Wide Open News -- Virginia House and Senate Pass UCITA Bill UCITA 5/2/2000; 10:34:10 PM Feb 15, 2000: Virginia's House of Delegates unanimously passed the Uniform Computer Information Act late Monday. The state senate quickly followed suit, unanimously passing UCITA on Tuesday. Grrrr...... Wondering why I'm so down on UCITA? Try reading a UCITA introduction. "All you ever wanted to know about the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is contained here.

Virginia House Passes UCITA UCITA 5/2/2000; 10:27:24 PM Feb 15, 2000: My jaw drops... not so much at the passage but at the unanimous passage. "E-commerce is a burgeoning business, but there really aren't rules and regulations that stipulate how you'll do business," May said in an interview shortly after the House of Delegates vote. "Primarily the objective was to establish an even-handed treatment of buyer and seller so neither side has the advantage.

DoubleClick Plan Falls Short Privacy from Companies 5/2/2000; 10:02:27 PM Feb 15, 2000: Privacy advocates prefer opt-in plans, where companies can't collect information unless the consumer has actively provided consent, over opt-out. For a company that promised really hard, honest to never collect data ever, so help them the BBB, only opt-in makes sense for them. Anything else is a lie.

Slashdot on License Bombs Humor/Amusing 5/2/2000; 9:59:11 PM Feb. 15, 2000: A few days ago I used the phrase license bomb to describe putting a license on some copyrighted material that you must accept in order to use, almost identical to a software license. Does anyone know how far that could be taken? Could I put a license bomb on my resume? My web pages? My registration information? And what with UCITA passing (assuming it continues to do so), maybe we could make a truly absurd license and attempt to enforce it, claiming that UCITA protects this.

News Item Record Personal Notes5/2/2000; 7:02:26 PM I've probably set a News Item record for one day today that will stand for a while... I'm through the first 1.5 months of the 5 months this site has been running and I've created 77 News Items, including this one I've been converting and neglecting my normal 'duties'... I recommend the Privacy Digest. I'll eventually catch up...In the meantime, this is part of the reason I'm doing this: Look at this historical view of the MP3 fracas: My template needs cleaning up, but this is so cool!

Byte: Internet Attacks and What We Should Do Misc. 5/2/2000; 6:42:55 PM Feb 14, 2000: If massive government control were the only way out of this, we'd have to do it. . . . The better way is to clean up our act.

University officials block MP3 site Music & MP3 5/2/2000; 6:41:51 PM Feb 14, 2000: Another university bans Napster, claiming that 50% of the campus bandwidth was consumed by the program. "This was not a knee-jerk reaction," Bruhn said. "We started looking at this since the middle of January."

Do You Yahoo? Good Laws, Bad Uses5/2/2000; 6:39:26 PM "The suit alleges that the companies' use of cookies, or little text files written into a personal computer's hard drive to identify a computer user, violates Texas' anti-stalking law."No no no! This is a thoroughly bad bad bad idea. It may seem like a smart use of the law, but it's smart as in "smart-aleck", not "smart Nobel Prize winner". Cookies are not stalking.

State of the Web Essays 5/2/2000; 6:33:54 PM Recent reactions to my writings indicate there is a need to answer a very legitimate question: "Why should I care? Nothing's hurting me." If I can't answer this question, then I might as well fold up shop. This is what I think the answer is.

License Plate Lust Personal Notes5/2/2000; 6:31:55 PM Feb 11, 2000: I normally try to keep my personal life out of this 'blog, but this is kinda cool I think... I'd actually like to have this license plate someday (though I think my state of Michigan doesn't allow seven letters).How many people's domain names are short enough to fit on a license plate, including the '.com' or '.org'?