Ehsan Nourbakhsh’s Blog

Reading a news article on Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) being forced to take down University Toolkit for violation of GPL license, I started to think how deep our privacy is being violated. As Brian Kerb of Washington post describes in his article, the University Toolkit is essentially a monitoring software, just identifying people with highest amount of network traffic with the file name, port address and traffic volume.

Beyond the irony of a copyright enforcing institution having to take down a software because of copyright violation, the software itself really annoys me. Imagine such observation shows some illegal activity going on the university network. Can this observation be used in a court of law? If not, why should such observation be done then. If yes, is it not a violation of “reasonable expectation of privacy”? If tapping someone’s internet activity is considered legal without a court order, same would hold for phone wire tapping. I am sure there is a problem in here, a huge problem!

• Washingtonpost: Brian Krebs: MPAA University ‘Toolkit’ Raises Privacy Concerns
• Wikipedia: The Internet, computers, and privacy in relation to the Fourth Amendment
• Electronic Frontier Foundation on Privacy

My favorite website, BoingBoing, has made a big mistake by naming Homer Simpson “Drunk Astronaut Pioneer”. That is a big mistake, since the pioneer of them all is nobody except Captain Archibald Haddock.

In the Explorers on the Moon (On a marché sur la Lune) book of series The Adventures of Tintin, Captain Haddock sneaks some bottles of Whisky and gets drunk in space. Since this book was published in 1954, there would be no doubt that Homer Simpson is not even in the game.