Anyhow, good news: "But after an outcry on electronic bulletin boards devoted to the game and threats by some devoted players to leave the game, the company backtracked."

What were they thinking? Note that as long as they ask permission in a clear fashion, do only what they say, and do not gather any other data, it would not really be a violation of privacy per se... but still. Scanning machines? For hacking tools that within the day would be rendered undetectable (you'd have to download a new copy, but that's no big deal)? And keep in mind the game players are paying a monthly fee; if they leave, they truly will hurt the bottom line.

Online game backs away from privacy threat: "Game developers Verant Interactive, worried about tools which allow people to cheat or disrupt the online game, wanted to examine players' personal computers for 'hacking tools' as a part of a new software upgrade. As recently as last night, executives said they would bar people from the game who didn't agree to open their systems to the digital bloodhounds' inspection."

That's actually two seperate arguments. First, why does what a judge in Boston has ruled matter to me? And more interestingly, how does it matter to someone in France? Second, how is posting cphack a violation of copyright when they are perfectly free to do so according to the GPL?

"What these guys were posting was not copyright-protected material," said Sarah Wunsch, an ACLU attorney in Boston. "We don't believe the judge has authority to issue a restraining order at all."

Salon asks Can hyperlinks be outlawed?, relating the Ticketmaster case where "deep links" were found legal and the MPAA's attempt to make it illegal to link to sites containing the DeCSS program. I wanted to look at that issue myself but couldn't find a copy of the Ticketmaster ruling.

Of course, since nobody's used it, who really cares? I find it useful though not to have to bounce back and forth between Weblogs.com to use for general browsing. The fact that you lose your favorites is a problem though, and one I'll have to work on.

Update on the Weblogs.com sidebar I developed for Mozilla... it works in Linux, but there is some odd behavior, like it doesn't want to close correctly :-). I have to chalk it up to bugs in Mozilla, so just wait for them to go away.