Circuit Writer Version 6.10
by Jim Scheef
The Healthcare System
As the news about coming changes to our nation’s healthcare system reaches a crescendo, I’ve been way too busy to listen. Even without listening I do know that the Obama administration plans to use information technology to bring needed savings. This means that providers will be installing electronic patient records systems. Would you be interested in learning about such systems? I don’t mean the big systems used at hospitals like what Ed Heare presented a couple years ago, but rather the systems used by your personal physician and similar providers to store your test results and medical history. These are the systems that will save (or not) the billions of dollars needed to save our economy. Let me know at jscheef@dacs.org. If there is sufficient interest, I’ll find vendors and doctors to do a general meeting presentation.
Are you Confickered?
The Conficker worm may be the most successful malware released to date, or the biggest failure. So far it’s hard to tell as the April 1 doomsday has come and gone seemingly without consequence. Of course, that does not mean that it’s all over. The worm still infects millions of computers. Is your machine among them? The simplest test I have found is an “eye chart” prepared by a clever programmer (joestewart.org). Take a look. If you don’t see what you are supposed to see, then check this eWeek article for some free tools to remove the worm.
Ultimate Zero-Day Attack
In an attack that will be hard to top for a long time to come, some almost too clever attackers pirated and infected a copy of Windows 7 release candidate with malware and started to build a botnet based on the installs. This may be the first case of infecting a version of Windows before it is released, in effect creating their own set of built-in vulnerabilities. Presumably, the carrot was that the pirates had removed the expiration date from the release candidate, or at least claimed they had and then seeded the RC on BitTorrent sites. Researchers at Damballa, an enterprise security firm that specializes in protection from botnets, were able to shutdown the command center. Dambella estimated that 27,000 copies were installed in just a couple of weeks. Beyond the piracy angle, this incident points out the dangers in testing prerelease versions of operating systems. To date there are no third-party antivirus or malware detectors that support Windows 7, plus the infection was made even more difficult by the fact that the trojan was “pre-installed.”
The theme is DMCA
Does the Digital Millennium Copyright Act affect you in your daily life? Not at all? Well, hold on there, keyboard breath! Maybe you should reconsider that position. Ever want to copy a movie DVD to your hard drive so you can watch in on your iPhone or other device? Is the DVD you bought yours or not? Read this PC World article about why you should care about the DVD copying case now in Federal district court. The legal concept of Fair Use, part of copyright law from the very beginning, has been effectively eliminated for any electronic media or device by the DMCA.
Copyright law has become so lopsided that even free speech is affected. Google, owner of YouTube, has filed a detailed submission about how many takedown notices are bogus. The filing is in New Zealand where a draconian version of the DMCA is under consideration but the statistics are the point.
“In its submission, Google notes that more than half [57%] of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one-third [37%] of notices were not valid copyright claims.”
A copyright holder can stifle speech on a website merely by making an accusation of infringement. This example of unintended consequences is not what Congress had in mind. Take another example of wiki operator, Sam Odio, who runs the site BluWiki.com as a hobby from his company OdioWorks. When some BluWiki users started a discussion about interfacing iPods and iPhones to software other than that available from Apple’s iTunes, Apple threatened legal action under the DMCA. OdioWorks took down the discussions but now, with support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), has filed suit against Apple to regain free speech. Read about this on the EFF website.
And finally, lest you think this only affects liberals, consider that the McCain presidential campaign complained to YouTube last October just before the election when the video site took down McCain campaign ads as a result of DMCA complaints from various news organizations. From the blog on the New York Times website:
“The commercials incorporated snippets of television news broadcasts. Using provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the news organizations demanded that the commercials be removed from YouTube because they violated the organizations’ copyrights.”
Senator McCain voted for the DMCA, and opposes legislation to enforce network neutrality. The irony of it all! Oh, the irony!
This is just the tip of the articles I would like to at least mention. I’ll post a list of the additional articles on the DMCA on my blog at
http://circuitwriter.spaces.live.com.
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