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From ZDnet, the New York Times and TechDirt comes this story: New York City has subpoenaed a TXTmob server that was used to coordinate street protests during the 2004 Republican national Convention.

The city’s lawyers are litigating civil suits brought by hundreds of protesters who were arrested during the convention. All the city’s lawyers want are the records of every user and message sent on the system.

TXTmob can be used to resend text messages to hundreds of mobile phones in real time. The software is available on the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s web site. Wikipedia has a good article about the service.

Tad Hirsch, the creator of the TXTmob software, does not want to release the information on his server:

“There’s a principle at stake here,” he said recently by telephone. “I think I have a moral responsibility to the people who use my service to protect their privacy.”

Hirsch has appealed for donations on his web site. Hirsch says some of that data no longer exists. He’s been busy writing his dissertation at MIT.

Who’s got the data?

There are many web and mobile services like Facebook and Twitter that could be used to coordinate protests, according to this Wired article. Groups need to consider who operates their messaging servers and who controls the data for their web services. Hosting an application like TXTmob on one’s own server is one way to avoid a Web portal or service provider’s restrictions.

Even so, the server has to be connected to the Internet, and the text messages are resent to subscribers through the mobile phone carriers servers. The telecom carriers routinely archive text messages sent through their systems, as I mentioned on 3 February 2008, and the carriers will provide messages and logs if subpoenaed.

I may have to revisit the article I wrote last year for the Encyclopedia of Business Ethics & Society. Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology had the following response regarding the TXTmob subpoena in Wired’s article, and I agree with him:

“In civil cases, the law seems to prohibit the disclosure of stored communications in response to a civil discovery subpoena because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 prohibits disclosure of stored messages of any kind,” he argues. “The subpoena clearly is not enforceable.”

But he adds that the case is a reminder that federal privacy law is in dire need of an update to reflect the new era of massive stored communications and web services.

“The notion that any litigant can get any information about any person is an 18th century rule that now can now encompass terabytes of information, and I think it also has an impact on service providers who don’t want to become one-stop shops for every litigant in the country,” he says.

A local example

On Monday, Two hundred protesters used email and phone calls to organize their event at Fort Street Mall in support of Aloha Airlines. The US Bankruptcy Court is in 1132 Bishop, above the MSIS classrooms in the Frear Center. My office is a few steps away. This Honolulu Advertiser article has details and a few pictures.

I didn’t see anything about the march at DontFlyGo. Their web site is difficult to navigate, and the domain name is missing an apostrophe on the banner. Based on this Honolulu Advertiser article, there’s little indication that local groups might try to use mobile messaging to boycott go! flights.

I rarely see a floppy disk these days. But if you need a 3.5 inch FDD in your desktop computer, consider adding an internal drive with flash memory slots, as seen on Gizmodo last week. It’s available in the UK – see RedFerret for a link.

Last night, every Starbucks store in the United States closed at 1730 local time for a three-hour training session. See this New York Times article about the training project.

I’ve written a long article, so you might want to get comfortable and find a tasty beverage.

The company’s CEO, Howard Schultz, wants Starbucks to return to its roots: making excellent coffee beverages, slowly. But Starbucks is working harder than ever to turn its miik-and-coffee shops into WiFi-enriched media listening lounges. It’s a plan that’s rife with assumptions about how the digital consumer entertains themselves.

Starbucks’ fascination with recorded music has never made much sense to me, because most fast food chains try to maximize customer turnover during the day. Serving customers faster should mean additional revenue per hour. A corporate playlist, slow service and comfy chairs should have the opposite effect.

Then again, most franchised burger joints don’t have merchandise displays on the floor. Starbucks stores do, and I often wonder who buys these items. If the service will be slower, and the company is returning to its roots, why doesn’t Starbucks remove the displays so that more customers could stand in line?

In the end, Starbucks wants its customers to spend more time in the store. It’s a core piece of the company’s strategy. If these customers have the means to afford a laptop computer or an iPod, they might buy a dessert or an extra beverage.

If at first you don’t succeed…

A few years ago, Starbucks experimented with CD burning kiosks in a few stores. Here’s some articles from Business Week in 2004 and KioskNews in 2006 about this dubious idea. I loved Howard Schultz’s quotes from the 2004 article – he was an enthusiastic champion of he projec.t Customers rarely used these stations, which housed a touch-screen Hewlett-Packard computer that helped users assemble their own playlists from an inventory of digital music. The service was slow, and the prices were about the same as itunes and other online merchants. The few customers that tried the kiosks usually figured out that they could burn their own CDs at home.

A recent New York Times article discussed an updated version of the media kiosk. Instead of a disc, customers would insert a USB memory stick. The payment and transfer process could take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending upon the quality and size of the files involved. Flash memory transfer can be slow, after all.

The Starbucks kiosk project was designed to induce customer to try downloading digital music. The kiosks could hold between 250,000 and a million songs on their hard drives. Baristas aren’t known for their computer troubleshooting skills, however. When the kiosks malfunctioned, customers could not get assistance.

Last year, Starbucks decided to welcome Apple as a partner. After all, iTunes is the dominant digital music service in the USA, as I pointed out yesterday. There’s a legion of iPod users who already use iTunes at home to download music and videos.

Serving up slow coffee and fast downloads

It makes sense to ditch the kiosk and its limited inventory, and offer the entire iTunes inventory in each Starbucks. But video files are much larger than audio files, and Apple keeps adding more content to the iTunes store every day. Customers might be more likely to view and buy digital media at Starbucks if the download speeds are as good or better than their residential Internet connection.

