Gives the company extra rights as the original developer

Since Netscape announced its plans to release the source code for Communicator 5 [1], open source developers have been awaiting the license terms for the release. Last week Netscape published version 0.9 of the "NPL" [2]. For the license itself in legalese see [3] (HTML) or [4] (text). Netscape has kindly provided both an annotated version [5] for non-native speakers of legalese and a FAQ [6]. The license is similar to to the LGPL [7] but goes further to provide special privileges to Netscape as the initial developer of the NPL'd code; in particular Netscape uniquely has the right to license NPL'd code, including code written by outside developers, to its partners on terms different than the NPL.

Netscape is soliciting comments on the preliminary NPL on this newsgroup [8] until 3/11.

[1] http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1998-01-26.html#s03
[2] http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/LICENSE-0.90.html
[4] http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/LICENSE-0.90.txt
[5] http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/annotated.html
[6] http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/FAQ.html
[7] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html
[8] news://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.public.mozilla.license

Mr. Louis Freeh, meet Mr. Jack Straw

In March of 1997 the then-Tory British government's Department of Trade & Industry proposed licensing "trusted third parties" to offer encryption services and requiring them to escrow users' private keys. The Labor party, then in opposition, decried this proposal, and their election manifesto [9] codified their opposition. But rumors have been circulating for a month now that the current Labor government is about to propose a scheme very like the year-old proposal [10].

On 2/10 Sean Gabb published this leak [11] of government plans to announce mandatory domestic key escrow. On 2/19 an official of the DTI did give a presentation [12] on policy suggestions for digital signatures -- and said that the domestic encryption part of the policy had been delayed by the "completely wrong announcements on the Internet," by which he apparently meant [11]. Now more than two weeks have gone by and no policy paper has been published; rumors continue to swirl that the policy, when it is released, will somehow link encryption with digital signatures. Microsoft Europe has issued a response [13] to this possibility that sets out the issues very nicely. Meanshile, the proprietors of NTKnow have set up a mailing list for fast-breaking British crypto news. To subscribe, mail majordomo@lists.unfortu.net with message: subscribe crypto-announce .

[9] http://www.labour.org.uk/views/info%2Dhighway/content.html
[10] http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1998-02-02.html#s07
[11] http://freespace.virgin.net/old.whig/flc010.htm
[12] http://www.liberty.org.uk/cacib/legal/crypto/icx2.html
[13] http://www.liberty.org.uk/cacib/legal/crypto/microsoft.html

Will it become illegal to push a cookie on a European?

Next October, EU rules go into effect governing the flow of personal data across national borders. If EU countries strictly implement these rules, they would have to cut off large amounts of corporate and personal commerce with countries that don't implement similarly strict privacy protections. Outside the EU, only Norway, Iceland, Slovenia, New Zealand, and Switzerland have laws governing the use of private data by commercial firms. Here is a summary of the directive on "Transborder Flows of Personal Data," taken from an article [14] covering possible impacts on the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan:

If the directive were applied liberally it could mean that Website operators would have to get permission from European users before setting a cookie, and would have to disclose the intended uses of cookie data and of personal data captured in site registration. The more suspect uses of cookies -- by ad sites for example -- would seem to be banished entirely, as their only intent is collecting and correlating personal data for purposes of unsolicited marketing.

Articles 25 and 26 [15] are at the center of the problems the directive poses for non-EU countries. Article 25 lays out the strictures and Article 26 gives some conditions under which they might be relaxed. No one seems to know [16] how the EU countries will implement the privacy directive.

[14] http://www.info-law.com/eupriv.html
[15] http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/dataprot/directiv/chap4.html
[16] http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe/globehtml/064/Lines_...

Online commerce developers and vendors may need to obtain licenses

On 3/4 Open Market announced that it has been awarded three patents covering significant aspects of online commerce [17]: visitor traffic analysis, electronic shopping carts, and secure, real-time payment using credit cards. The company intends to collect royalties from others in the Internet commerce space. These patents will be more difficult to contest than EData's [18]. The proprietor of the Internet Patent News Service says:

Open Market's capsule descriptions of the patents: [17] http://www.openmarket.com/releases/3patents.htm
[18] http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1996-04-07.html

The Echelon system links five nations' spy agencies in filtering all voice and data traffic worldwide

Have you ever gotten a laugh from this venerable Net .sig?

A draft European Parliament report [19] on the role and function of political control technologies was circulated last month. The Scientific and Technological Options Assessment recounts characteristics of a worldwide intelligence-gathering and distribution system named Echelon. Much of the current knowledge of Echelon came out of New Zealand, where in 1996 Nicky Hagar published the book "Secret Power." (It is not, alas, listed at Amazon, Waterstones, or Barnes & Noble.) See this summary [20] published in CovertAction Quarterly. Echelon coordinates the signals intelligence of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It listens in real-time, from earth and space, to the vast majority of all email, fax, telex, and voice traffic worldwide and filters it for words or phrases of interest to one of the five countries' intelligence services. Just like the paranoids always said. This has been going on since 1981. In a note to the Cryptography mailing list, Vin McClellan <vin at shore dot net> picks out STOA's hot point: And in conclusion, courtesy of meta-X spook (see TBTF for 1995-04-13) [21], let me CIA plutonium Peking DES kibo Panama NSA PLO domestic radar disruption Khaddafi supercomputer BATF North Korea Serbian just state that our great country will never be truly free until Nazi genetic Ft. Meade South Africa nuclear plutonium Ft. Bragg colonel cryptographic Kennedy FBI Delta Force radar Uzi Mossad bomb Marxist strategic AK-47 terrorist.

