Yahoo in court over Nazi auctions Country Watch: France7/24/2000; 1:47:01 PM 'A ruling last month gave Yahoo's French site until 24 June to make it impossible for people in France to gain access to the auctions - describing them as an "offence to the collective memory" of French people.'Yahoo's French language site, fr.yahoo.com, has already blocked access to the pages auctioning Nazi memorabilia. 'But surfers can browse the same pages, which routinely offer hundreds of real or imitation Nazi artefacts every day, on the global site yahoo.

Links to Der Schockwellenreiter LinkBack 7/24/2000; 1:40:20 PM Der Shockwellenreiter joins the LinkBack program. Desc: "It's a weblog about, politics, culture, scripting languages (Perl, Frontier, Python), the Mac and me ;o) And yes, this weblog is named after the famous novel from John Brunner."

BBspot - Metallica's New Album is Napster-Proof Humor/Amusing 7/24/2000; 12:44:55 PM 'Metallica released their long awaited "Download This" CD today, and the band declared it Napster-proof. The 74 minute CD contains one 55 minute song, "Napster Begone" and a 19 minute, one-question interview with drummer Lars Ulrich. '"We wanted to make an album that those bastards on Napster wouldn't steal and I think we succeeded," said Lars. "We realized that we couldn't stop the Napster movement, so we decided to make a Napster-proof album.

DeCSS Trial Day 5 DVD & DeCSS 7/24/2000; 12:43:07 PM 'EFF's defense team landed a surprising blow to the MPAA in Court on Friday when it revealed that the Livid Project has built an open source DVD player for Linux machines using DeCSS.... Pavlovich [who led the project to develop the player] stated the Livid Project's DVD player was created by lawful reverse engineering under the open source development model, which relies upon dozens to thousands of programmers around the globe working collaboratively.

Microsoft becomes cookie defender, privacy hero Privacy from Companies 7/24/2000; 10:43:23 AM 'Microsoft got quite a bit of mileage out of its announcement earlier this week that it would be building cookie management features into Internet Explorer. ... What a difference a day makes, indeed. Wasn't it just Wednesday that Microsoft was the slipshod, careless perpetrator of practically every security hole and privacy infringement enabler in the Galaxy? Haven't Messrs Catlett and Smith spent years compiling long lists of offences perpetrated by the Great Satan of the Security Hole?

The Trouble With Regulating Hate Free Speech7/24/2000; 10:37:31 AM 'While some would like to see new laws to deal with these sites – wherever they are and as many as there may be – the U.S. constitutional right to free speech protects most of them. Some European nations, however, lack the same free-speech standards. So, like other Internet policy issues such as data privacy and encryption, Europe's standards on hate speech clash with American ones.

The Napster Weblog Music & MP3 7/24/2000; 9:54:02 AM Dave Winer has started a Napster Weblog. It's got a lot of the essays, comments, and pointers to postings on various message boards that I'm not pointing to. He's also looking for someone or someones to help run it, if you find that interesting.

Blow up the Internet! Technology & Sociology7/24/2000; 9:37:52 AM '"Los Cybrids proposes that the Internet SHOULD NOT EXIST!" '"--SHOULD NOT EXIST," echoes Cybridputo #2 in an ominous undertone, as he looms behind Cybridputo #1.' ...'"You have 1,500 e-mails," Cybridputo #1 murmurs archly. "You have 15,000 E-MAILS!" Oh, yeah, the Net's not just eating up the globe in its consumerist maw, it's destroying your very own quality of life, and then there's what computers do to the environment and to your personal privacy to consider, too, the Los Cybrids rail in choreographed staccato.

Australia Decides Streaming Isn't Broadcasting Country Watch: Australia7/24/2000; 9:35:30 AM But the Internet Industry Association was not ready to celebrate its win until the Government made its decision law.'"We are encouraged, but are we satisfied? No," association executive director Peter Coroneos said last night.''"Until the decision has been given legal effect, the position of our members will remain uncertain," he said. "The review has been concluded in the time frame that we considered appropriate.

ChatScan Search Engine Misc.7/23/2000; 7:35:49 PM This site will allow you to scan conversations occuring on the Internet Relay Chat channels, covering conversations previously considered so ephermal as to be untracable.More demonstration of your inability to hide.The high-rated postings in the Slashdot thread are unusally informative, including a lot of evidence that the ChatScan engines are not playing nice with others. If the allegations in that thread are true (including using their user's bandwidth for gathering information unrelated to the user's current actions and being major annoyances on entire networks), this is a nasty company.