It Makes No Sense For The President To Not Use Email

from the get-with-the-times dept

Eight years ago, we noted that newly elected President George W. Bush had given up email, in order to avoid problems with open records laws on Presidential communications. Not surprisingly, there's now a lot of speculation concerning whether or not President-Elect Barack Obama will now have to give up email as well. In the intervening eight years, email has become much more important, and, of course, Obama is a known Blackberry fanatic.

Eight years ago we thought this was a silly turn of events, and today it seems even more ridiculous. Email is an important and useful form of communication. It seems silly not to allow Obama to use email, and it's difficult to see what the real advantage of cutting him off would be. The article mentions concerns about security, but no one is saying he should be sending nuclear codes or military training plans via email. The second concern is about the open records laws, that would potentially open up private communications to the public. Again, it seems like this can be dealt with in a variety of ways -- either by changing the law to protect certain emails, or by having Obama make it clear to any and all emailers that their emails should be considered public records. It seems like there are better solutions out there than cutting him off entirely.

Filed Under: barack obama, email, open records, president

Please Stop Telling Us How Many Emails Fit Under A Broadband Cap

from the it's-really-avoiding-the-point dept

Earlier this year, we pointed out that if you're a broadband provider implementing some kind of broadband cap, and you're hyping it up by showing off just how many emails can be sent under the cap, there's a problem. Obviously, ISPs are using the number of emails as a criteria because emails use up almost no bandwidth -- so no matter what the cap is, the answer is "a lot." But, of course, the number of emails you can send is meaningless. There's no big email epidemic that is what has ISPs claiming they need to put in place limits. As Broadband Reports notes, it's all incredibly demeaning to focus on the number of emails you can send:

Those would all be relevant measurement criteria, were we all idiots.

People don't care about how many emails they can send. They want to know if they'll actually be able to download more than half an HD movie. Focusing on emails is like telling someone that a full tank of gas in their car will allow them to travel six hundred million millimeters. That's meaningless for someone who wants to know if they can actually get from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a single tank of gas. If these ISPs really feel the need to implement caps, at least be honest about what it means for customers.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, email

AOL Sued For Putting Ads In Email

from the you've-got-lawsuits! dept

We Americans sure do love filing lawsuits for just about any reason. The latest is a guy who has sued AOL for putting text ads in his email messages, claiming that because he pays for his AOL account (that might be his first mistake), these ads are "fraud, unjust enrichment" and a violation of California business codes. He's trying to turn it into a class action lawsuit as well. Here's another suggestion: switch your email account. Hopefully this gets thrown out quickly.

Filed Under: advertisements, email, lawsuits
Companies: aol

Is The Indictment Of The Palin Email Hacker Legally Correct?

from the truthiness dept

Stephen Colbert famously coined the term "truthiness" on the very first episode of The Colbert Report. The word is used to explain a person who knows something is true in his or her "gut" rather than via any facts (and, of course, continues to believe that it's true even if the facts contradict the claim). I'm beginning to wonder if there needs to be a similar world for the legal world, where you believe something must be illegal, in your gut, even if the law itself doesn't appear to cover it. That's what we see with folks who want to string up Lori Drew, the woman whose online conversations with a former friend of her daughter may have resulted in that girl's suicide, despite little evidence that Drew's actions broke any actual law. Yet, because of the quasi-lynch mob mentality of folks who felt in their gut that it must be illegal, prosecutors eventually twisted a law to charge her.

Now it's looking like the recent indictment of a teenager for breaking into Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's email may be facing a similar situation. We had already noted that Justice Department's own definition of the law might make it difficult to prosecute the hacker. However, now a friend sent over an interesting analysis of the indictment itself, by Orrin Kerr, which suggests the entire indictment is legally flawed. Specifically, the statute used, claims that the intrusion is only a felony if used to further a criminal activity.

As Kerr notes, it's not clear what criminal activity was "furthered" by hacking into the email -- unless you read the whole thing recursively, such that the act itself is illegal, and thus doing it is furthering that illegal act. But, obviously, that's legally problematic. So once again, it looks like a situation where plenty of people believe that the act was illegal (very reasonably so, I might argue), but the feds are having trouble finding a law that actually makes it illegal. So, do we have any Colbertian suggestions for what this should be called? Illegalism? Illeginess? Illegfulness?

Filed Under: email, hacking, legality, sarah palin

Does Email Make You Lie More?

from the just-a-little-bit dept

Does a more impersonal means of communication make it easier to... stretch the truth? Apparently, a new study found that people tend to lie more in email when compared to a written note (paper?!? pens?!?). The study involved people being given a pool of money and asked to divide it with someone else, who they could communicate with either via email or via written note. While pretty much everyone lied about the total amount of money, those who communicated over email lied by even bigger amounts. The writeup doesn't really suggest why this is, but it makes you wonder what factors could be involved. People often talk about how sitting at a keyboard can make people "mean," but they usually attribute it to the anonymity factor. However, could the "coldness" of typed words feel less personal as well?

Filed Under: email, lies, personal, studies

India Claims To Have Cracked Blackberry Encryption; Proudly Spying On Emails

from the details-missing dept

Earlier this year, India demanded that RIM allow it to easily snoop on any email messages sent via Blackberry devices. The company explained that since the end user sets the encryption key, there's simply no way to provide a backdoor to snoop on the messages. However, now the government is proudly claiming that it's cracked the code and can now monitor Blackberry messages on various mobile operator networks. The details are quite vague, especially an offhand comment about how this is "wholly for non-enterprise solutions." That would suggest, then, that enterprise Blackberry messages may remain secure. It also raises questions about whether or not the mobile operators in question are simply providing access to their mail servers. Either way, the whole thing seems weird -- including the government's effort to publicize the fact that it's spying on Blackberry messages.

