DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

On the one hand I have a hard time getting excited about fax laws, because I don’t have a fax machine. On the other hand, I remember what a pain in the ass it was to get unsolicited faxes when we used our main voice line to receive the occasional fax from Europe a few years back.

Unsolicited faxes are currently illegal, and have been since 1991, since the passage of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. This doesn’t prevent some companies from sending them, nor does it prevent other companies from buying unsolicited faxes by the boxload in hopes of winning legal judgements against fax-spammers.

I believe the problem is that the TCPA was not specific enough in spelling out when fax communications are legal; for example, according to Sen. Lautenberg (NJ), “[the TCPA] generally prohibits anyone from faxing unsolicited advertisements without prior expressed invitation or permission from the recipient.”

What does “prior expressed permission” mean?

The TCPA stands as a law with its existing language, but the FCC published an “interpretation” of the law in October 1992. According to Lautenberg, the FCC’s interpretation contains this footnote: “facsimile transmission from persons or entities who have an Established Business Relationship with the recipient can be deemed to being invited or permitted by the recipient.” (Lautenberg’s speech can be found in the video transcript of a Senate meeting, at 41:15 in this RealVideo stream.)

Does this footnote to an “interpretation” constitute an amendment or revision to a law passed by Congress? I wouldn’t think so, but lots of junk-fax companies apparently disagree, or there would be no such thing as “junk faxers.”

Curiously, the courts disagree with the FCC’s interpretation, according to an editorial in the Mercury News: “courts have repeatedly rebuked the FCC, saying that Congress had not authorized the [EBR interpretation].”

In response, the FCC revised its initial TCPA interpretation in July 2003, requiring that companies have written consent prior to faxing solicitations. This is a neat idea, not only that I’d have to opt in, but that I’d have to do it in writing. But it places an unreasonable burden on business owners and consumers alike: if I want a written bid from a vendor, I wouldn’t want to have to fax or mail a request for it.

Enter Representative Fred Upton (R, Michigan)… he proposed Senate bill 714, which would make the FCC’s initial footnoted interpretation into law. In other words, according to the Mercury News editorial, “any business you’ve ever walked into, visited online, called or bought from would be exempt from” the 1991 junk-fax ban.

EBRs are evil, especially for large companies such as banks, hotels, and chain stores, for they often have tens to hundreds of affiliate relationships with other companies, so if you’ve done business with any of them, you’re eligible to solicited by of all of them.

The Senate hearing (see the video link above) provides an entertaining, but frustrating half-hour of education on the issue. Senator Boxer spoke intelligently on the matter, and called out the bill’s Luntz-esque name when she said the “Junk Fax Prevention Act” should more appropriately be called the “Junk Fax Promotion Act.” Leave it to a Republican to name a bill for exactly the thing it will not do.

The Merc editors were even less kind; they suggested calling it the “License to Advertise by Theft Act.”

Read more news at Steve Kirsch’s junkfax.org website.

By the way, the title of this article comes from Sen. Boxer’s prediction (quoting unnamed analysts) that the current annual total of 2,000,000,000 faxes sent would double to 4 billion, should the “Junk Fax Prevention Act” become law.

I am simultaneously elated and sad:

The Bush administration is violating a law…

The law in question is the Energy Policy Act, passed in 1992 following the Gulf War. Its goal is to replace 30% of all oil used for transportation in the U.S with alternative fuels by 2010.

It’s an ambitious goal, and the benefits would be huge:

• significantly reduce dependence on foreign oil
• create less toxic air and water pollution
• push down prices on alternative fuel vehicles through economies of scale

The law focuses not on individual auto buyers, but on fleet operators, beginning with the biggest vehicle fleet operator in the country: the federal government.

The Energy Policy Act requires that at least 75% of the vehicles purchased by federal agencies use alternative fuels. Further, the Energy Policy Act gave the US Dept. of Energy the ability to mandate that state, municipal, and even private fleets (e.g. national package delivery companies) also purchase some percentage of alternative-fuel vehicles, if it determined that that would be necessary to meet the Act’s goal of a 30% reduction in oil used for transportation.

