i was waiting for this to show up on RAW, but it hasn't so i decided
to forward it. Looks like the subscription model is being instituted.

A minimum contribution of 5 bucks a year seems like a pretty damn
good deal to me.

>From: info@rhizome.org
>Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 12:22:12 -0500
>To: twhid@mteww.com
>Subject: Membership Contributions
>
>Dear Timothy:
>
>Thank you for your contribution of $XXXXXX on XXXXXXX. Please take
>a moment to read this important message about a major change at
>Rhizome.org.
>
>Since 1996, Rhizome has been a place where anyone, regardless of where
>they are from or how well-known they are, can voice their opinion or
>announce their work. We started out as a single email list, and have
>grown into a nonprofit organization with a range of programs that
>support not only the discussion of new media art, but also its creation,
>presentation and preservation. The field of new media art has grown a
>lot since the early days, and Rhizome.org has grown with it--we now have
>22,000 members in 118 countries.
>
>As you probably know, Rhizome's financial situation has become
>increasingly difficult in recent months. We are no longer able to
>support our programs through our existing revenue sources--mostly grants
>from foundations whose support is shrinking.
>
>After much discussion with the community and among ourselves, the staff
>and board of Rhizome.org have decided to start requiring a contribution
>as part of membership. The minimum contribution will be $5 per year.
>
>We will continue to offer thank you gifts at higher levels, and hope to
>offer additional benefits as well, such as free magazine subscriptions
>and discounts at new media festivals and conferences.
>
>As a recent contributor, your membership will be extended for one year
>from the date of your last gift.
>
>We recognize that many Rhizome members have limited financial resources,
>but have concluded that Rhizome.org can only survive with substantial
>support from our community. Our goals in taking this step are to
>continue to serve our community, to grow as the field grows and to
>evolve our programs and services as the field changes.
>
>Please consider making an additional contribution if you are able. As
>usual, we accept contributions online via secure credit card transaction
>or PayPal at http://rhizome.org/support. We also accept checks, money
>orders or cash mailed to Rhizome.org, 180 Varick Street, 11th Floor, New
>York, NY 10014.
>
>Starting January 15, new members will have a 30 day grace period to
>evaluate what we have to offer and make a contribution. For those who
>can't afford even $5 per year, we will offer the site for free on
>Fridays. For students, we hope to arrange institutional memberships
>through colleges, universities and art schools.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>The Rhizome Crew
>
>+ + +
>
>Rhizome.org is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. For U.S.
>taxpayers, contributions to Rhizome are tax-deductible, minus the value
>of any goods or services received, to the extent allowed by law. If you
>would prefer not to receive emails like this one in the future, you can
>opt out at http://rhizome.org/preferences/email.rhiz.
>
--
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/technology/20MONI.html

Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet

By JOHN MARKOFF and JOHN SCHWARTZ

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet
service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad
monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its
users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National
Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year,
according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It
is a component of the effort to increase national security after the
Sept. 11 attacks.

The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing
the report, and it is intended to create public and private
cooperation to regulate and defend the national computer networks,
not only from everyday hazards like viruses but also from terrorist
attack. Ultimately the report is intended to provide an Internet
strategy for the new Department of Homeland Security.

Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional and
regulatory approval, would be a technical challenge because the
Internet has thousands of independent service providers, from garage
operations to giant corporations like American Online, AT&T,
Microsoft and Worldcom.

The report does not detail specific operational requirements,
locations for the centralized system or costs, people who were
briefed on the document said.

While the proposal is meant to gauge the overall state of the
worldwide network, some officials of Internet companies who have been
briefed on the proposal say they worry that such a system could be
used to cross the indistinct border between broad monitoring and
wiretap.

Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of the
nation's largest Internet providers, said, "Internet service
providers are concerned about the privacy implications of this as
well as liability," since providing access to live feeds of network
activity could be interpreted as a wiretap or as the "pen register"
and "trap and trace" systems used on phones without a judicial order.

Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before the
proposal could move forward.

Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical
Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal,
which includes a national network operations center, was still in
flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require
gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user
level.

But the need for a large-scale operations center is real, Ms. Olson
said, because Internet service providers and security companies and
other online companies only have a view of the part of the Internet
that is under their control.

"We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire picture,"
she said. "When something is happening, we don't know it's happening
until it's too late."

The government report was first released in draft form in September,
and described the monitoring center, but it suggested it would likely
be controlled by industry. The current draft sets the stage for the
government to have a leadership role.

The new proposal is labeled in the report as an "early-warning
center" that the board says is required to offer early detection of
Internet-based attacks as well as defense against viruses and worms.

