Administrivia: Sorry about the problem with the RSS newsfeed today. It should be fixed at this point. (1:25 PM Eastern) I've been making some updates in the background and got a little ahead of myself. One of the changes I made had some, ahem, unforeseen consequences. I have reversed the change and am currently investigating how both functions can live together.

Holt Uncensored :: A Candid Look at Books and the Book Industry : Publishing News : Booksellers : Bookstores : Reviews Interviews - Literary Lynching. Pat Holt is a former Book Review Editor and Critic for The "San Francisco Chronicle".

It is with great pleasure that I have gained the consent of Dorothy Bryant to publish her work-in-progress, "Literary Lynching," in serial fashion at HoltUncensored.com. Below you'll see what is available so far. You can start with the Introduction, but feel free to read the chapters out of order as they are compiled.

You may download and print any portion of the book you wish. There is no charge, but if you are a teacher, librarian or other professional who plans to copy and distribute excerpts, let Dorothy know. I've created a special mailbox for her at dorothy@holtuncensored.com. Dorothy also welcomes feedback or questions, which she'll try to answer.

Culture News from Wired News - Literary Lynching Goes Online.

Since Sept. 11, authors Susan Sontag, Michael Moore, Barbara Kingsolver and others have been criticized by some in the media for making statements and writing essays critical of the U.S. government.

"Speak your truth at the wrong time and you get whacked," said columnist Pat Holt, describing the practice known as "literary lynching."

The practice of criticizing authors for speaking their minds has been going on for centuries, said Dorothy Bryant, whose new book, Literary Lynching, will be distributed free, chapter by chapter, on Holt's online newsletter, Holt Uncensored.

Bryant, who is 72 and the author of 13 books, had given up on Literary Lynching, which focuses on the silencing of Hannah Arendt, William Styron, Thomas Hardy, Kate Chopin, George Orwell and Ivan Turgenev.

"Then came Sept. 11, and the ongoing aftermath of unofficial attacks on writers and speakers by frightened people who seem to confuse discussion or dissent with disloyalty," Bryant said.

Unfortunately for Bryant, publishing houses weren't interested. Enter Holt, who said she knew publishers were wrong when they said there was no definable market for Bryant's book. Inspired by Seth Godin, who gave away an online version of his Unleashing the Ideavirus, Holt approached Bryant with a similar plan.

"I didn't suggest this as a way to find a publisher for Dorothy," Holt says. "I did it because the concept of literary lynching is important, it's beautifully written and investigated, and of course it's timely as heck."

Bryant says she has no idea what to expect from putting the book online for free. "That's why the whole thing is such fun. At my age you just want to have fun," she says.

Privacy News from Wired News - Yahoo's 'Opt-Out' Angers Users.

In an e-mail that begins, "Your privacy is very important to us," Yahoo informs its users that it will begin providing personal information to marketers, even if the user had already opted against it.

[ ... ]

Yahoo has also added users' home addresses and phone numbers to their "Yahoo ID" profiles.

Predictably to everyone but perhaps Yahoo, user reaction to that e-mail has been less than positive.

Marketing and privacy experts predict that Yahoo's action will have a widespread and detrimental effect on all electronic sales and services, due to increasing privacy concerns.

[ ... ]

Many users said they deliberately did not supply their home addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information when they signed up for their IDs, but later gave that information to Yahoo-affiliated merchants. That contact information was seemingly added to their Yahoo ID profiles, and then marked "Yes" by Yahoo for receiving mail and phone solicitations.

Slashdot | Distributed Computing Program Hidden in Kaza.

CNET NEWS.COM - Stealth P2P network hides inside Kazaa.

A California company has quietly attached its software to millions of downloads of the popular Kazaa file-trading program and plans to remotely "turn on" people's PCs, welding them into a new network of its own.

Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a California-based digital advertising technology company, has been distributing its 3D ad technology along with the Kazaa software since late last fall. But in a federal securities filing Monday, the company revealed it also has been installing more ambitious technology that could turn every computer running Kazaa into a node in a new network controlled by Brilliant Digital.

The company plans to wake up the millions of computers that have installed its software in as soon as four weeks. It plans to use the machines--with their owners' permission--to host and distribute other companies' content, such as advertising or music. Alternatively, it might borrow people's unused processing power to help with other companies' complicated computing tasks.

[ ... ]

The immediate plans for Altnet, Brilliant and the new peer-to-peer network remain unclear.

Bermeister said the company had been testing the technology along with ad giants DoubleClick as a way to serve ordinary Web ads more quickly. Under this plan, an ad that a person sees on a Web site might be hosted by a nearby computer running Brilliant's Altnet instead of on a central ad server, as now typically happens with DoubleClick.