Unfortunately for everybody on the planet, the DOE punted this responsibility by announcing in January 2004 that it would not require private or local-government fleets to purchase AFVs, because, as far as I can tell, it wouldn’t do enough good. Add that to the list of the dumbest things I’ve heard this year: it will help, but not enough, so don’t bother. Curiously, the DOE requests voluntary compliance, which makes even less sense to me than not enforcing minimums: We don’t think alternative-fuel vehicles will help reduce petroleum consumption, so we won’t require you to buy AFVs… but we’d like you to buy AFVs anyway because they will help reduce petrol— er, umm… Bah.

Fortunately, the federal mandates of the Energy Policy Act still apply. The Center fo Biological Diversity and Bluewater Network have filed a lawsuit demanding compliance.

My favorite quote from the Chronicle article notes the stupidity of the Bush Administration’s energy policy:

Full compliance with the law would save 1.4 billion barrels of oil a year, or four times as much oil as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as the administration proposes, said Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity.

For additional info, see the following:

• the press release announcing the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Bluewater Network: Environmental Groups Sue 14 Federal Agencies for Failure to Implement Energy Policy Act (PDF; 104k)
• the main site for the Energy Policy Act

ZabaSearch drives another nail in the coffin of personal privacy. Type in a name and state and get the person’s full name, birthdate, address, and phone number. It’s like a time machine, too; their data goes back at least 15 years, retaining records of every place anyone has ever lived. Sigh.

David Lazarus did some nice investigative work for the Chronicle, in a column called It’s impressive, scary to see what a Zaba search can do. The article explains an unexpected and bizarre connection between the founders/owners of Zaba and the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

See also Matt Haughey’s recent writeup on the issue: Strange, Troubling Privacy

Security guru Bruce Schneier dissects the papal election process in a 1750-word essay. He comes away impressed with the security of the procedure: it would be very hard to hack this election.

In related news, Diebold is not going after the papal election vote-machine market.

Schneier’s conclusions are interesting and disheartening:

[O]pen systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder. Every step of the election process is observed by everyone, and everyone knows everyone, which makes it harder for someone to get away with anything. Second, small and simple elections are easier to secure. This kind of process works to elect a Pope or a club president, but quickly becomes unwieldy for a large-scale election.

I find this disheartening because it would be great to apply the procedures of the Congress of Cardinals to our own horribly flawed national election procedure… but due to scale, we can’t.

So, one of my new goals is to make a CD of original music. The first tune is “in the can” but still suffering at the inept hands of an amateur producer; once he’s done fiddling I’ll release the song here.

That leaves me about 6 more songs to write. To begin, I’m trying a new approach, which I’ve dubbed “cut-and-paste songwriting.”

Songs are constructed from parts: a verse thing, a chorus thing, a bridge thing, maybe a solo, maybe an intro, maybe an outro. My old band used to create these parts during improv jams, which we’d record and subsequently mine for usable material.

In a jam, one person throws down an idea, someone else picks it up, plays along, changes it up, throws it back, etc. Collaboration happens in realtime.

Now that my bandmates have all grown up and moved away, jam time is hard to come by. So we’re doing it virtually instead: I set up a low-fi version of my recording gear at my band’s low-fi studio by wiring up three mics on my drum kit (Bonham style!). I put one mic in the kick drum and hung two overheads, mixed them to stereo, squashed the signal half to death with my compressor, and recorded the remains.

I tracked a couple minutes of each of four grooves, taken from my own groove library. For example:

Sanitized For Your Protection (drums excerpt)
Stomach Grapes (drums excerpt)

I sent these drums-only MP3s to my personal bassist, who laid down some great bass lines. For example:
Sanitized For Your Protection (drums + bass)
Stomach Grapes (drums + bass)

We have finished three such parts so far, and there’s a rumor of a 4th. I will attempt to add a dulcimer melody to some of these, and leave some for the guitarist. (As Andrew says, guitar is just a garnish anyway.)

We’ll exchange another round of grooves in a month or so, and then I’ll begin assembling them into songs by cutting and looping various sections and pasting them into arrangements. I’m sure we’ll be refining the parts and especially the transitions as we hone in on something we like; this initial assembly will just get us the basic outline of the song.

This approach gives us some flexibility: if the melody or lyrics demand a longer or shorter verse/chorus/whatever, we can make the edits easily before tracking the final arrangement. This gives all the players an opportunity to have a voice in the song structure. It’s a response to the sessions last Fall, in which the guitarist had to supply melodies and lyrics to fit arrangements that had already been finalized; the compromise was entirely one-sided. The new approach, if it works, should allow for more-equal collaboration.