The Human Genome project was completed at the start of the last decade, and only in the last two years have we really begun to reap the fruits of the immense undertaking. I talk about some of commercial players and legal issues surrounding the wide spread adoption of personal genomic technology in medicine at the First AMA-IEEE Conference on Individualized Healthcare blog.

Incidentally, I’m also on the organizing committee for the conference mentioned above. Consider attending the conference if you are interested in Individualized Healthcare!

First AMA-IEEE EMBS Medical Technology Conference on Individualized Health Care
23-23 March 2010, Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC

Joseph Brownstein from ABC News forwarded me this article that absolutely infuriates me:

Copyright Silliness on Campus

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren’t expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies

…

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have bribed so many members of Congress that the house committees responsible for education and copyright have decided to bend over backwards and practically ask universities to expel students for copyright violations.

Congress constantly complains about America losing its technical superiority. Maybe if our universities receive the proper funding and are ask to concentrate on the things that really matter, we wouldn’t have this problem?

As reported from Slashdot and BBC, Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the maker of HD-DVD’s encryption scheme has declared war on the blogging community.

It all started when AACS’s HD-DVD encryption was cracked and the compromised key began leaking onto the web. Instead of perfecting their technology, AACS decided to pressure various websites (including the tremendously popular digg) to remove the offending key. The online community revolted and the compromised key soon appeared all over the web.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Now AACS is promising legal and technical recourse for EVERYONE who posts the above key. (Read BBC’s account here, and slashdot’s account here). Hey, if they want a war, we’ll give them a war.

What is kind of amusing and sad about all of this is that an unrevokable crack has already been developed by the good folks over at doom9. Read more about it here.

I am storongly against DRM technology in general, and as these implementations become more and more draconian, it’ll only be a matter of time before the general public revolts too.

Two decisions regarding technology were handed down by US courts today and I am once again disappointed by the result. Incidentally, the two cases just happen to be my two pet peeves, personal privacy and patents.

In the case of Vonage vs Verizon, a judge has issued an injunction against Vonage barring them from acquiring new customers on the grounds that Vonage has violated 3 very very broad software patents of Verizon’s. Not delving into the issue of whether software patents should be issued at all (and most of the world in fact do not issue software patents), Verizon’s own patents seem to cover nothing more than “obvious extensions” to current technology. See Clint Ricker’s brilliant analysis of the patents involved at his blog. Why can’t the US patent office do their job properly?!

In a much murkier case, a university student who was hacking sites like ebay.com was convicted based on evidence that the systems administrator of the network collected while hacking the student’s computer! Wire has published an article summarizing this case pretty well: Court Okays Counter-Hack of eBay Hacker’s Computer. This precedent can have potentially horrifying repercussions downstream. What stops Microsoft from deleting all of your files because they *think* you have a pirated version of Windows? or are we now going to let the RIAA hack computers that they *think* might contain pirated songs? Bruce Schneier, the CTO of Counterpane has written a great editorial about the subject: Vigilantism Is a Poor Response to Cyberattack.

Our civil liberties and our ability to innovate continue to get stymied by bad policies from the US government. Perhaps 1984 wasn’t nearly as fictional as people had thought.

Students often complain they are treated as nothing more than a collection of standardized scores and their GPAs. Well, it turns out adults are similarly judged by numbers, the most prominent of which is the credit score. Everyone from employers, banks to landlords use credit scores to get a quantiative measure of one’s “trustworthiness”. Even medical schools are beginning to use credit scores to evaluate applicants. When this single number is of such pervasive influence in everyday life, one might have expected strong government oversight… but you’d be wrong.

Until recently, most consumers have no idea what’s in their credit report. The information within it can be completely wrong and they wouldn’t even know! It wasn’t until 2003 that US Congress passed the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act (FACTA). It finally guaranteed consumers access to one annual credit report from each of the 3 major consumer credit agencies: TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. Exparian, of course just couldn’t wait to create some confusion for consumers. While the government mandated credit reports can be obtained here:

http://www.annualcreditreport.com

Experian decided they would operate a PAID credit viewing service here:

http://www.freecreditreport.com

When a service charges 13 dollars a month to view credit reports, how exactly does that qualify as free? MSNBC has even written an article on this most blatant deceptive marketing scam.

Don’t fall for FreeCreditReport.com

Also one year ago, credit bureau Experian was also slapped on the wrist by the Federal Trade Commission for misleading consumers at its FreeCreditReport.com Web site. The FTC said Experian didn’t make clear to consumers that they would be charged $79 for an annual subscription after they signed up at FreeCreditReport.com.

What the FTC didn’t say (but was abundantly clear to anyone with a brain) was that FreeCreditReport.com and Experian were benefiting from confusion over news stories telling consumers were entitled to a free copy of their credit report every year. And the site was designed to add to the confusion.

While not admitting wrongdoing, Experian agreed last August to give consumers refunds and make the terms of its product clearer.

….

Given all the confusion, and the legal action, it�s amazing that FreeCreditReport.com is allowed to continue operating. I know it continues to cause mix-ups. Earlier this year, during the hubbub about the missing Veterans Administration laptop, I heard experts testifying before Congress point to the wrong site by accident.

