ARTS & FARCES internet

Walt Mossberg has come around to recognize that the greatest threats to our privacy come from corporations, not government. Welcome Walt, seriously.

That said, developments in Congress last week don’t bode well.

In a 96 - 1 vote, the Senate passed the Uniting and Strengthening America (USA) Act without Senator Russ Fiengold’s (D-WI) amendments that would ensure privacy safeguards by limiting roving wiretaps to the phone use of the target named in the investigation; preserve the privacy of “sensitive” documents such as medical records by making investigators convince a judge that access is necessary; prohibiting the use of “secret searches”; and limit the monitoring activities of administrators of computers owned by universities, libraries, and corporations.

The neatest part of a web piece that gets relatively widespread notice is the reconnecting that results.

I don’t much like the concept of blogrolling or exchanging links. There’ something about it that seems a little cheap, a bit less than honest, and a tad sleazy. I send heads-up emails to other writers when I publish something that I think they’ll find interesting, but I never ask for or offer to exchange links. So this is going to read like blogrolling, but it’s not. I link for two reasons: it either clarifies, illustrates, or develops my topic or it interests me.

Mark Bernstein knows more about hypertext than just about anyone other than Ted Nelson, and his work has always interested me. What’s better is that he’s a programmer and understands what kind of tools writers need to hone their craft. Probably because he’s a pretty dang good writer his own self.

Bernstein’s company, Eastgate Systems, makes the Storyspace hypertext tool for writers and publishes hypertext works—serious hypertext, not the crap we’re doing here. Eastgate’s next effort is code-named Ceres, a hypertext note-taking and weblog environment Bernstein describes as “Agenda meets Storyspace meets Blogger, with a few plot twists along the way.” If you’re serious about non-linear media, check it out.

Dave Winer was quick to take me to task for leaving the small commercial developers out of the pickin’ cotton for Bill piece. He even drew us a picture a month ago. His point is that media coverage about the software industry invariably break down to Microsoft v. open source. What about the little guys, like Dave’s company, UserLand?

Well, he’s right, of course. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about small software developers. I use a lot of their software. I’d be dead in the water without Dantz Retrospect, Opera, SmartFTP, and a bunch of others. Even after nearly two years of using Windows, I still miss a lot of great software on the Mac, most specifically BBEdit.

Great software comes from small developers. Programs I live in every day—Photoshop, Visio, FrameMaker, and Microsoft Word—all came from small developers initially. In fact, I’d venture that all really great software came from small teams or individuals. Remember ThinkTank and MORE? Those were Winer products. How about FactFinder and the original FileMaker? How about WriteNow?

Pretty soon all God’s creators gonna be pickin’ cotton for Bill. Or maybe Rupert or Walt.

Imagine that suddenly, all distributions of GNU/Linux were illegal in the United States. As well as Zope, Python, Perl, Apache, and all other open source software products. While that arguably may not be the goal of the Security Systems Standard & Certification Act (SSSCA), it would surely be a result. The SSSCA would outlaw any digital device—including personal computers—that did not include a copy protection mechanism. Right now the only thing keeping it from happening are the events surrounding 11 September.

The bill, written by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC)—chair of the Senate Commerce Committee—with a lot of help from Disney and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.