Records of toysrus.com subpoenaed in privacy probe
Privacy from Companies
12/13/2000; 11:40:49 AM 'Records from Toys ''R'' Us Inc.'s Internet division have been subpoenaed in an investigation of its privacy practices, a spokeswoman for the toy retailer said yesterday.

'The inquiry by New Jersey's Division of Consumer Affairs, which is overseen by the state attorney general's office, partially stems from lawsuits that accuse toysrus.com of illegally sharing personal information about its Internet customers with market researchers, spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer said.'

Google tracker raises privacy issues - sorta
Privacy from Companies
12/13/2000; 11:03:05 AM

'"By using the Advanced Features version of the Google Toolbar, you may be sending information about the sites you visit to Google," the company warns during the Toolbar installation process. "In order to show you more information about a site, the Google Toolbar has to tell us what site you're visiting which it does by sending us the URL."

Where Did They Go: CallTheShots.com
Misc.
12/12/2000; 5:18:12 PM It seems that Akamai ate CallTheShots.com, a service that chopped up various websites and re-combined the pieces, probably illegally as it did it without any permission from the website owners. I don't know why Akamai would want them. *shrug*

Judge Blocks Whois Spam
Misc.
12/12/2000; 1:06:45 PM

'In a ruling in U.S. District Court in New York City, Judge Barbara Jones ordered Verio to stop using customer contact information housed in Register.com's Whois database to carry out a massive telephone and e-mail market campaign.

'In issuing the preliminary injunction, Jones determined that Register.com (RCOM) had a significant likelihood of prevailing on its claims that Verio violated usage policies, made unauthorized references to Register.com in marketing messages, and improperly used robotic search devices to obtain information on company servers.'

Webcasters Get Copyright Relief
Administrative
12/11/2000; 2:03:53 PM

'The copyright office ruled that terrestrial radio stations that simulcast their content on the Web are subject to paying the same licensing fees as Internet-only broadcast businesses. Previously, only webcasters were forced to sign up for compulsory licenses.

'"This was a very good day for webcasters," said Jonathan Potter, the executive director of the Digital Media Association (DiMA).'

SmartFilter - I've Got A Little List
Free Speech
12/8/2000; 11:34:29 AM

'Censorware blacklists provide one of the best validations ever seen, regarding the slippery slope theory of censorship. Consider the preceding examination of the Extreme or Obscene category. The words certainly sound scary. Extreme ... Obscene ... Child Pornography ... Excessive Violence ... Mutilation. Only upon very careful and precise reading does one realize that the category definition is akin to Mother rapers ... Father stabbers ... and creating a nuisance. They have mixed in very severe and legally-meaningful First Amendment terms such as Obscene and Child Pornography, with vague and broad phrases such as push the limits of acceptability and may be related to sex, bodily functions, obscenity, or perverse activities. This allows them to start the electronic book-burning with a claim of Constitutional justification. But then it reaches everything from Jerry Springer to punk rockers to difficult artists. Or even gay and lesbian Mormons.'

Encryption tears holes in RIP Country Watch: Britain12/7/2000; 1:59:36 PM

'A group of cryptographers think they have found a way to defeat the RIP Act, by making it impossible to hand over the keys to encrypted information. 'The section of the act that has caused so much controversy in the UK gives the government the right to the plain text of, or key to, enciphered information. However, if a person has used an ephemeral key, they never know what the key is and so cannot pass it on to a third-party, and it is this vulnerability that the group wishes to exploit.... 'Fairbrother, quoted in IT paper Computer Weakly, said: "It is technically impossible to have an effective law, because of the state of cryptography. RIP says you have to give a key but you can use an ephemeral key - where you never knew what the key was."'

FBI Hacks Alleged Mobster
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
12/6/2000; 3:25:47 PM

'But when the feds learned of Scarfo's security measures, they decided to do something that would bypass even the best encryption software: FBI agents sneaked into Scarfo's office in Belleville, New Jersey, on May 10, 1999, and installed a keyboard-sniffing device to record his password when he typed it in.

'A seven-page court order authorized the FBI and cooperating local police to break into Scarfo's first-floor "Merchant Services of Essex County" office as many times as necessary to deploy, maintain, and then remove "recovery methods which will capture the necessary key-related information and encrypted files."'

Privacy Fears are Not Paranoia
Privacy from Companies
12/6/2000; 3:20:27 PM

'A 20-year-old woman stalked through the Internet and killed. Thousands of e-commerce customers watching as their credit card numbers are sold online for $1 apiece. Internet chat rooms where identities are bought, sold and traded like options on the Chicago Board of Trade. These are the horror stories dredged up by privacy advocates who say the Net’s threat to personal privacy can’t be dismissed as mere paranoia. And, they say, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.'

Fending Off the Pay-Per-View Society
General IP Issues
12/6/2000; 1:05:37 PM

'It is disconcerting, of course, to be told that our society might be passing up a chance at a digital heaven and opting instead for hell. The warnings are all the more alarming when they come from people like Moglen, who understand digital networks so much more profoundly than the rest of us do.

'But there is reason to be circumspect about their predictions. As Moglen himself volunteers, he has been ''on the wrong side of history'' before. In 1979 he wrote a paper criticizing the early Macintosh experiments with using a mouse, which he referred to as the '''caveman interface'. You point and you grunt,'' he says. ''My notion was that computers were a different kind of intelligence, and that human beings had much to gain from learning how to converse with [them] in ways that would be more sophisticated, not less.''