Exparian has even recruited other websites (including movie ticket websites!) to sign up unsuspecting consumers onto their service, hoping they wouldn’t look hard enough at their credit cards bills to notice this recurring charge:

CIC*Triple Advantage877-4816825

The few times we actually need lawyers for a class action lawsuit and they are nowhere to be found!

Via Sara at Orcinus (read at Geoff‘s blog):

I’ve been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America’s top universities. The message is short and simple: “Teach what you like, it�s all fine with us. But if you put ID in your science courses, we will not accept those courses as adequate for admission to our campus.”

…

In a story that seems to have gotten almost no attention outside the local area, the University of California — the nation’s largest university system (motto: Fiat Lux, or “let there be light”) — has been engaged in a legal battle with Calvary Chapel Christian School over the question of what is an acceptable science education, and what rights a university has when it comes to drawing those lines.

While various school boards around the country continue to start small skirmishes over the merits of intelligent design, it is nice to finally see a university take a firm stand in such matters. It is very frustrating, and indeed quite maddening to watch so many institutions capitulate to the mere possibility of bad publicity. Whatever happened to standing up for one’s principles?

It is truly sad to see Americans holding Corporate America to higher standards of transparency and accountability than their own government. Acts such as Sarbanes-Oxley passed in 2002 greatly increased the civil and criminal penalties for executives who knowingly lie (or fail to properly disclose relevant information) to their shareholders. Yet, the current administration is busy exculpating themselves and pulling the wool over our eyes?

From digg and the LA Times, Cheney visit ruling appealed.

WASHINGTON � The Bush administration asked an appeals court Wednesday to overrule a federal judge and allow the White House to keep secret any records of visitors to Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence and office.

From Carl‘s blog and ThinkProgress, John McCain�s War On Blogs.

Now he has introduced legislation that would treat blogs like Internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles. Some highlights of the legislation:

� Commercial websites and personal blogs �would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.�

� Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain�s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face �even stiffer penalties� than ISPs.

With so much political posturing coming from the current administration, one would have hoped that their copious free time is a result of their extremely high productivity. Unfortunately, the complete opposite is true.

From the Christian Science Monitor, This do-nothing Congress did all the wrong things.

At 4:35 a.m. last Saturday, Sen. Bill Frist performed his last act as majority leader. To the handful of members still there, he announced the adjournment of the 109th Congress “sine die” – that is, forever – leaving behind the most unproductive session in recent history. Congress has been in session only 103 days this year, compared with 110 for President Truman’s “do-nothing Congress.”

It did not perform its most basic constitutional duty – to vote the appropriations necessary to run the government. Of 11 departmental appropriations, it had managed to pass only two – defense and homeland security. The rest of the government was left to limp along on a stopgap resolution that was constantly in danger of expiring – the next deadline is Feb. 15.

Other countries riot over this sort of duplicity, where is America’s infamous moral outrage?

Every year, thousands of studies and experiments are conducted on humans by universities and research centers across the nation. The experiments span the gamut from pharmaceutical trials for potential new cancer drugs to basic psychiological studies testing human reflex speeds. The one thing that all the experiments have in common is their relations to an ominously named group called the Institute Review Board (IRB). Wikipedia defines the IRB as such:

Institutional review board/independent ethics committee (IRB/IEC) (also known as ethical review board) is an appropriately constituted group that has been formally designated to review and monitor biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects. In accordance with Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and HHS regulations, an IRB has the authority to approve, require modifications in (to secure approval), or disapprove research. An IRB performs critical oversight functions for research conducted on human subjects that are scientific, ethical, and regulatory.

….

The ultimate goal of the IRB is to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects involved in studies, including but not limited to:

• Full disclosure of potential risks in studies
• Provisions made for forseeable risks
• Ensure that subject participation is purely voluntary

It is in fact the last point above that I believe NYU’s psychology department has fully violated. In it’s “The Advanced Psychology Student’s Guide to Fulfilling the Research Participation Requirement through Participation in Studies“, it says:

One requirement of your advanced course in psychology is that you fulfill a Research Requirement by either taking part as a subject in 2 hours of psychology studies, with the option of doing 1 more hour for extra credit, or preparing a written critique as described in the Research Requirement Selection Form. This guide has been prepared to give you all the information you need to fulfill the research requirement by participation in studies. PLEASE READ IT CAREFULLY! If you have changed your mind and would prefer to choose the literature and critique option, please contact your instructor. You must choose either participation or a literature search; credit from both may not be combined to fulfill the Research Participation Requirement.

….

I believe that this is the quintessential ethical outrage that the IRBs were instituted to prevent. The NYU psychology department is clearly using its position of power to coerce students into their experiments. One might argue that there is a choice given to students, either be part of an experiment or prepare a written critique. However, the existence of such a choice does not make it any more voluntary. In fact, I strongly believe that even this supposed choice is unethnical, as it essentially excuses students from a homework assignment in exchange for doing favors for the department.

