ARTS & FARCES internet

Common wisdom says that the scariest man in technology is Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Common wisdom would be wrong. The scariest man in technology is Larry Ellison, chief executive of database vendor Oracle.

Ellison wants a centralized database for medical and criminal records. That database would, presumably, be an Oracle database and it would be maintained by the federal government. According to a Reuters wire report, Ellison told attendees of a Colorado technology conference that “there should be one system” to eliminate many of the current problems in health care and criminal justice.

According to Larry logic, a big, centralized, honking Oracle database is the cure for two of society’s most pressing ills.

The Oracle CEO maintains that a centralized database would be much more secure than the many decentralized systems now in use. Ellison conveniently failed to remind his audience that the consensus among most security experts is that centralized systems are generally less secure than decentralized systems and that a single security breach in a centralized system could be apocalyptic compared to a single catastrophic security breach in a decentralized system.

Nevermind that Ellison’s “unbreakable” Oracle9i isn’t. Not even close.

This from the guy who would never be able to start Oracle without help from the Central Ingelligence Agency (CIA) in the form of a major contract. This is the same Larry Ellison who has regularly proposed a national identification system, powered by Oracle, natch, as an anti-terrorism measure. And this is the same Oracle that’s currently in hot water with its home state of California for software sales without competitive bidding that is ending up costing the state too much.

“It’s just the dawn of the Information Age,” Ellison told his audience. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Wrong again, Larry. We’ve seen quite enough.

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John Robb, president and chief operating officer of UserLand Software, Inc., asks why the online privacy advocacy organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) aren’t all over a company no one has heard of: comScore.

comScore, Robb reports, is among the worst violators of individual privacy on the Internet. The company is responsible for all those bogus “download accelerators” that are actually used to monitor behavior and credit card usage on the net. Having recently purchased Media Metrix (an Internet audience measurement service operating in the United States and Canada), comScore now “owns the online consumer data market,” according to Robb.

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At a public workshop on digital rights management (DRM) held at the Department of Commerce yesterday, it became abundantly clear that the entertainment industry intends nothing less than to make fair use of copyrighted works illegal.

According to Grant Gross’ report on the DRM workshop, fair-use and consumer-rights advocates were prevented from addressing the assemblage. The panel itself was heavily weighted with representatives of the technology and entertainment industries. Of the 23 panelists, only two, Graham Spencer of digitalconsumer.org and Bob Schwartz from the Home Recording Rights Coalition, represented the interests of technology and entertainment customers.

Electronic Frontier Foundation intellectual property attorney Robin Gross said that the EFF’s “position was not welcome at this table.”

Probably because of the way in which the members of the panel were selected, Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti felt comfortable attempting to rewrite history:

“At one point Valenti even claimed that the movie industry supported VCRs when they first came out, supposedly like the movie industry is now supporting the Internet. Bob Schwartz of the Home Recording Rights Coalition reminded Valenti that the MPAA tried to get an injunction against VCRs in the early ‘80s and wanted to charge a $25 to $50 ‘piracy fee’ for every blank videotape sold.”

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As further evidence that the political tide is, indeed turning, consider that tomorrow’s Minneapolis StarTribune carries an editorial endorsing instant runoff voting as a solution to political activists running sham campaigns to pull votes from the opposition:

“What the problem cries out for is Minnesota’s adoption of an instant-runoff-election procedure. That way, voters from the Green Party or Independence Party or Socialist Workers Party can vote their conscience without fear of tipping the election to the candidate most opposite their views.

“Here’s how it works: A voter casts a ballot that ranks candidates by order of preference. So a Green voter might signal that her first preference is the Green candidate, second preference the DFL candidate, third preference the Republican candidate. If no candidate has an absolute majority, votes for the trailing candidates are reassigned to those voters’ second choices. The process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes cast.”

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On Monday, the House of Representatives voted 385 - 3 to pass a bill that would allow malicious computer crackers to be sentenced to life in prison. The legislation, known as the Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) would also allow law enforcement agencies to conduct Internet and telephone wiretaps without a court order.

The Bush administration has insisted CSEA is needed to thwart cyber terrorism, denial of service attacks, and network intrusions. Although the proposed legislation had been written well before the 11 September attacks, those events almost certainly account for the bill’s near-unanimous support.

The bill must pass the Senate before it can be signed into law, and will likely meet feeble opposition. The best the citizenry can hope for is that the Senate won’t have time to consider the matter before the end of the current congressional session.

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