Filed Under: blackberry, email, encryption, india

Will The DOJ's Interpretation Of Email Privacy Make It Difficult To Prosecute Palin Email Hacker?

from the we-said-what-now? dept

While plenty of folks are talking about the cracking of Sarah Palin's personal email account, the EFF is noting that the Justice Department's own interpretation of email privacy laws may actually make it difficult to prosecute the hacker under the most obvious statute, the Stored Communications Act. You see, since the DOJ would prefer that your email not be considered private, it has interpreted emails that you've opened, but not deleted, as not being subject to the SCA. That's thanks to a somewhat contorted reading of the law that suggests that an opened email is no longer considered either in temporary or intermediate storage -- nor is it considered saved for backup purposes. Those happen to be the two requirements under the law. Thus, if the hacker accessed emails that Palin had already read, the DOJ may have trouble using the SCA, since its own statements (though, thankfully, not the courts) seem to believe that hacking in and reading already read emails is not covered by the law.

Filed Under: email, hacking, justice department, sarah palin, stored communications

Just Assume the Spammers Are Going to Get Your Email Address

from the resistance-is-futile dept

There's been quite a flame-war going on over at TechCrunch, where Mike Arrington has claimed that the way Apple deals with invalid URLs for users' public iDisk pages makes it "a dead simple way for spammers to easily spider" Apple's iDisk site to compile a list of all MobileMe usernames (and, therefore, email addresses) for spamming purposes. TechCrunch readers are split about whether this is a serious problem or a non-issue. I think Arrington is right that this wasn't the best design decision, but the hyperbole seems unwarranted. In the first place, this doesn't give anyone a way to spider the iDisk site. All it enables is a brute-force dictionary attack, which is going to be a lot slower and will only catch those whose addresses contain dictionary words. Moreover, as various people have pointed out, similar criticisms could be levied at other companies that also provide ways the bad guys could determine the validity of email address—although Google's email validity checker does present the user with a CAPTCHA after about 10 tries.

I think it's important not to lose sight of the big picture here. No, we don't want to make it too easy for spammers to scrape our email addresses from the web. But at the same time, as the use of email becomes more and more pervasive, there are more and more ways for our addresses to "leak" into underground spammer communities. And once your email address has leaked out, a version of the darknet thesis takes over, and at that point you can just assume all the spammers are going to get your address sooner or later. So it's hard to get too worked up about the problem TechCrunch is identifying here. I've long since stopped trying to shield my primary email address from spammers, and relied on my client-side spam filter to weed out the spam for me. Apple should probably make some changes to the iDisk site, but this is not a serious privacy flaw, and it pales in comparison to the other problems MobileMe has been having recently.

Filed Under: email, privacy, spam
Companies: apple

Suddenly Snoozing Your Email Box Is The In Thing

from the do-not-disturb dept

Just last month we pointed to a study that showed that more experienced internet users checked their email a lot less, as they had realized what a distraction it could be. Of course, there are some people who just can't resist -- so it's interesting to see companies and services trying to deal with it. First there was the launch of a service called HitMeLater, which lets you forward your email to an address that determines when it will resend that email again. That is, if you get an email that you don't want to deal with right away, but know you'll forget about it once it scrolls out of the main pane of your inbox, you can just forward it to 4@hitmelater.com and it will email that message back to you four hours later. You can replace the number with any number of hours you want, or with the name of a day, and it will resend the email on that day.

But apparently it wasn't just HitMeLater thinking about this type of service. Microsoft is apparently experimenting with its own email snooze button for Outlook. It's different than HitMeLater, in that this is really a solution for those who simply can't resist checking email. Instead, you can have the system put up a virtual "Do Not Disturb" sign -- and Outlook won't sync up your email for whatever period of time is specified. Of course, there will be those who will say that people just need to learn some discipline on their own, but knowing that's not going to happen, what's wrong with some tools to help people out?

Filed Under: email, overload, snoozing
Companies: hitmelater, microsoft

A Lot More At Stake In TorrentSpy vs. MPAA Email Snooping Lawsuit

from the wiretapping-laws dept

For a few years now, we've been covering the battle between TorrentSpy and the MPAA. While TorrentSpy has given in and shut down on the question concerning the operations of its business, there was a separate legal question that is still being fought in court. As we noted recently, TorrentSpy has appealed the judge's ruling that the MPAA didn't break any laws in gaining access to its executives' emails. As you may recall, the MPAA hired a guy who hacked into TorrentSpy's servers to send copies of all the emails to himself first, which he then sold to the MPAA (he later regretted this decision and confessed to TorrentSpy, which is what resulted in the lawsuit in the first place). When the issue first came up in court, the MPAA played dumb, and pretended that it assumed the guy had legal access to the emails.

While this may seem like just a straight privacy case, the EFF, along with the ACLU and others, have filed a brief noting that there's much more at stake here. Specifically, the EFF is concerned that the court ruled that since the email messages were not technically "intercepted" under the wiretap act, due to the fact that the emails were stored, however briefly, on a mail server before they were copied and re-forwarded. In other words, as the EFF points out, if you have access to any server that handles a message as it travels across the internet, it's not "intercepted" for you to read that message. That has huge and very dangerous implications for any sort of internet wiretapping -- suggesting that as long as the government routed all communications through its own machines, it could read everything without a warrant. This case is about a lot more than a BitTorrent tracker battling the MPAA.

Filed Under: email, surveillance, wiretapping
Companies: mpaa, torrentspy