The most telling part of the story can be found in the text itself. A cursory reading of the text will show the department’s clear preference towards students taking part in a study over the submission of a written critique, with extra credit being available only for those students who choose to be subjects of experiments.

As a researcher and a staunch privacy advocate, I find NYU’s behavior in this matter absolutely reprehensible. I have since sent this page to NYU’s IRB and will update with any response that I receive.

The warez scene has once again suffered some significant losses due to the recent multi-country crackdowns.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8419601/

Alleged Net pirates raided across globe
11-nation operation targets large-scale online distributors

Updated: 1:00 p.m. ET June 30, 2005
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department announced Thursday an 11-nation crackdown on large-scale Internet pirates who illegally distribute first-run movies, video games and other copyrighted materials.

FBI agents and investigators in the other nations conducted 90 searches starting Wednesday, arresting four people and shutting down at least eight major online distribution servers for pirated works, a Justice official said. Authorities also seized hundreds of computers in raids in the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales planned a news conference Thursday afternoon to announce the arrests and other measures that law enforcement officials are taking as part of Operation Site Down.

Among those arrested was Chirayu Patel of Fremont, Calif., on charges of violating federal copyright protection laws, said a law enforcement official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to preempt the official announcement.

Patel is alleged to be a member of a “warez” group, a kind of underground Internet co-op that is set up to trade in copyrighted materials. Warez (pronounced “wares”) groups are extraordinarily difficult to infiltrate because users talk only in encrypted chat rooms, their computer servers require passwords and many are located overseas, the FBI has said.
Warez groups differ from popular file-swapping networks, where millions of files are shared without such precautions.

Last month, authorities shut down a popular Web site that facilitated the downloading of movies and other materials. Investigators said many of the copyright movies were available through the Elite Torrents site even before their commercial release. No arrests were announced at the time.

President Bush signed a new law last month setting tough penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught distributing a movie or song prior to its commercial release.

Keep in mind that the scene derives absolutely no personal benefit / profit from it’s action, AND the scene is what keeps many of these companies afloat in the first place. Let me elaborate on the latter point. Many of you probably have no idea how much some of the commonly used softwares cost, so let me give you a few examples:

• Adobe Photoshop CS: 599.00
• Adobe Acrobat 7: 449.00
• Microsoft Office 2003 Standard: 399.00

Most people probably take these softwares for granted because they know someone who just happened to have given them a copy for free. Realistically, how many of you would have bought these softwares at the prices listed above? I would wager that the answer would be close to nil. Many of you would probably seek cheaper alternatives to accomplish the same task, for example:

• Gimp: Free
• OpenOffice: Free

The feature set for these cheaper softwares are currently weaker, but how many of you truly know how to use all the functions on photoshop? Did you really need Photoshop to add borders to your digital pictures? However, due to the warez scene, most people do use photoshop (hey, it’s free, why not?) for image editing (regardless of how trivial the editing is), thus giving photoshop huge amounts of market share (intangible asset+++) that otherwise might have belonged to smaller software houses. This has the end result of eliminating virtually all their competition but also making them far less competitive for pricing (why make it cheap, corporations have no alternatives, end-users aren’t paying!).

Numbers in the billions are commonly thrown around by the software industries when they discuss how software piracy has affected their bottomlines. As I addressed earlier, many copies of their software would not have been used anyway if not for warez. Furthermore, those who use warez commonly contribute value to the software that they’ve warezed. Let’s use Adobe Photoshop as an example again. Many of the tutorials and plugins that you see floating around the internet are created by users who have warezed the software! Furthermore, because so many users begin using their software at a young age, many of them end up using them in their professional work (with legal licenses).

This sort of intangible assets and continuing market shares is something that these companies secretly enjoy and relish while they publicly blast warez. If warez were to entirely disappear today, microsoft and adobe would be in serious trouble…

MIDDLETOWN, Connecticut (AP) — A woman charged with causing a fatal car crash in 1999 says that she couldn’t have been behind the wheel because she was performing a sex act on the driver at the time.

Heather Specyalski, 33, was charged with second-degree manslaughter in the crash that killed businessman Neil Esposito. Prosecutors allege that she was driving Esposito’s Mercedes-Benz convertible when it veered off the road and hit several trees.

But Specyalski claims that Esposito was driving, and she was performing oral sex on him at the time, said her attorney, Jeremiah Donovan. He noted that Esposito’s pants were down when he was thrown from the car.

Superior Court Judge Robert L. Holzberg ruled Tuesday that Specyalski can proceed with the defense, despite objections by the prosecutor.

“A defendant has a right to offer a defense no matter how outlandish, silly or unbelievable one might think it will be,” Holzberg said. He added: “No one ever told me in law school that we’d be having these kinds of conversations in open court.”

Assistant State’s Attorney Maureen Platt said the defense is flawed.

“His pants could have been down because he was mooning a car he was drag racing,” Platt said. “His pants could have been down because he was urinating out of a window. His pants could have been down because he wasn’t feeling well.”

Also Tuesday, Holzberg denied Donovan’s motion to use gender as grounds to eliminate jurors. Donovan had argued that women would be biased and more likely to convict.