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."

Cookies and the privacy invasions they've been used for (note: 'been used for', not 'caused') should be treated as all-new types of crimes that may, upon further inspection, happen to bear some relationships to old-style crimes.

I've written elsewhere that metaphors are not arguments, and a more general expression of that idea is "Metaphors are useful only for explaining, never deciding." (Perhaps On Deciding... Better should do a bit on what I call the 'metaphor' fallacy. I'm tempted to do so myself, it just wouldn't be as good. Too many people thinking about Internet issues resort to metaphors, which unfortunately is a form of intellectual laziness in this environment where so much is new.)

Cookies are not stalking. If cookies are to be compared to anything in the real world, it would be radio tagging an animal, except that cookies only work some of the time, and the tags can be removed or rejected (see, even that's not such a good metaphor). You dare not start down the path of creating metaphors for all Internet activity and then start legislating based on that; it will not work. It creates a miasma of legislation and will not 'scale', in engineering parlance; you are constantly creating new special cases for the Internet program du jour.

No no no! This is a thoroughly bad bad bad idea. It may seem like a smart use of the law, but that's smart as in "smart-aleck", not "smart Nobel Prize winner".

The whole contents of the new piece could probably be summed up as "Sure, it seems harmless now... but it won't be so harmless later." Still, it can be sobering to take a survey of everything that's happening right now. Even if you know all of this stuff, it may still be worth reading for the perspective.

I've updated the Purpose of this site... not only does it still have the old purpose, which I'm now calling this site's Mission Statement, but it also includes my answer to the legitimate question, "Why should we care about the issues I talk about on iRights, when so many of them seem unimportent now?" in my new piece, State of the Web.

I disagree strongly... technical problems are not going to stand in the way of making a great website. There are other, bigger problems in the works.

Seybold Musings: The One-Person Web Is Dead: "If you're someone who just got used to the idea of making Web pages, saving them to your hard drive, and then uploading them to a Web server, I have begun to sound like I'm from Mars. But that's the whole point -- the whole process of creating Web sites is evolving into something really big. Been planning on mourning the day when the Web transforms from being a medium where regular joes can get their message out to the world to a medium totally dominated by big media companies with lots of expensive staff and technical experts? Break out the black frock, because the time is now."