But Internet service providers argue that its data-monitoring
functions could be used to track the activities of individuals using
the network.

An official with a major data services company who has been briefed
on several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see
how such capabilities could be provided to government without the
potential for real-time monitoring, even of individuals.

"Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to
be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official
said.

The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap
system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to
Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore
was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is
looking at the whole Internet."

One former federal Internet security official cautioned against
drawing conclusions from the information that is available so far
about the Securing Cyberspace report's conclusions.

Michael Vatis, the founding director of the National Critical
Infrastructure Protection Center and now the director of the
Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth, said it was
common for proposals to be cast in the worst possible light before
anything is actually known about the technology that will be used or
the legal framework within which it will function.

"You get a firestorm created before anybody knows what, concretely,
is being proposed," Mr. Vatis said.

A technology that is deployed without the proper legal controls
"could be used to violate privacy," he said, and should be considered
carefully.

But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis warned,
"You end up without technology that could be very useful to combat
terrorism, information warfare or some other harmful act."
--
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

hi everyone,

MTAA is really hyped on the whole creative commons effort and after
extensive discussions we've decided to slap a creative commons (cc)
license on our main web site MT Enterprises WorldWide
(http://www.mteww.com).

We've chosen a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license which
means people can use any part of our work as long as we get credit,
they use it for non-commercial purposes, and if it's a derivative
work they release it under the same exact license. you can read a
summary of this license here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0

you can peruse the legal code here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0-legalcode

**important**
the cc license doesn't cover our Website Unseen titles. These pieces
were originally created through individual agreements with collectors
and we don't think it would be ethical to release them under a
license different than the original agreement.

MTAA urges people to look into the Creative Commons licenses and, if
you can, help to open source cultural output and put the power back
into the hands of the creators, artists, musicians and authors.
--
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

from the nytimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/arts/design/18FEAR.html?8hpib

tasty quote:

"The kid is clueless, basically," a police official said on Monday,
demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art critic.

++
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

By strange coincidence, New York City's crime rate was reported
yesterday to be the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United
States, New York ranking 197th among 216 cities with at least 100,000
residents. This puts the city below squeaky-clean Provo, Utah, but
(thank goodness) still above Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

At the same time it turned out that those 37 black boxes with the
word "Fear" on them, which mysteriously turned up attached to girders
and walls in the Union Square subway station last Wednesday, were, as
you may have guessed from the start, an art project. The boxes, which
spread panic and caused the police to shut the station for hours and
call in the bomb squad, turn out to be the work of Clinton Boisvert,
a 25-year-old freshman at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, who
surrendered Monday to the Manhattan district attorney's office, which
intends to prosecute him on charges of reckless endangerment.

So now it is left to hapless, fledgling art students, fresh from
Michigan, to keep up the city's gritty reputation for crime. At least
New York can still take pride, as the nation's cultural capital, that
even our misdemeanors are works of art. Take that, Rancho Cucamonga.

First things first. Clinton, what an idiotic project. As the saying
goes, art this bad ought to be a crime. "The kid is clueless,
basically," a police official said on Monday, demonstrating
remarkable acumen as an art critic. The state of public and political
art has now declined to the point that plenty of people who follow it
simply presumed last week that what happened at Union Square must be
a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist or a threat by a union
member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960's, people might
have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70's, a
loony loner. Yesterday's loony loner is today's Conceptual artist.

Mr. Boisvert couldn't be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer
has told him not to talk to the press for a while. Trying to imagine
what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes
bearing "fear" were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New
Yorkers have felt since 9/11 - to give physical form to prevalent
emotion. But that's art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work
trafficked in emotional violence. Carried to an extreme, violence as
art leads to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's notorious remark,
which he tried desperately to retract, that the attack on the World
Trade Center was "the greatest work of art that is possible in the
whole cosmos."

Mr. Boisvert's inspiration was evidently Keith Haring, who made his
reputation in the 1980's drawing happy, cartoonish dancing figures
and barking dogs in chalk on the black paper pasted on unused
advertising spaces in subway stations. He was a graffiti artist,
which made him a harmless, beloved petty criminal. He did not leave
dangerous-looking black boxes in crowded public places. Mr. Boisvert
is an admirer of his, Barbara Schwartz, one of his teachers, told me
yesterday. She stressed that his project wasn't meant to be a prank.
She insisted that he was a very serious young man. The work was
intended to get people talking, she said.

