DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Remember Ken Hamidi, the disgruntled ex-Intel employee who retaliated by spamming up to 35,000 Intel employees with emails critical of corporate policy, triggering lawsuits and ACLU meddling and PR stunts and etc.? I wrote about it in late 2001, when some journalists (incorrectly) characterized the dispute as “david vs. goliath,” when in fact it had more to do with the implied responsibility of delivering email. Read more at Hamidi’s site, intelhamidi.com, but beware the disturbing “free speech” slant.

Common sense, and Intel’s case, suffered a setback last week: The state Supreme Court boosted free speech over property rights in cyberspace, denying Intel’s attempt to stop an angry ex-employee from using the company’s e-mail system to send messages to thousands of workers.

Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar is quoted as opining, “[Hamidi] no more invaded Intel’s property than does a protester holding a sign or shouting through a bullhorn outside corporate headquarters, posting a letter through the mail, or telephoning to complain of a corporate practice.” This appears to me to be incorrect. If a protester holds a sign in the driveway, Intel pays nothing, and 99% of employees don’t notice. If a protestor sends a letter, a single employee is engaged for a few minutes, but this is the cost of doing business. The same applies to the handling of a telephone call.

But Hamidi sent tens of thousands of emails. Werdegar and the other justices of the majority failed to grasp the difference. Werdegar’s opinion needed to have said, “[Hamidi] no more invaded Intel’s property than would 35,000 protesters holding signs or shouting through bullhorns outside corporate headquarters.” She didn’t say that, because (in my opinion) such a disturbance would be considered an invasion of property. If 35,000 people showed up to protest, would Intel have invited them into the foyer? I think not. Intel would have invited cops with rubber bullets to defend the company against siege. Barricades would have forced protestors to back off of Intel property. Nobody would have claimed that Intel needs to accept the protest without comment. Extrapolating from Werdegar’s opinion, Intel would not only need to allow 35,000 protestors up on the lawn, but would have to send out for lunch, too. “Hi, this is Sally at Intel. We’re having guests for lunch. Can I get some kung-pao chicken delivered right away? Yes, with steamed rice for 35,000.”

Another troubling aspect of the case was Intel’s failure to show damages. It appears that had Intel been able to prove that Hamidi’s flood of email caused outages or hardware failures, the claim of invasion would have stood a better chance of success. This is troubling because it’s the IT department’s job to withstand floods. Networking experts regularly design systems to withstand 2x or 5x or even 10x spikes in throughput. According to the state Supreme Court, building scalable systems provides a tacit invitation to outsiders to abuse those systems, at least within the systems’ tolerance for abuse.

So, for example, if I build a wall around my property, I can’t sue graffiti artists, because clearly the wall is there to be defaced, right? If I didn’t want graffiti, I should not have built the wall. This seems to be the essence of the judges’ opinion. (Forgive me for not using the word “justice” here.)

Now that Hamidi has a legal right to spam Intel’s entire staff with his diatribes, what’s the next step for Intel? If the company were to filter inbound email to prevent Hamidi’s spam from reaching employees, would the ACLU be back on the case demanding that Intel guarantee delivery of every inbound message?

The ACLU calls this “censorship,” but I just don’t see the argument. AOL discards inbound email based strictly on volume — and AOL doesn’t wait until there is real risk to the system, as Werdegar demands. AOL does not even publish the conditions that trigger such blacklisting. When AOL blacklists a sender, all subsequent inbound messages are silently deleted. Neither the sender nor the recipient is notified. Will the ACLU battle AOL too, with the effect of giving spammers the legal right to force AOL to deliver every message? This is a dangerous road, because nobody wants to go where that road leads.

It’s just not a free speech issue. Intel does not protest Hamidi’s right to have a website where he can express his opinion. That would be a free speech issue.

I get flak from friends at mealtime because my preferred diet appears to be so restrictive. In reality, there are only a few types of foods I don’t eat, but because those foods comprise about 85% of the regular American diet, it’s common that I can’t find anything on a restaurant menu that I’m willing to order.

Recently I went out for pizza with a group of omnivorous friends. My entrée included a side salad, which I requested be made without onions, not so much because it’s one of the foods I’ve grown to find revolting, but because onions don’t agree with me.

