What a stupid ruling!

If I were demon, I would turn the Internet into a one-way connection; you may request pages, but query arguments will be stripped, post arguments will be denied, telnet connection will not be allowed, nothing except web pages coming back would be allowed. All other English ISPs would be forced to follow suit too (you'd have to do this in conjunction with them, of course).

Of course, it has nothing to do with people's 'rights' (or lack thereof) to libel, it has everything to do with who's responsible. Demon Internet estimates that there are one million individual articles posted every day on their servers. My experience on the internet says this is a reasonable number. If this is not overturned, then ISPs are going to be forced to essentially shut down the Usenet, the Web, and basically, anything where their users can send out.

Demon coughs up damages in Godfrey libel case: This has been an ongoing case since well before this site started. Prof. Godfrey has been crusading to make ISP's responsible for what is posted using their facilities. (I believe "crusade" is his word, too, so no flames please.) He has finally succeeded. In his words: "I am happy with the settlement. I don't think there is a right, in fact I'm quite sure there's no right, to libel other people on the Internet, to concoct fabricated allegations and try to destroy people's reputations."

Did you realize that the cphack program was this dangerous? "Ideas bear consequences, fruitful and also destructive. The pernicious idea that all men are not created equal is the philosophic basis which incited the degradations of slavery and the genocidal slaughter of the [Nazi] Holocaust." Would somebody please write me if they can figure out what this has to do with decrypting a list of banned URLs?

Maybe it's time to bring it back, though.

The cynic in me is forcing me to suggest that the issue is a null point, journalistic integrity disappeared decades ago.

I tend to write about the rights of "the common folk", since the rights of corporations tend to be well a$$ured by legions of lawyers, but there's an interested thing happening around and about Scripting News. How do you define journalistic integrity in the new world of online journalism?