorized access laws often see the laws as analogues to the burglary and trespass laws that address real property crimes. In light of the failures of property-based crimes, the new laws prohibit "breaking in" to computers, which legislatures have described as the act of accessing computers without authorization. As we have just seen, however, this understanding is simplistic: "Access" and "authorization" have proven much more complicated to apply in practice than they first appear to be.
Why? In the case of access, much of the blame belongs to the advance of computer technology since the 1970s. In 1975, a person who used a remote computer typically did so by "dialing in" to the computer over a telephone line. The user then would encounter a text-based log-in prompt, and would need to enter a username and password to proceed. Today, in contrast, computer users utilize networks to surf the Web, send and receive instant messages, download music and videos, and perform countless other tasks, often using "always on" Internet connections that merge seamlessly with the computers themselves. While the concept of access may have made sense given 1975 computer technology, the technology of 2003 presents a different case. Back then, you knew when you accessed a computer; today you might know when you use a computer, but the word "access" is merely a label to be assigned somewhat awkwardly to conduct that may not seem like an access at all.
There are two major reasons courts have had difficulty interpreting the scope of "authorization. " The first is that courts have yet to explore exactly what kind of authorization the statutes address. Presumably the computer's owner/operator has the primary authority to control what is authorized, much like a property owner might do for physical trespass laws. But as I explain in the next Part, access to a computer can be unauthorized in different ways, and courts have not yet recognized such differences and explained which types of unauthorized conduct fall within the scope of the statutes.
The second source of the difficulty is that many cases have interpreted "authorization" in the context of civil disputes rather than criminal prosecutions. The difference tends to push courts in the direction of expansive interpretations of new laws. It is one thing to say that a defendant must pay a plaintiff for the harm his action caused; it is quite another to say that a defendant must go to jail for it. Courts are more likely to hold a defendant liable under an ambiguous statute when the stakes involve a business dispute between two competitors than when the government seeks to punish an individual with jail time. As a result, civil precedents tend to adopt broader standards of liability than do criminal precedents. Because many unauthorized access cases have arisen in a civil context with sympathetic facts, courts have adopted broad approaches to authorization that in a criminal context would criminalize a remarkable swath of conduct involving computers.
III
A Proposed Interpretation of "Access" and "Authorization"
in Computer Misuse Statutes
The history of computer crime law shows courts and legislatures trying to define a legal response to a problem that they only partially understand. In the first two decades, courts struggled to apply preexisting laws against theft and other property crimes to computer misuse. While they reached sensible outcomes in particular cases, no clear principles emerged. When computer misuse threatened or caused substantial harms, courts tended to find it criminal; when it did not, courts interpreted the law narrowly to avoid punishing the computer users. In response to these uncertainties, legislatures enacted computer crime statutes that prohibited accessing computers without authorization, and in some cases, exceeding authorized access.
While proponents of the new laws believed that they would cure the old ills, the old ills have reemerged, albeit in a slightly different form. Courts previously used harm as a proxy for theft; now they appear to use harm as a proxy for lack of authorization. The reasoning seems to go something like this: Use of a computer that causes harm to its owner is use that the owner would not want; use that an owner would not want is access that the owner implicitly has forbidden; and access that an owner implicitly forbids is access without authorization. Once again, the law has failed to create workable standards to guide courts. Instead, courts have interpreted the ambiguous legal standards to reach results that seemed correct given the facts of the particular case.
Can we do better? We can, and I suspect that in time we will. One promising alternative would be to replace one-size-fits-all unauthorized access statutes with new statutes that explicitly prohibit particular types of computer misuse. As I discuss below, only a handful of possible types of computer misuse exist: It should be possible for a legislature to catalog them, decide which types it wishes to prohibit, and draft a statute narrowly tailored to that misconduct. Such an approach would better satisfy the basic aspiration of criminal law by describing the harmful conduct clearly and proscribing it directly. As we develop more experience with computer misuse crimes, and as the categories of misuse become clearer, the pressure for such a direct approach surely will mount. ***
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