Passport Licensing Changes Privacy from Companies4/11/2001; 12:38:41 PM As I was one of the critics of Microsoft's Passport privacy policy, I feel a moral obligation to point out that while ETP was down, Microsoft did change the policy. However, it seems that all may still not be well. The end of Dan Gillmore's column today talks about it and also mentions a colloquium will be held at Stanford:'The terms are still not what you'd call consumer-friendly.

Judge threatens 'disgraceful' Napster with closure - again Music & MP34/11/2001; 12:30:29 PM Or, The Judge Who Wanted The Moon.'At issue is Napster's attempt to follow Judge Patel's 5 March order that the sharing of songs nominated by the Recording Industry Association of America should be blocked. The RIAA claimed that Napster hadn't complied with the order, and brought the company before the court to demand Napster explain itself. 'Napster's argument has been that it has tried to block the 135,000 songs named by RIAA on behalf of its members, and indeed had blocked 275,000 songs hidden behind 1.

Europe To Adopt Strict Internet Copyright Law DMCA 4/11/2001; 12:12:04 PM Details at the EU's site. I haven't gone over it with a fine-toothed comb (it would take a couple of days anyhow), but my intuitive take on it seems to be that they trumped the DMCA, tipping the so-called "balance" even further in favor of the content producers. It seems the idea that intellectual property exists for the purposes of improving society, not lining corporate pockets, is now an anachronistic idea to be paid lip service only.

Why do we need privacy? Surveillance and Privacy from Government4/11/2001; 11:38:36 AM This typical article on why we really don't need privacy is fairly uninteresting as is. The comments at the bottom are much more interesting. I think this one is particularly good.I'm noticing several commonalities in all anti-privacy articles:Inevitable conflating of government versus corporate privacy. Am I the only one to make the distinction? They're two totally different things.

Jurors badly miscalculate MP3.com damages Humor/Amusing4/10/2001; 9:27:14 AM 'Jurors inadvertently let MP3.com off the hook last week when they wrote down the wrong damages figure in a court case over copyright infringement. 'On Friday the eight female jurors in a New York court, including one maths teacher, ordered the online music giant to pay around $300,000 to record label TVT (Tee Vee Toons). MP3.com was ecstatic, issuing a press release today crowing over victory.

Crippling withdrawal strikes me as my dealer stopped dealing Personal Notes4/9/2001; 5:18:45 PM I really, really missed iRights while it was down. Yikes! I think I spoke truer then I knew: "For many people, writing and sharing it with the world (even if the world doesn't beat a path to your site) is addictive on the first hit."As I was trying to figure out what to do about it a few days ago, I decided to check my e-mail, and lo and behold, there was an e-mail from garret offering me space on dangerousmeta for the duration of the outage!

DMCA provides no real protection for a small developer. DMCA 4/9/2001; 4:56:53 PM 'This is the story of a small, naïve developer who didn't file the copyright on his software and ended up being abused by Ariston Technologies, in Huntington Beach, California. My hope is that others can learn from this situation. 'Ariston Technologies clearly violated copyright laws by distributing for profit a proprietary work without knowledge or permission of the copyright holder.

Compressed Data: Law Newsletter Has to Sneak Past Filters Censorship4/9/2001; 4:35:04 PM From the people-are-always-smarter-then-computers dept:'There is nothing wrong with David Carney's spell-checker. It is on purpose that in his e-mail newsletter, Tech Law Journal, he misspells words like sex (sez) and pornography (pormography) and camouflages the names of computer viruses. If he did not, he explained last week in an editor's note, his journal would never get past the computers at readers' offices that screen incoming e-mail messages for references to sex or network security.

The phantom cyber-threat Hacking & Cracking4/9/2001; 4:22:27 PM 'Are you under 30? If so, jokes former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake in his book "Six Nightmares," chances are you have enough technical know-how to be a cyber-threat. And if you don't, says Lake, you can find everything you need, including cyber-attack tools and their instruction manuals, on the Internet. Armed with these tools, "millions of computer-savvy individuals could wreak havoc against the United States.

Apologies for delay, April Fools, slow servers Administrative4/3/2001; 8:09:24 AM I feel I should apologize for the lack of updates and the fact my April Fool posting was up for hours longer then it should be. I haven't 'heard' any other complaints, so it may just be me, but editthispage.com has been slow for me the last couple of days. In fact, for much of the last 48 hours, my connections were simply denied.