Presidential Ramblings

I hope everyone at the June General Meeting enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed putting it on. I know I had a blast, even if I did fail to properly introduce Bill Keane and Don Pearson when they did their demonstration of how to run Windows software on Linux using WINE (a recursive acronym for ‘WINE is not an emulator'). Sorry guys.

Shareware Today

Which segues to my first topic - the state of shareware today. What is shareware? Once upon a time it meant inexpensive (sometimes free) downloadable software sold on a "try it before you buy it" basis. Generally, it was a small program written by an amateur programmer who wanted to make some small return on the time spent writing and debugging the program. After you installed and tested the program, you would send your check to the author to pay for it - or at least some people did.

Over time, a few people built small companies on these shareware programs. I just checked and you can still buy TAPCIS, the CompuServe access program, for $39.50. This program once supported a company with a half-dozen employees. I used TAPCIS for more than 10 years and saved hundreds of dollars in CompuServe charges. For some, shareware became big business.

In the beginning, payment was on the honor system. There was no one forcing you to send the money. Over time, shareware authors started to force the issue. One method was "crippleware." This was a program that was hobbled in some way to make it less useful. Once you paid, the full version became available. Now, time limited trial versions are the norm. Registration and payment over the Internet unlocks the software right on your disk.

Today you can download IBM's flagship DB2 Universal Database for any platform including the IBM S/390 mainframe and "try it before you buy it." Does that make DB2 shareware? You get my point. So what changed? The Internet changed everything, but the odd part is that big businesses, like IBM, have adopted the shareware model and made it work as an integral part of their business. When it comes to a business model, you can score one for the little guys!

Online safety and privacy

Internet safety is a pretty big issue around Danbury these days, in view of the tragic events in our local news about the young girl murdered when meeting someone from an online chat room. We are trying like the dickens to have a general meeting program on the subject of Internet safety and it looks like we will have someone from the FBI later this year. That's the good news. Almost all the other news concerning your privacy, online safety, and rights to the digital content you buy is bad. This topic is so massive, I don't know where to begin.

When you buy a newspaper for cash at the news stand no one knows what you read in that paper, however the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001' allows the federal government to start accumulating a list of everyone with whom you exchange email and all the web sites you visit with very little legal justification. Let's say for some reason you are mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist and the FBI secretly begins surveillance of your online activities. This results in an electronic dossier about you. Later, you are cleared, the surveillance stops and you, none the wiser, go on with your life. What happens to all that "potential evidence"? There is no mechanism requiring its destruction. Years later who might have access to this information and for what purposes?

If you think your Internet browsing habits should be public knowledge, consider another scenario: The January 20th NY Times had an article "Consumer Tools for Holding Bill Collectors at Bay." I clicked the link to read the article online. Now, does the fact that I was interested in an article on bill collectors make me a poor credit risk? If you suddenly start reading about cancer on the web, does that mean you are a poor health risk? What if your bank or your employer could see a list of the web sites you visit? Should anyone be able to track your reading habits? For some reason, the fact that our Congresspersons are formulating a bill (Online Personal Privacy Act, Senate Bill 2201) to "protect" our privacy does not give me a whole lot of comfort. These are the issues at the base of online privacy, not porn or terrorism, but your civil liberties.

And from the Electronic Privacy Information Center web site (www.epic.org/news) comes this delightful tidbit:

DOJ Says Homeland Security Office Not Subject to FOIA.

The Justice Departmentis seeking the dismissal of EPIC's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Office of Homeland Security (OHS). In a brief submitted to the U.S. District Court in Washington, DOJ argues that OHS is not an "agency," and therefore is not subject to the FOIA's open government requirements. See EPIC's Homeland Security Page for more information. (May 7)

Only time will tell if this situation changes when the Office of Homeland Security becomes a cabinet-level agency. If it doesn't, the prospects are truly chilling, given that this will be the place where all of our government's "intelligence" comes together - and I don't mean that to be humorous!

See you next month.

The online version of this column will include links to the various resources I have noted.

Jim Scheef
dacsprez@dacs.org