A Mark Glassman story at the New York Times discusses the didtheyreadit email-tracking software that I wrote about previously.

The story quotes the head of didtheyreadit as saying that the purpose of the software is to tell whether an email reached its intended recipient. "I won't deny that it has a potentially stealth purpose," he adds. He implies pretty strongly that the stealthiness is just a side-effect and not in fact the main goal of the product.

The fact is that spying is built into the didtheyreadit product, by design. For example, it would have been easier for them to report to a message's original sender only whether a message had ever been read: "Yes, it's been read" or "No, it hasn't been read yet", and nothing more. Instead, they went to the extra trouble to report all kinds of additional information to the sender.

It does seem to be a side-effect of their web-bug-based design that didtheyreadit could gather much more information about where and when a message was read. But nothing forces them to actually collect and store this extra information, and nothing forces them to report it to anybody. They made a design choice, to store and pass on as much private information as they could.

Even the basic stealthiness of the product was a deliberate design choice. They are already adding an image to email messages. Why not make the image some kind of "delivery assured by didtheyreadit" icon? That way the message recipient would know what was happening; and the icon could be used for viral marketing -- click it and you're taken to the didtheyreadit site for a sales pitch. Why did they pass up this valuable marketing opportunity? They made a design choice to hide their product from email recipients.

Sometimes engineering imperatives force us to accept some bad features in order to get good ones. But this is not one of those cases. didtheyreadit is designed as a spying tool, and the vendor ought to admit it.

WirelessUnleashed is a new group blog, dedicated to wireless policy, from Kevin Werbach, Andrew Odlyzko, David Isenberg, and Clay Shirky. Based on the author-list alone, it's worth our attention.

E-voting vendors often argue that their systems must be secure, because they have been tested by "independent" labs. Elise Ackerman's story in Sunday's San Jose Mercury-News explains the depressing truth about how the testing process works.

There are only three labs, and they are overseen by a private body that is supported financially by the vendors. There is no government oversight. The labs have refused to release test results to state election officials, saying the results are proprietary and will be given only to the vendor whose product was tested:

Dan Reeder, a spokesman for Wyle, which functioned as the nation's sole testing lab from 1994 to 1997, said the company's policy is to provide information to the manufacturers who are its customers.

It's worth noting, too, that the labs do not test the security of the e-voting systems; they only test the systems' compliance with standards.

SysTest Labs President Brian Phillips said the security risks identified by the outside scientists were not covered by standards published by the Federal Election Commission. ``So long as a system does not violate the requirements of the standards, it is OK,'' Phillips said.

A few states do their own testing, or hire their own independent labs. It seems to me that state election officials should be able to get together and establish a truly independent testing procedure that has some teeth.

I just finished reading "The Creation of the Media," by Paul Starr, a sociology professor here at Princeton. This is an important book and I recommend it highly.

Starr traces the history of communications and the media in the U.S., from the 1700s until 1940. The major theme of the book is that the unique features of U.S. media derive from political choices made in the early days of each technology. These choices, once made, can be very difficult to unmake later -- witness the challenges now in reconsidering the use of the radio spectrum. After reading Starr's book, there can be little doubt that the choices we make now will shape the development of the Internet for a very long time.

For a concise summary of the book, it's hard to beat the review in Sunday's New York Times, by James Fallows.

In his limited space, Fallows leaves out one pattern noted by Starr that carries obvious lessons for us. When U.S. policy was at its best, it refused to give the titans of one technology control over the next technology that came along. For example, the Post Office was not given control of the telegraph; Western Union did not control the telephone; and AT&T; was locked out of radio. The lessons for us now, when the masters of old technologies, such as the movies and recorded music, want to control Internet technologies, should be obvious.

Mary Bridges offers an interesting report from a court hearing yesterday, in one of the RIAA's lawsuits against end users accused of P2P infringement. She points to an amicus brief filed by folks at Harvard's Berkman Center, at the Court's request, that explains some of the factual and legal issues raised in these suits.

[link credit: Derek Slater]

Can this be a coincidence?

This week, Congress prepares to vote on the Pirate Act, which would impose severe penalties for online copyright infringers and redirect the Department of Justice toward copyright enforcement and away from any other insignificant law enforcement problems facing the U.S. In the same week, Steven Landsburg advocates the death penalty for online criminals.

Perhaps Landsburg has the solution to the P2P problem as well. Imposing the death penalty on P2P infringers only makes sense, according to Landsburg's ironclad reasoning. See, executing somebody (even an innocent person) only imposes $10 million of harm; and if that deters even 0.5% of the $4 billion in estimated annual piracy losses, an execution save $20 million and is a good deal for everybody. To believe otherwise is simply irrational.

It's not too late to amend the Pirate Act.

[Note to any overly clueless readers: This is a joke. Proportionate penalties for copyright infringement are fine with me. Killing P2P users, no.]

Steven E. Landsburg has a somewhat creepy piece over at Slate, calling for the death penalty for computer worm authors. Ernest Miller responds.

UPDATE (12:15 AM): James Grimmelmann has some interesting thoughts on Landsburg's proposal.

Alex Halderman has created a page about the Word tracking bugs I described yesterday. He offers an example Word tracking bug for you to examine, and a scanner program that can find and remove Word tracking bugs on your computer.

When I wrote Monday about the new didtheyreadit.com privacy-invading email tracking system, I had no idea that an even more invasive system has been on the market for two years or so. This system, called readnotify.com, was pointed out by commenter Brian Parsons.

readnotify.com is an email tracking system that uses Web bugs (like didtheyreadit) and also uses a trick involving IFRAMEs (unlike didtheyreadit). The IFRAME trick cannot be disabled by the standard countermeasure of turning off remote image loading. There may not be an easy way to disable it in today's email software, short of turning off HTML email entirely.