Well, it did. She said she had no idea he was planning it. Her
assignment for the freshman foundation sculpture class was to make a
site-specific work, part of the curriculum for years. A couple of
students in the class shot films on subways. Mr. Boisvert had said he
was going to paint Fed Ex boxes black and arrange them in a room in
the school. Ms. Schwartz had reserved a room for him, she said, but
he mentioned nothing about "fear." He said he wanted a dance floor.
She thought he was planning a performance.

Clearly, he changed his mind after he spoke with her. "It was my last
class of the semester and everyone was presenting what they had done,
and his was the last project before the break at 2 o'clock that
afternoon," Ms. Schwartz said. "He put out snapshots he had taken
around the subway station. He said he had taken the boxes to Union
Square that morning and placed them in plain view of everyone. He
said he had painted the word `Fear' on them.

"We were all saying, `Wow, how interesting,' but I looked at him when
it dawned on me. I said, `Clinton, you didn't leave them there, did
you?' One of the other students then said the trains were no longer
stopping at Union Square and two others said there was a bomb threat.
I said, `Oh my God, do you think this has something to do with your
project?' He looked stricken. He never imagined what would happen."

Ms. Schwartz consulted her superiors at the school. Mr. Boisvert
consulted a lawyer.

He spent a night waiting in a holding cell for arraignment. His work
thereby became performance art. The history of modernism is littered
with artists whose outrageous provocations have made headlines; only
an elite few have made it into jail. Mr. Boisvert joins that company.

A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much fear as
he caused straphangers.
--
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

this is some very valuable work that empowers creators to release
their work into the world on their own terms instead of the all or
nothing approach that copyright law allows. it releases creative work
into the network in a new way which provides much more freedom for
creators and viewers.

+++
from creativecommons.org:

Creative Commons Unveils Machine-Readable Copyright Licenses

Monday, December 16, 2002

San Francisco, CA - Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to
promoting the creative reuse of intellectual works, launched its
first product today: its machine-readable copyright licenses,
available free of charge from creativecommons.org. The licenses allow
copyright holders to easily inform others that their works are free
for copying and other uses under specific conditions. These self-help
tools offer new ways to distribute creative works on generous terms -
from copyright to the public domain - and are available free of
charge.

"People want to bridge the public domain with the realm of private
copyrights," said Stanford Law Professor and Creative Commons
Chairman Lawrence Lessig. "Our licenses build upon their creativity,
taking the power of digital rights description to a new level. They
deliver on our vision of promoting the innovative reuse of all types
of intellectual works, unlocking the potential of sharing and
transforming others' work."

Creative Commons licenses help people express a preference for
sharing their work - on their own terms. Copyright holders who decide
to waive some of their rights but retain others can choose a license
that declares "Some Rights Reserved" by expressing whether they
require attribution or allow commercial usage or modifications to
their work. Additionally copyright holders may select to waive all
their rights and declare "No Rights Reserved" by dedicating their
work to the public domain. After the copyright holder chooses their
license or public domain dedication, it is expressed in three formats
to easily notify others of the license terms:

1. Commons Deed. A simple, plain-language summary of the license,
with corresponding icons.

2. Legal Code. The fine print needed to fine-tune your copyrights.

3. Digital Code. A machine-readable translation of the license that
helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its
terms of use.

"Our model was inspired in large part by the open-source and free
software movements. The beauty of their approach is that they're
based on copyright owners' consent - independent of any legislative
action - and motivated out of a wonderful mixture of self-interest
and community spirit," explained Creative Commons Executive Director
Glenn Otis Brown. "One of the great lessons of these software
movements is that the choice between self-interest and community is a
false choice. If you're clever about how you leverage your rights,
you can cash in on openness. Sharing, done properly, is both smart
and right."

Various organizations and people have pledged their support for
Creative Commons, including Byrds founder Roger McGuinn, DJ Spooky,
iBiblio, the Internet Archive, MIT Open Courseware project, O'Reilly
& Associates, People Like Us, the Prelinger Collection/Library of
Congress, Rice University's Connexions project, Stanford Law School,
and Sun Microsystems. Implementers include musicians, writers,
teachers, scholars, scientists, photographers, filmmakers,
publishers, graphic designers, Web hobbyists, as well as listeners,
readers, and viewers.

Copyright holders can choose the appropriate license for their
digital content at http://creativecommons.org/license/. Additional
information is available through the technical fact sheet and
testimonials document.

Behind Creative Commons

Cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael
Carroll, Lawrence Lessig, and Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, MIT
computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary
filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, and public domain Web
publisher Eric Eldred founded Creative Commons in 2001. Fellows and
students at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law
School helped get the project off the ground. A non-profit
corporation, Creative Commons is based at and receives generous
support from Stanford Law School and the school's Center for Internet
and Society. Learn more.

--
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>