Thursday, November 7, 2024

May 21, 2001– Newsletter #131

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Goodies to Go ™
May 21, 2001–Newsletter #131

This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com

Please visit https://www.htmlgoodies.com
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Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,


The manuscript for my third book, Web Design
Goodies went to press last week. You can pre-order it
right now from Amazon.com. Head to the HTML
Goodies homepage at: https://www.htmlgoodies.com and
you’ll see the link to order the book.


I’m proud to say that the book took so much longer to
write than my other two because it is not content from
HTML Goodies. It was written completely apart from
the site. I would guess that 95% of the book does not
appear on the HTML Goodies site. We also performed a
very large survey in regards to the topic. We wanted to
make the book something that could be understood and
helpful to anyone who picked it up in a bookstore right up
the ladder to graduate students.


I’m very happy with the finished product.


Did you hear


The U.S. Pentagon appears to be leading the pack as the
site people would most like to hack. According to the
Pentagon’s Chief Information Officer, there has been an
almost steady flow of hack attacks this year. Last year
215 of 23,662 attacks were successful. This year appears
to be on track to break the record.


Egarden.com is calling it quits. The online store closed
its doors on the one-year anniversary. If that’s not much
of a shock to you, how about Dell computers also
shutting down its online marketplace just four months
after it opened? Wow. It appears to be getting rougher
out there.


Just when I decide to buy a PDA, it appears as if the
market is drying up. Palm has announced that sales are
falling quite short of all expectations. Financial analysts
are stating that this might be the quickest downturn yet in
the world of high tech. It’s so bad that it’s been
suggested that the company leave the hardware side of
the business altogether. All this happened in just six
months.


Now onto today’s topic


I make part of my living as a University professor. I’ve
now been at my latest position with Southeastern
Louisiana University for two years. I am what is known
as tenure track. That means I am under consideration
to become a tenured professor.


The process is more or less stringent from school to
school but where I am, the process is six years long with
yearly evaluations. In order to get tenure I must have
good teaching evaluations, provide service to the
university, and publish.


You may have heard the term, publish or perish. Well,
that’s a true statement. Tenure track is actually a double-
edged sword. You either get tenure or you are out of a
job. If you do get tenure, it certainly isn’t a guaranteed
job. It doesn’t mean that a professor can now sit on his or
her can, do nothing and collect a paycheck. In fact,
research from the NEA and the American Federation of
Teachers shows that tenured professors generally publish
more than untenured professors. The few stories you
may have heard regarding lazy tenured professors is
certainly not representative of the vast majority of college
and university educators.


Tenure was created to act as a shield for a professor
whose research and writings might anger or go against
the beliefs of an establishment and in turn threaten his
or her job. A tenured professor has met the requirements
of his or her school and, because of meeting the
requirements, has been granted a kind of safe haven in
which to produce research.


Well!


There’s this Princeton professor by the name of Edward
Felten who, as many professors do, took the time to
deliver the results of some research to a group of people
at Stanford University.


Professor Felten only delivered a good portion of his
research leaving off some of the best parts. You see, he
was in fear of being sued for what he might say.


Professor Felden headed up a research team that included
persons from Rice University and Xerox-PARC. Guess
what they did.


They broke music security technologies created by the
Secure Digital Music Initiative, a collection of major
record labels and hardware/software manufacturers
dedicated to protecting digital audio content. What
watermarks they created, Felten, and his team, broke.
Better yet, the entire process of breaking the watermarks
took only three weeks.


These are obviously some smart researchers.


It seems easy enough to me. Professor Felten performed
research and that research should be published. Tenure
should protect him.


Not so fast. Professor Felten did present his research, but
stopped short of giving away all the answers mainly
because of a threat delivered by senior vice president of
business and legal affairs for the RIAA, Matthew
Oppenheim.


Oppenheim stated, in a letter to Felten, that publishing or
presenting his results could land him on the wrong side
of a federal lawsuit.


Oh, it gets better. Later that week, Cary Sherman,
general council for the RIAA, said the letter was a
mistake. They stated they were taken aback regarding
how the letter would have been perceived. The RIAA,
through Sherman, stated that the group should have been
more tactful. Sherman went on to say that if Felten
published his research that he would not be sued.


Right.


The RIAA’s position is that people should be involved in
this kind of research but that the results should not harm
another’s technology. Felten countered by saying that the
technology was just too easy to break. One member of
his team, Felten said, broke one of the codes by accident.


I’d like to stand here, throw my fist into the air, and tell
professor Felten to publish the work anyway but it’s not
my university and my position that would take the heat.
This is the question of tenure being brought into play.
Professor Felten has created research that goes against an
establishment and that establishment got its guff up.


Will society stand for such a thing? Can a professor at an
institution of higher education be silenced simply because
the major corporation he or she is researching doesn’t like
the results? We’ll see.


I am saying society rather than the university structure
because if a single university went up against a force as
financially powerful as the RIAA, they would be defeated
and bankrupt as a result. It could ruin the school.


No, where the RIAA will be defeated in such a case is in
the court of public opinion. The NAPSTER debacle will
uphold that statement if it hasn’t already.


I would suggest that the RIAA look to the results of
professor Felten’s research as help. If it were really as
easy to crack the codes as professor Felten said it was,
then why sue? Take the money you were going to use to
sue the team and give it them. Fund them. You got beat.
They beat you.


If you can’t beat em’, fund em’. Get these people on
your side so that they are now working for you rather
than against you.


The only problem isthey may not want to work for you.
They may want to stay on the opposite side of the fence.
If so, then once again, don’t sue. Take the money you’d
spend on the suit and put it towards research and
technology. It’s obvious that the technology you came up
with was cracked like a walnut. Put more funding into it.
Better it.


Hopefully society will stand behind a professor who is
performing credible research allowing him or her to
publish results without sitting in fear of lawsuits and
monetary punishment.


If we don’t, the new line may become, publish and
perish.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


That’s that. Thanks for reading.


Joe Burns, Ph.D.


And Remember: Speaking of publishing, Emily
Dickinson wrote over 1700 poems. How many were
published during her lifetime? None.

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