Worse yet, readnotify offers a service that lets anyone put hidden tracking bugs in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other OLE-compliant document formats. When somebody opens a document containing one of these trackers, the time of the access is reported, along with the accessor's IP address (which often reveals their geographic location) and some configuration information about their computer.

The vulnerability in Word that readnotify exploits was discovered back in 2000 by Richard M. Smith. It got some press coverage back then, but was mostly ignored because there were no reports (at that time) of anybody exploiting the vulnerability. Now there are commercial products that exploit it. It's time for Microsoft to fix this vulnerability.

Recently I read two great articles on copyright: Tim Wu's Copyright's Communications Policy and Mark Lemley's Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property.

Wu's paper, which has already been praised widely in the copyright blogosphere, argues that copyright law, in addition to its well-known purpose of creating incentives for authors, has another component that amounts to a government policy on communications systems. This idea has been kicking around for some time, but Wu really nails it. His paper has a fascinating historical section describing what happened when new technologies, such as player pianos, radio, and cable TV, affected the copyright balance. In each case, after lots of legal maneuvering, a deal was cut between the incumbent industry and the challenger. Wu goes on to explain why this is the case, and what it all means for us today. There's much more to this paper; a single paragraph can't do it justice.

Lemley's paper is a devastating critique of a new style of copyright-extension argument. The usual rationale for copyright is that it operates ex ante (which is lawyerspeak for beforehand): by promising authors a limited monopoly on copying and distribution of any work they might create in the future, we give them an incentive to create. After the work is created, the copyright monopoly leads to inefficiencies, but these are necessary because we have to keep our promise to the author. The goal of copyright is to keep others from free-riding on the author's creative work.

Recently, we have begun hearing ex post arguments for copyright, saying that even for works that have already been created, the copyright monopoly is more efficient than a competitive market would be. Some of the arguments in favor of copyright term extension are of this flavor. Lemley rebuts these arguments very convincingly, arguing that they (a) are theoretically unsound, (b) are contradicted by practical experience, and (c) reflect an odd anti-market, central-planning bias. Based on this description, you might think Lemley's article is long and dense; but it's short and surprisingly readable. (Don't be fooled by the number of pages in the download -- they're mostly endnotes.)

JD Lasica has an important story about an FCC proposal, backed by the recording industry, to impose a broadcast-flag mandate on the design of digital radios. As JD suggests, this issue deserves much more attention than it has gotten.

He also has copies of correspondence on this issue exchanged between RIAA president Cary Sherman and Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) CEO Gary Shapiro. Shapiro notes that this proposal directly contradicts the RIAA's "Policy Principles on Digital Content," which say this:

Technology and record companies believe that technical protection measures dictated by the government (legislation or regulations mandating how these technologies should be designed, function and deployed, and what devices must do to respond to them) are not practical. The imposition of technical mandates is not the best way to serve the long-term interests of record companies, technology companies, and consumers ... The role of government, if needed at all, should be limited to enforcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional specifications reflecting consensus among affected interests.

The FCC's proposal will be open for public comment between June 16 and July 16.

A company called didtheyreadit.com has launched a new email-spying tool that is generating some controversy, and should generate more. The company claims that its product lets you invisibly track what happens to email messages you send: how many times they are read; when, where (net address and geographic location), and for how long they are read; how many times they are forwarded, and so on.

The company has two sales pitches. They tell privacy-sensitive people that the purpose is to tell a message’s sender whether the message got through to its destination, as implied by their company name. But elsewhere, they tout the pervasiveness and invisibility of their tracking tool (from their home page: "email that you send is invisibly tracked so that recipients will never know you’re using didtheyreadit").

Alex Halderman and I signed up for the free trial of the service, and sent tracked messages to a few people (with their consent), to figure out how the product works and how it is likely to fail in practice.

The product works by translating every tracked message into HTML format, and inserting a Web bug into the HTML. The Web bug is a one-pixel image file that is served by a web server at didtheyreadit.com. When the message recipient views the message on an HTML-enabled mailer, his viewing software will try to load the web bug image from the didtheyreadit server, thereby telling didtheyreadit.com that the email message is being viewed, and conveying the viewer’s network address, from which his geographic location may be deduced. The server responds to the request by streaming out a file very slowly (about eight bytes per second), apparently for as long as the mail viewer is willing to keep the connection open. When the user stops viewing the email message, his mail viewer gives up on loading the image; this closes the image-download connection, thereby telling didtheyreadit that the user has stopped viewing the message.

This trick of putting Web bugs in email has been used by spammers for several years now. You can do it yourself, if you have a Web site. What's new here is that this is being offered as a conveniently packaged product for ordinary consumers.

Because this is an existing trick, many users are already protected against it. You can protect yourself too, by telling your email-reading software to block loading of remote images in email messages. Some standard email-filtering or privacy-enhancement tools will also detect and disable Web bugs in email. So users of the didtheyreadit product can't be assured that the tracking will work.

It’s also possible to detect these web bugs in your incoming email. If you look at the source code for the message, you’ll see an IMG tag, containing a URL at didtheyreadit.com. Here’s an example:

<img src="http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?code=e070494e8453d5a233b1a6e19810f" width="1" height="1" />

The code, "e0704…810f" in my example, will be different in each tracked message. You can generate spurious “viewing” of the tracked message by loading the URL into your browser. Or you can put a copy of the entire web bug (everything that is intended above) into a Web page or paste it into an unrelated email message, to confuse didtheyreadit's servers about where the message went.

Products like this sow the seeds of their own destruction, by triggering the adoption of technical measures that defeat them, and the creation of social norms that make their use unacceptable.