Ordering the entrée was slightly more complex. This was my first restaurant pizza since my recent decision to stop eating cheese on pizza — the last application of dairy I made regular exceptions for. So I tried to brace the waitress. “I’d like to order a pizza, but it’s going to be strange,” I said, “because I don’t want any cheese.” She took it well. Often, especially outside California, I get an incredulous look, like opting out of cheese is like opting out of oxygen.

We worked through the restaurant’s peculiar ordering approach, which apparently allows for customized pies but requires nonetheless that the order begin with something on the menu. In other words, I couldn’t order “tomato sauce, tomatoes, basil”; I had to order “The #2 except without parmesan, mozzarella, or cheddar, with basil and sliced tomatoes.” I was tempted to find the most elaborate, top-heavy pizza on the menu and then individually subtract every topping in reverse order, leaving a bare crust upon which to construct my vegan masterpiece, e.g. “I’d like the saffron-chive-prawn and bacon pesto / roasted potato rosemary havardi egg combo pizza, except without the rosemary, egg, roasted potatoes on the one half or the saffron-chive-prawns or bacon or pesto on the other half, with a little marinara sauce and sliced tomato and basil, thank you” and then watch with a bemused grin while the waitress dutifully copied down paragraphs of pointless exceptions, just to prove the idiocy of the exercise.

Finally she moved on to the next person’s order. It came in one word: “supreme.” I had to laugh. The next order took only two words: “me, too.”

I laughed again later when my instruction-manual pizza was delivered exactly as requested, whereas the one- and two-word supremes, like my side salad, all had no onion. So much for ordering simply.

The odd thing is, I can’t order so easily in California either, not because I need to cross-examine the chef about hidden meat products, but because the granola restaurants I frequent offer lots of choices, specifically to accomodate neo-non-ovo/lacto-pescatarians, Soy Zonians, McDougall/Atkins/Hollywood dieticians, and even those most curious of all, the people who eat chicken on waffles.

Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials.

The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials — reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy.

Source: Boston Globe, Website turns tables on government officials

Site: Open Government Information Awareness

Seen: at Macintouch

On Jan. 31, 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashed off the coast of California, killing 88 people bound for Seattle. Subsequent analysis implicated:

• a possible design flaw in a part called a “jackscrew”
• insufficiently-frequent inspections of this part
• pilot error

As with all disasters, blame and finger-pointing and lawsuits abounded.

On Friday, the Chronicle reported that Alaska Airlines and Boeing Co. have settled all but one of the lawsuits resulting from this crash. Settlement amounts to heirs and families “ranged from a few million dollars to $20 million.”

Plaintiff’s attorney Kevin Boyle said, “They were above and beyond the amounts in usual cases. It’s not perfect justice but it’s the best our legal system can provide.”

I would love to know what Kevin Boyle considers “perfect justice.” Should the courts have sentenced the airline executives to death by plane crash? I mean, what was he hoping for? Nothing anybody can do at this point can bring back the 88 people who died. This wasn’t a malicious act on anyone’s part, or even a criminally negligent act by the people who maintained the airplane. I’m certain that everybody at Boeing and Alaska Airlines would much rather this disaster had never happened.

So what is “justice?” As far as I know, justice is about fairness. It’s sure not fair that 88 people died in a plane crash, but is there any way to make it right afterwards?

Maybe Boyle had some ideas that didn’t get quoted in the newspaper. I like to think so, because the alternative is that he was just spouting soundbites, feigning indignation for the sake of the press. A back-of-the-envelope calculation puts his piece of this settlement at (6 plaintiffs x ~$5M apiece x standard percentage of 30% x 50% split with his partner) about $4.5 million, enough to pursue real reform in airline oversight, travel safety, or even “perfect justice” if that’s his thing.

On a related note, the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder is terrifying.

Bim sent a moistened remix of my Levi’s billboard image. I laughed out loud.

So long as I’m on the subject, here’s my color-corrected version:

• 600x450 preview (105k)
• 1152x768 15'' powerbook desktop size (324k)
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