Radio Userland Personal Commentary7/28/2000; 3:59:51 PM I'm waiting for Radio Userland. From an examination of the source code as it comes down over Pike, it looks like the "Next Song" feature, if you choose to have randomized playing, 'just' hunts for a random song, with no other criteria.As I posted in the discussion group yesterday, I've found an acceptable quality of MP3 encoding and have been converting my collection to MP3 for listening at home and at work.

LinkBack Database Corruption LinkBack 7/28/2000; 3:12:26 PM I've had a massive database corruption in the LinkBack Frontier database, and the service has been reset. As a result, a lot of links that were being suppressed due to being old will show up again for the next two days; it'll have itself sorted out by Sunday. The good news is I only lost data... all the scripts and who is a member is intact.

Spammer Pays Up at EBay Content Integrity7/28/2000; 2:00:17 PM 'ReverseAuction has agreed to pay $1.2 million and to quit harvesting emails from eBay's site as part of a settlement agreement.''Harvesting users' email addresses from eBay servers was an act of trespass, said Monahan.'Apparently this ruling stems from the same legal theory as the one they used to block Bidder's Edge from collecting eBay auctions either.

Treat EBay Listings as Property? Lawyers See a Threat Content Integrity7/28/2000; 12:57:01 PM 'oncerned that a recent federal court ruling dangerously extends the ancient law of trespass to cyberspace, 28 leading Internet legal scholars are arguing in an appellate court that the decision "threatens the very foundations of the Internet." The red-alert language of the professors is aimed in part at drawing attention to a legal dispute in California between auction giant eBay and a smaller rival, Bidder's Edge, that raises important questions about property rights in the digital age.

U.S., Web Ad Firms Strike Privacy Deal Privacy from Companies 7/28/2000; 12:55:48 PM 'A group of Internet advertisers announced Thursday a new set of industry standards crafted with the federal government to give Web surfers a say in how their personal data is used by online marketing firms. The deal also bars Internet firms from using visitors' medical or financial data, Social Security numbers and online sexual behavior to determine which advertisements to flash on their screens.

TheStandard.com: U.K. Passes E-Mail Snooping Bill Into Law Country Watch: Britain 7/28/2000; 12:24:04 PM 'A surveillance bill granting the U.K. government sweeping powers to access e-mail and other encrypted Internet communications passed its final vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday and is set to become law on Oct. 5. Among other provisions, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) bill requires Internet service providers in the U.K. to track all data traffic passing through their computers and route it to the Government Technical Assistance Center (GTAC).

Fairtunes Music & MP3 7/28/2000; 10:38:08 AM 'Fairtunes is an Internet service that allows digital music consumers to pay artists for their work.' Note, paying the artists is not the same as paying the copyright holder, as the studios hold the copyright. It's a purely moral gesture with no legal force.

No "There" There Misc.7/28/2000; 9:41:25 AM 'Cyberspace isn't on any map, but I know that it must exist, because it is spoken of every day. People spend hours in chat rooms. They visit Web sites. They travel through this electronic domain on an information superhighway. The language we use implies that cyberspace is a place as tangible as France or St. Louis or the coffee shop on the corner. But why, exactly, should we think of the Internet as a geographic location?

Divided Data Can Elude the Censor Free Speech7/28/2000; 8:11:34 AM 'The system is called Publius, after the pen name adopted by the authors of the Federalist Papers. It dices up messages, encrypts the pieces and spreads them across many computer servers. The pieces, called keys, are designed so that even a small number of them can be assembled into a complete message. Thus, while keys would live on dozens or hundreds of computers, a user would need to have access to only a few of those computers to have enough information to reassemble the document.

Toysmart suspends auction of customer list Privacy from Companies 7/28/2000; 8:06:36 AM 'Objections to the sale of confidential customer information have driven Toysmart.com to temporarily pull its customer list from auction, according to the Massachusetts attorney general's office.... '"The debtor said that because of all of the objections being filed (against the sale of its customer list), no bidder was wanting to come forward," said Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General Pam Kogut.