[ ... ]

However, people who accept "terms of service" already distributed with Brilliant's and Kazaa's software are already agreeing to let their computers be used without any payment at all.

"You hereby grant (Brilliant) the right to access and use the unused computing power and storage space on your computer/s and/or Internet access or bandwidth for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing," the terms of service read. "The user acknowledges and authorizes this use without the right of compensation."

Anybody who declines this provision is not able to install the Kazaa file-swapping software. Brilliant's software can be disabled or removed after installation without affecting Kazaa's performance, however.

CIO Insight - Global Encryption by Satellite?

Via an encryption scheme that uses GPS satellites to track users' locations, Georgetown professor Dorothy Denning takes the copyright fight to Hollywood--and into the heavens.

[ ... ]

Working with a Hollywood movie executive and an Internet entrepreneur, Denning has invented a way to keep information scrambled until it reaches a precise location, as determined by GPS satellites. Armed with Denning's geo-encryption system, which she co-patented in 1998, only people in specified locations, such as movie theaters, living rooms or corporate conference rooms, would be able to unscramble the data.

But the idea also has drawn interest from the Pentagon. Coded messages that the Defense Department sends its commanders in the field, for example, could be deciphered only in a certain room of a certain building in, say, Kandahar--greatly reducing the risk of malicious interception.

[ ... ]

The idea has its share of critics: "The problem is making the encryption device and GPS receiver tamperproof," says Bruce Schneier, a fellow cryptographer. Denning agrees that "you'll never solve the security challenge completely." But she believes geo-encryption has seriously upped the ante in the brain race against hackers.

Slashdot | Geo-Encryption: Global Copyright Defense?

Yahoo! News - Whatever Happened to Carnivore?

Its name may have changed from Carnivore to DCS-1000, but the controversial cybersnooping software used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still on the hunt for information, and likely is scouring vast amounts of Internet communication.

In fact, Carnivore probably is chomping on more data than ever as a result of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States. Following those events, it was widely reported that the FBI installed its e-mail snooping program on several Internet service provider (ISP) networks around the nation.

But a recent court order may mean that more information will be revealed about how Carnivore works and what it is being used for, according to privacy advocates.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Carnivore Update.

ZDNet: Why the Feds CAN'T protect kids from Internet porn.

A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, and others to overturn the Act is now appearing before a three-judge panel in Philadelphia, on its way to an almost certain appearance in Washington before the Supremes.

It would be knee-jerk easy to say that the ACLU is once again standing up for pornographers and supporting free speech well beyond reasonable bounds. But the ALA? It's hard to imagine that America's librarians don't want to protect their young patrons from the evils of the Internet. There must be something going on here.

The librarians have raised two principal objections. First, they say the filtering technology itself doesn't work very well. One expert witness for the defense testified that blocking software was accurate 92 percent of the time and did not inordinately filter out inoffensive material. The ALA says it will present experts of its own to refute that claim and show that blocking software does a poor job of filtering out objectionable material, and all too often, blocks legitimate content.

New York Times - free registration required At Shea, Lines So Long It Looked Like La Guardia.

Michael Morris arrived at the Mets' opening day game about an hour early yesterday, ready to take in the spring air and enjoy a ballgame with his son, Richard.

But they were not prepared for what greeted them: snaking lines similar to those at airports, with security guards and police officers searching fans as they entered the stadium and telling them to empty all bags that were not see-through. The increased security meant that some people, even some who arrived early, missed the first inning as they were subjected to complete searches.

New York Times - free registration required For All in Search of Skeletons, U.S. Opened Its Closet at Midnight.

``I want to see if he was living with his second wife, Dora, or if he had gone off and married another woman without divorcing her,'' Mr. Leclerc said shortly before the microfilm was made public at the stroke of midnight. ``He was married five times that I know of, four times I can prove and as many as seven times to hear my relatives talk.''

Such were the prickly personal questions that brought genealogy buffs out during vampire hours here and across the country for the unveiling of information on individuals and families gathered in the 1930 census. Under federal law, this data, which, most juicily, discloses who was living with whom and in what dwelling, is kept secret for privacy reasons until 72 years have come and gone.

New York Times - free registration required Judge Weighs Dismissal of Charges in Digital Copyright Case.

A federal judge heard arguments today on a request to dismiss the prosecution of a Russian software company charged with violating a digital-copyright law. The case is one of the first legal challenges to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which prohibits the sale of tools that can help people circumvent the electronic locks that protect copyrighted digital works like music or books.

New York Times - free registration required National Briefing: Washington.

Shielding Names In Subsidy Program Federal lawmakers put provisions into the $171 billion farm bill to restrict the release of information about who receives federal farm subsidies. Last year, the Environmental Working Group, a research group, posted the information, which it received through a Freedom of Information Act request, on a Web site; some farmers said the site was an invasion of their privacy.