[19] http://www.jya.com/atpc.htm
[20] http://jya.com/echelon.htm
[21] http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1995-04-13.html

This champion of free speech likes it less when the speech is directed their way

David Barberi's <info at 2meta dot com> humor site [22] collects his favorites among the numerous April Fools pranks that have circulated on the Net since at least 1978. He archived [23] a Usenet posting from last April, author unknown, which purports to be from one Hugh F. Hefner and falsely claims that Playboy Magazine has decided to shut down. It's pretty funny. (The same posting is available from Deja News, but not from Alta Vista's Usenet database.) Last month Barberi received a demand [24] from the Playboy legal department that he remove the piece. He has consulted with a lawyer and so far has not taken it down, though he has placed an "obnoxious warning" on each page of the site. US case law strongly supports parody as protected speech. Barberi suggests he may contact the Playboy Foundation for help with the legal expenses. His is exactly the kind of David-vs.- Goliath, first-amendment case that in the past Playboy has aided financially.

[22] http://www.2meta.com/april-fools/
[23] http://www.2meta.com/april-fools/1997/playboy-shutdown.html
[24] http://www.2meta.com/april-fools/playboy/

Cheaper and faster than comparably equipped Wintels

In May Apple will begin shipping low-cost laptops that are more than comparable in price and performance with their Wintel competitors [25]. The new models, which have been rumored under the code names Main Street and Wall Street, will start at $1999 for a 233-MHz G3 processor with a 12.1-inch dual-scan display. 233-MHz Pentium MMX notebooks today cost anywhere from $2,900 to $5,000 and underperform a similarly clocked G3. Apple's new pricing will undercut even the bargain-basement system you can buy today [26] by combining a low-end PowerBook 1400 ($1800) with a 250-MHz G3 add-in from Newer Technologies ($1000).

A survey: please send me a note (dawson dot tbtf at gmail dot com) if you presently use a Macintosh regularly. What is the probability that you will buy another MacOS system?

[25] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,19780,00.html?pfv
[26] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,19673,00.html?pfv

Apply quick for cry.net, bum.net, or uzi.net

Darn those guys at Need To Know [27]. Their useful and interesting e-rag comes out on Friday and often as not scoops TBTF on two or three items I had planned to run the following Monday. Here is one: Roger Gonzalez <argh at datapult dot com>, with way too much time on his hands, did a brute-force search for all 2- and 3-character names still available in the .com and .net domains. The result [28]:

• All 2-letter domains are taken
• All 2-alphanumeric domains in .com are taken; 104 are left in .net
• Of the remaining 3-character domains, only 55 are words

You can download Gonzalez's entire report [29] (349K).

NTKnow doesn't (they would say "don't") credit the source of this item, but they probably picked it up the same place I did, from Glen Mccready's 0xdeadbeef mailing list.

[27] http://www.ntk.net/
[28] http://datapult.com/domains.html
[29] http://datapult.com/domains3.txt

Faster and faster apart

Push may be moribund as a topic on the Web (for example, Microsoft will ship IE5 without its Active Channel bar [30]), but it is very much alive in the corridors of cosmology. TBTF for 1998-01-19 [31] reported that the universe looks to expand forever, slowing all the time but never reversing its expansion. This concensus only came clear in January, and already it is being supplanted with talk of a universal repulsive force [32] -- perhaps the "cosmological constant" that Einstein invented and rued all the rest of his days -- that is causing the universal expansion to accelerate over time. One candidate for the instigator of this repulsive force is the zero-point energy of the vacuum (see TBTF for 1997-11-24 [33] and [34]). Evidence for the acceleration comes from observations of distant supernovas. Fans of the inflationary Big Bang theory welcome the news, because the cosmic push may be just enough to balance the books on a topologically flat universe, after visible matter, dark matter, and exotic matter (WIMPs and MACHOs) have fallen short. An accelerating expansion would also mean the universe is older than it apappears, helping to close an embarassing gap with the estimated age of its oldest stars.

[30] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,19656,00.html?pfv
[31] http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1998-01-19.html#s11
[32] http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1998/split/pnu361-1.htm
[33] http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1997-11-24.html#s10
[34] http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1997/split/pnu345-2.htm

Physicists just want to have fun: WIMPs and MACHOs are weakly interacting massive particles and massive cometary halo objects. WIMPs were postulated first as a candidate for the "dark matter" in the universe, and after they were named the comet boys just had to trump them.

For a complete list of TBTF's (mostly email) sources, see http://www.tbtf.com/sources.html.

TBTF home and archive at http://www.tbtf.com/ . To subscribe send
the message "subscribe" to tbtf-request@world.std.com. TBTF is
Copyright 1994-1998 by Keith Dawson, <dawson dot tbtf at gmail dot com>. Com-
mercial use prohibited. For non-commercial purposes please forward,
post, and link as you see fit.
_______________________________________________
Keith Dawson    dawson dot tbtf at gmail dot com
Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.