The RIAA, following its sue everybody strategy, is ready to go after the Librarian of Congress (via Michael Mussington). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

From the linked article, RIAA's second claim:

The Librarian ignored 25 separate licensing agreements the RIAA had previously agreed to and submitted as evidence, as well as 115 similar deals signed by the individual record companies. If these agreements -- all of which represented rates born by a fair market -- were appropriately considered by the Librarian, the final royalty rate would have been significantly higher.

Dan Sickles points out this on the Microsoft site (when you search for DRM):

Group Program Manager
Location: Washington
Are you interested in being part of Microsoft's effort to build the Digital Rights Management (DRM) and trusted platforms of the future (Palladium)?

This is one of many like this.  Despite Microsoft saying that Palladium isn't DRM, it's clearly not the truth. It's mostly about DRM in the short term.  Longer term it is about personal data sharing (a requirement for the next generation of marketing: personal advertisements -- what I call demographic dystopia). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

"You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer,"

The preceding verbiage appears in the EULA for SP1 for WinXP and SP3 for Win2K. This is it. The bell hath tolled. The tax-man is here. It's time to pay the piper. You must now decide: Will you deed your computer over to Microsoft, or wean yourself from your Microsoft dependence?

I am a Vernor Vinge fan. One of my favorite books is his "A Fire Upon the Deep".

For a while I've been aware that there is an annotated edition of it on an obscure, totally impossible to get a copy of CD called The "Electric Science Fiction" 1993 Hugo/Nebula Award Anthology CD. The edition available on that CD claims to contain 500KB of annotations from the author. I, and many others, would very much like to see those annotations, but it seemed they disappeared, along with the CD itself.

About... wow, a year and five months ago!... I killed my hard drive. In the end, the most importent thing I lost was music I had written with my synthesizor, which was irreplacable in every sense of the word.

I could have sworn at the time that I had taken a backup of these things, along with a RedHat installation (back when it fit on one CD), but I could never find it, so I assumed I had mis-remembered. Especially after I found a couple of old RedHat CDs with other backups on them, but no music.

'Quite a number of us who participated in the early Internet protocol design were from the computer security research side, and did our best to make the Internet architecture secure from the start. But the NSA (I am told) told DARPA that any attempt to introduce security mechanisms into TCP/IP's architecture would be viewed very negatively. (This happened at about the same time that Rivest, et al. received a mysterious threatening letter from a senior military official claiming that their work on the RSA cipher must be stopped immediately)....'

I had a nicely researched article here a couple of days ago, but due to a bug in Mozilla and an over-aggresive mouse click, I lost it.

However, I hope to reconstruct it tonight.

In other news, this is a good article.

Copyright has become an interesting topic to a large number of people, so I'm going to assume for the moment that anyone reading this site is aware of Lawrence Lessig's case against copyright term extension, soon to be in the Supreme Court. I wanted to say a couple of things about that.

The news has been buzzing around for the last couple of days that Representative Berman, whose palm has been crossed with silver by the entertainment industry, would introduce a bill permitting copyright holders to hack or DoS people allegedly distributing their works without permission. Well, the bill has been introduced - read it and weep. Although the bill wouldn't allow copyright owners to alter or delete files on your machine, they would be allowed to DoS you in essentially any other way. Let me restate that: the MPAA and RIAA are asking that they be allowed to perform what would otherwise be federal and state criminal acts and civil torts, and you will have essentially no remedy against them under any laws of the United States. [Privacy Digest]

My analysis of the bill: Despite the obvious un-American nature of the bill, and the fact that the RIAA and MPAA are basically asking for permission to commit terrorist acts (that word has been tossed around a lot lately, but it's literally true here; they intend to "terrorize" their customers), the current incarnation of the bill is basically irrelevant. In order for a copyright holder to be allowed to get away with "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise imparing the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work", the act must meet several criteria:

• must not cause economic loss to any person other then affected file traders
• must not cause an economic loss of more then $50.00 per impairment to the property of an affected file trader not related to the copyrighted material

"I can't help it," Rosenblatt said. "Even when I close my eyes at night, I feel myself deconstructing things in my dreams—random stuff like that two-hour Dukes Of Hazzard reunion special or the Andy Warhol postage stamp or commercials for that new squeezable gel deodorant. I'd say I'm going crazy, but that presupposes an artificial barrier between societally preexisting concepts of 'sanity' and 'insanity' which themselves represent another false dichotomy maintained for the preservation of certain entrenched elements of the status quo and... Oh, God. I'm doing it again."

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, in his markup of legislation to create a Homeland Security Department, yesterday rejected a national identification card and scrapped a program that would use volunteers in domestic surveillance.

Mr. Armey, chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, included language in his markup of the legislation to prohibit the Justice Department from initiating the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, also called Operation TIPS.

Mr. Armey's bill also would create a "privacy officer" in the Homeland Security Department, which he said was the first ever established by law in a Cabinet agency. Mr. Armey said this person would "ensure technology research and new regulations from the department respect the civil liberties our citizens enjoy."