2600 DECSS REPLY BRIEF FILED DVD & DeCSS 3/23/2001; 11:56:23 PM 'Our legal team has filed a reply brief responding to the claims made by the MPAA, US Government, and various majorleague sports entities. A great deal of work went into these briefs and they've really outdone themselves. Our deepest thanks go out to all of those at the EFF, FGKS, and everyone else who helped make it happen.'

Napster Says It's All Confused Music & MP3 3/22/2001; 8:57:38 AM Certain people's chortling about how Napster could suddenly filter their music was premature; technology didn't magically make a leap allowing Napster to do the impossible and now, right on schedule, Napster's having trouble filtering the files: 'While song-swapping through Napster has dropped sharply since the company began policing its system, the file-swapping service reported Wednesday that it's having difficulty complying with a court order requiring it to remove copyright material.

ACLU and ALA fighting Library Filters Censorship3/21/2001; 11:47:11 AM This has been reported recently by many media sources, but I was holding off until I could find the actual complaints. Here they are: The ACLU's complaint is at http://www.aclu.org/court/multnomah.pdf and the ALA's complaint is at http://www.ala.org/cipa/cipacomplaint.pdf .I've been thinking about library filters lately (it came up on the weblaw list) and I think the answer lies in neither approach. Why do we [think we] need library filtering?

Sweaty Scenes from the Life of a Censor Censorship 3/21/2001; 11:30:27 AM A story from a real-life AOL censor. It's interesting to see the "other side" of the issue, that of the human censors.

Websites forced to reveal user identity Country Watch: Britain3/20/2001; 6:09:31 PM 'A High Court judge has told two UK websites to reveal which user was behind defamatory messages placed in discussion groups. 'Legal action launched by net company Totalise has ended with the financial websites the Motley Fool and Interactive Investor International being forced to hand over the identity of the user who was only known online by a nickname.

.Net demystified: What you must know Privacy from Companies3/20/2001; 8:52:06 AM 'Suppose, for a moment, that everything could talk to everything else. Your calendar could get information from and supply data to your documents, or your cell phone, or someone else's calendar and cell phone. Your computer's desktop could tell you that your dry cleaning is ready or your bank account is overdrawn....''To do this, Microsoft wants to know everything: the information in your user profile, address, and application settings; what devices you use; what's in all your documents; your favorite Web sites; where you are at any given moment; your credit card numbers and payment information; the contents of your personal calendar, contact list, and e-mail inbox; and probably a few things I've left out.

Human Justice for Human Beings Essays 3/19/2001; 12:41:45 PM 'The 1950's science fiction authors were half-right. We will be enslaved to machines, but it won't be because they rose up and overthrew their creators. We will voluntarily enslave ourselves to the machines because it is cheaper in the short term.'

Glenn Fleishman on Gilmore and Censorship Censorship 3/18/2001; 12:28:38 AM Glenn Fleishman saves me the effort of writing that essay Suffice it to say I agree wholeheartedly. 'Crying for a commercial contract violation is also ridiculous. Verio's not the government. They're not restricting your friggin' freedom of speech. They're preventing you from doing something that violates their commercial interests, as well, incidently - just by the way - feeds into the ability of spammers worldwide to continue their hideous mission.

Defeating E-mail bugs and Spyware on Windows Protecting Yourself 3/17/2001; 7:28:09 PM You can't quite eliminate spy-ware with these techniques, but you can make a massive dent in them. About a year ago I found a product called Zone Alarm, which bills itself as a free personal computer firewall program. It's not quite what I'd call a firewall, though, in that it takes a decidely non-traditional approach to the problem.

Spam Laws, 107th Congress Spam & E-Mail 3/17/2001; 6:50:55 PM Slashdot has an article today on yet another spam law proposed in Congress. Rather then make a news article out of that, I'd rather take this opportunity to point you at the Junk Email pages at the Center for Democracy and Technology.