Three criticisms of the "$30 Billion" privacy price tag Privacy from Companies 5/11/2001; 8:10:56 PM These are three good criticisms of the amazingly-inflated 30 billion dollar price tag a recent industry "study" placed on the costs of federally mandated privacy. There's also a lot of pointers in there that apply to analyzing other studies of equal quality.

Anti Spam Bills Continue Spam & E-Mail5/11/2001; 7:18:40 PM From the article that Slashdot links to:'A bill designed to reduce unsolicited commercial e-mail ran into trouble in a House committee Thursday, as business leaders and lawmakers declared their opposition to the legislation.'Almost every legislator and witness present for the House Judiciary Committee hearing said they had problems with the bill, which previously passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee.'I linked to the Slashdot article for the extremely bad natured humor occurring in the comments.

What They (Don't) Know About You Privacy from Companies5/11/2001; 6:57:47 PM 'When Richard Smith got his FBI file, he learned a lot of interesting things about himself. 'He found out that he had died in 1976 and that he may have previously been married to a woman named Mary. He also discovered that he may be known as "Ricky Smith" or "Rickie Smith" -- aliases he shares with a couple of convicts doing hard time in Texas.

Jury finds Rambus committed fraud Patents 5/9/2001; 7:35:34 PM 'A federal court jury here Wednesday afternoon found Rambus Inc. had committed fraud by failing to disclose its synchronous patent applications to the industry JEDEC standards body.' More rare justice.

Truth squad needed to combat Internet lies,commercialization Misc.5/9/2001; 4:21:46 PM 'When moneyed and powerful interests concoct a prevailing -- but false -- wisdom through public-relations deceptions and other techniques, credible experts need to stand up and explain why this or that emperor is unclothed.''There are precedents. In 1997, for example, federal government officials were publicly mulling whether to force adoption of a ``key escrow'' system of cryptography, whereby people and organizations would effectively be forced to turn over to third parties the keys to their most secret data.

EU Data Protection Could Clamp Data Flows Privacy from Companies 5/8/2001; 2:43:06 PM Pointing to this Financial Times article, an unnamed reader excerpts: "'The wide-ranging directive aims to protect data about EU citizens against misuse worldwide. It is backed by the power to cut off data flows to countries that the EU judges not to have adequate data protection rules and enforcement.'"

A Case of Free Speech Boundaries Free Speech5/8/2001; 2:07:42 PM 'A pending libel suit in New York now stands to test -- and potentially redraw -- some of the boundaries of journalistic free speech on the Internet. 'The case concerns Roberto Hernandez Ramirez, general director and majority owner of the National Bank of Mexico, also known as Banamex. In 1997, this prominent Mexican billionaire and Salinista investor was the subject of a series of 15 investigative reports in the Merida, Mexico daily newspaper Por Esto that fingered him as a major narcotics trafficker between Colombia and the United States.

Google Information for ETP.com Personal Notes5/8/2001; 1:52:59 PM LATER UPDATE: Sheesh, people, Google's de-indexing was worth doing something about, it was worth discussing what actions to take, but it wasn't worth a flaming shit-fest. Let's have a sense of scale, here, please.UPDATE: I was incorrect. See this post on Andrea's site. (Thanks to Seth Dillingham.)I wanted to pass this on, since many ETP'ers who read this site may not have seen this.

Defending the cookie monster Privacy from Companies 5/7/2001; 5:20:53 PM I've been thinking about cookies lately because here at Salon, our new Premium program relies on them in order to work properly, and we've corresponded with a small but vocal group of readers who feel strongly that All Cookies Must Be Destroyed. And though I am normally a diehard on issues of Web privacy, I have to report that cookies have been unfairly maligned.

AOL's New Filter on the Block Censorship5/7/2001; 11:43:28 AM 'America Online has begun using new filtering technology to power its "parental control" options for kids, young teens and older teens. The automated technology -- provided by filtering company RuleSpace -- recognizes eight languages and can analyze the content of 47 million webpages per day.''Because patents are pending on the context recognition technology, details are fuzzy. But the basic idea is that, rather than searching for objectionable keywords, it analyzes text and assigns it to a category of similar kinds of text.