Starbucks had to develop a way to offer the entire iTunes inventory without excessive bandwidth costs and slow download speeds. TUAW.com reported earlier this month that Starbucks may be installing edge servers in its stores. This type of server stores or caches content at the edge or end of a network, to give users faster access to files and services. An edge server is a good way to reduce bandwidth demands and manage latency by storing popular audio and video files inside the Starbucks store itself.

During the day, AT&T WiFi customers would use the WiFi access point at that Starbucks store to receive and buy audio and video content from Apple’s iTunes Store. Content would be saved to customers laptop computers, mobile phones, iPhones and iPods.

Popular audio and video files, including new releases, this week’s TV shows and best-sellers would be stored on the store’s edge server, so the user would receive their files at WiFi speed, instead of a much slower transmission from AT&T’s GSM mobile network or a remote server on the store’s broadband connection.

The edge server would receive fresh content late in the evening, based on local usage patterns and marketing plans, while the store is closed and bandwidth is less expensive. So Starbucks stores in Honolulu would probably get more Hawaiian music and “Lost” episodes on their edge servers, while Starbucks sites in Texas would store more country music and NASCAR highlights in their edge servers.

What’s the cache?

Akamai Technologies uses a similar approach to cache or store web applications, web pages, audio, video and other content in its global content distribution network network, and iTunes does use Akamai services. Yahoo, CNN, Slide and the NBA also use Akamai servers to mirror content for their web sites. Akamai’s network is designed as a cache for any Internet user, regardless of their connection. I discussed Akamai and latency on 6 June 2007.

Akamai’s network, and similar networks run by competitors, help Web publishers reach millions of users per day by mirroring content. I’ve never had this problem on billso.com, but it’s possible that someday my little web server will be swamped with requests from thousands of users for the same article. Don’t worry, billso.com has a cache feature that I can activate if I need it, so I don’t exceed my monthly bandwidth allocation.

The iTunes store inventory is placed on multiple servers located in major population centers, and connected to several fast Internet connections. Web retailers use these same networks to handle heavy shopping days like Mother’s Day and Black Monday.

Surfing on the edge is very akamai

Content distribution networks can also help remote locations with large Internet user populations. Honolulu is a great example. It makes much more sense for Hawaiian Telcom and Oceanic Time Warner to cache audio and video content on Oahu than to handle thousands of transoceanic requests for the same files. See my discussion on 7 June 2007.

The Wikipedia page for Akamai has some basic information, and links to additional articles and resources, including this 2006 Business Week article, a 2006 article from SeekingAlpha, and this MIT video – there is a play link above the photo on that page. The video is about an hour long, and it requires RealPlayer. It’s a great discussion of how an academic research project can be commercialized, but there’s a lot of technical jargon.

From BoingBoing comes the most disturbing information security news I have read in a while.

We’ve long assumed that disk encryption is a robust means of storing confidential data on a computer. Disk encryption products work by encrypting all of the data on a drive, including documents, the operating system, swap files and caches. Disk encryption software can start up before the operating system to let the user enter their password or key. Disk encryption software can also be used on USB storage, as well as partitions on an unencrypted drive.

Disk encryption helps travelers keep their data confidential. My post of 5 Janaury 2008 addresses how cryptography works.

Warm RAM, lost key

Princeton University researchers have developed a simple attack that can retrieve the BitLocker disk encryption key from a Windows Vista computer. The user has to have logged into the computer so that the encryption key is then stored in the computer’s RAM. If the computer is in sleep mode, running a screen saver, or still warm, the encryption key can be extracted from RAM. The extracted data can be saved to a USB storage device, so that another computer can take its time to analyze and fix any errors in the extracted key.

The same kind of attack will also work on Apple FileVault, TrueCrypt, PGP Whole Disk Encryption, and other disk encryption products. The research report is available as a PDF file at this web site.

Declan McCullagh has posted his analysis of the report at news.com. he points out that this vulnerability has been used by other researchers to pull data through a FireWire connection to an iPod. It is difficult to harden a computer against this form of attack, but the attack must be carried out in person. It cannot be done across the Internet, at least in the form that the researchers demonstrate. The attacker needs a USB drive preloaded with the attack software. A can of Dust-Off might also be helpful, to chill the RAM.

Watch that drive

The easiest way to harden a computer against this attack is to maintain physical control of the encrypted drive. Don’t leave it alone. Update the encryption software regularly, as the software developers will more than likely develop their own patches to wipe the key from RAM.
This YouTube video produced by the research team is a brief overview of the vulnerability and the attack.

Cisco Systems, the world’s largest network equipment company, has released its largest switch ever. The Nexus 7000 can move 15 terabytes of data per second, and is designed to connect distant data centers together. According to Forbes, that is fast enough to move the entire Wikipedia in about 40 seconds. The 1-meter tall box will require special cabling and cost US$200,000 a year to maintain and operate.

As companies move their servers and data storage into larger data centers, these types of switches are necessary. The continued growth of web-based applications is also supporting this trend. Networks are a lot like plumbing, but there’s only a finite amount of water on the planet. The amount of data produced and stored continues to grow.

According to a Reuters article, John Chambers, the long-time CEO of Cisco, believes network growth will continues at a fast pace for the next ten years as ISPs and data centers add capacity.