MS incites UCITA breach UCITA5/12/2001; 7:11:27 PM 'Whereas Maryland's version of UCITA gives jurisdiction to Maryland, Microsoft insists that jurisdiction for the use of Passport resides in the law and courts of Washington state. As a result of this conflict, it appears that Maryland residents are not allowed to use the Microsoft service.''Although this conflict did seem to be an amusing instance of both Microsoft and the legislative sponsors of UCITA in Maryland getting hoisted on their own petards, I at first didn't see any significant consequences to all this legal snafu. Passport is a free service, and Maryland's version of UCITA includes an escape hatch for free products, designed in part at the behest of open-source software advocates. But then I remembered that the Passport license is subsidiary to the license for MSN; so I checked the license terms of MSN....'My intuition says we're missing some critical part of this story, but I'm not really certain what it is. What were Microsoft's lawyers thinking?

They Know If You've Been Bad or Good Surveillance and Privacy from Government5/12/2001; 11:34:03 AM 'Independence Hall will forever be depicted in history books as the birthplace of the United States. Along with the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, it is among the most recognizable symbols of freedom in the world. Ironically, this building where the Declaration of Independence was signed, emancipating Americans from an intrusive government, is now the site of a high-powered video surveillance camera.'From the no unenforcable law series on iRights. (I need to re-factor this site's catagories, "No Unenforcable Law" would become a new catagory, headed up by the Human Justice story.)

Transaction Costs and the Social Costs of Online Privacy
Privacy from Companies
5/11/2001; 10:46:06 PM 'Economically, privacy can be understood as a problem of social cost, where the actions of one agent (e.g., a mailing list broker) impart a negative externality on another agent (e.g., an end consumer). Problems in social cost can be understood by modeling the liabilities, transaction costs and property rights assigned to various economic agents within the system, and can be resolved by reallocating property rights and liability to different agents as needed to achieve economic equilibrium. This article examines how advances in high speed networking and data storage have radically reduced the costs to businesses of collecting, storing, manipulating and exchanging large amounts of personally identifying information on consumers, and the policy implications that these cost reductions have on property rights over personal information. A complementary economic and legal system that recognizes individual property rights over personal information is suggested as a way in which to greatly accelerate the adoption of electronic commerce and to extract inefficiencies from the already existing marketplace for personal information.'

More interesting and accessible then that abstract may indicate. I found this by following a link in the three criticisms article earlier. I'm still chewing on it, but I was starting to develop an argument much like the thesis of this piece.

Judges Seek Answers on Computer Code as Free Speech Free Speech5/11/2001; 10:42:23 PM 'In what may signal a heightened significance for a case testing the constitutionality of a 1998 digital copyright law, a panel of appeals court judges has asked both sides of a case to answer a list of 11 questions on whether computer code can qualify as free speech.'Here's the court request with the questions.I'll post the EFF's answers (which I'm sure they will post) when I can get them. It will be really interested to read the two side's answers. I think the subtext for all 11 question is "Can code really be speech?" For instance, consider question 2: "Does DeCSS have both speech and non-speech elements?" The real question is what definition of speech the two sides will use to answer this question is. Stay "tuned".

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... unusually enjoyable.

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. 'En fin, Smith -- who is the chief technology officer of the Privacy Foundation -- found that his FBI file contained more errors than correct data.'

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. Eleven noted technologists, including several of the world's top cyptographers, issued a report persuasively showing why key escrow would inevitably compromise our collective security, not enhance it.''On many topics, one person's truth is another's lie. But every debate needs a foundation of plain facts, laid out in ways the public can grasp.'

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.'"