A month ago, the MPAA filed its report [PDF] with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the terrors of analog copying. I quote: "in order to help plug the hole, watermark detectors would be required in" -- are you sitting down? -- "all devices that perform analog to digital conversions." At their page Protecting Creative Works in a Digital Age, the Senate lays out the issues they'll be looking at, including briefs from corporate groups, and provides a comment form so your opinion can be heard as well. As Cory Doctorow writes: "this is a much more sweeping (and less visible) power-grab than the Hollings Bill, and it's going forward virtually unopposed. ...the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is bare weeks away from turning over a veto on new technologies to Hollywood." Doctorow's article on the "analog hole" for the EFF does a great job of explaining the issues to non-electrical-engineers, and has many thought-provoking examples of how requiring such technology would be a giant step backwards.

'House Approves Bill for Child-Friendly Domain Names:

'The House of Representatives' approved legislation designed to cordon off a safe online 'playground' for young children. House members voted 406-2 to approve the 'Dot-Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002,' which would mandate the creation of a "dot-kids" extension within America's sovereign "dot-us" Internet domain. ... [Ernie the Attorney]

'Ernie asks why this is a bad thing, so here's the answer....'

Good read. There's quite a bit more then what I'm quoting here, and it may not be clear who's saying what, since I had to kill the formatting. In regard to the Shifted Librarian's comment: 'I haven't followed up on this to see who is defining the standards for this domain, but I can't think of a single person (let alone committee or entity) that I would trust to do this for the entire country.', I went ahead and looked up the bill, but the linking is confusing me. This should go to the text of the bill as passed, but you may need to use this page; look up "dot-kids" and pick the first result.

Simson Garfinkel: 'Just as nations now regulate their physical frontiers, so too will they regulate their electronic ones--using computer security rather than objectionable ideas as their justification.'

This won't work very well on a national level, because of the virtual impossibility of determining what a bad packet is. A virus forwarded over email could very well be a McAfee employee in Europe forwarding something found in the wild to the main McAfee labs in the US. Most other "bad" documents may have similarly importent legitimate uses. On the national scale, you just can't block on any reasonable criterion without paying a horrible price (by which I mean actual money).

Yesterday Creative Commons was announced. I just browsed the site quickly looking for a spec describing the XML format they're using. Megnut suggested that if blogging tools make it easy for people to declare their intentions and automatically generate the XML, that would be a good thing. I'm into helping if I can. First I gotta find the spec.

Let's say the spec emerges. One of [Userland, Blogger, LiveJournal] implement it and make it easy for their users to use this. Thanks to the very healthy competition in this space, the other two follow up within a week. (This assumes a simple "Creative Commons" spec, which is likely.) Bam; in two weeks, quite possibly less, a new XML standard has been rolled out to thousands of sites. In short order, tools that use this content will emerge, too.

Icky.

The linked article is something I think I've been groping towards for a while, and I think it makes sense. Even if you aren't a Christian, it might help to read it; it speaks to something about marketing in general that we all have to deal with. In the age of professional advertising and targetted marketing, how do you ever find anything good, be it as importent as answers to the Great Questions, or as trivial as picking toothpaste. Both are now pitched as life-changing decisions.

A Jabber update: As you may have seen on Scripting News, there's this "tcp.im" thing which we're still hammering out. Exactly what happens with the Jabber code I've written depends on what happens over the next few days, and whether or not Dave decides to ship it standard to everybody with Radio. (Personally, I'm hoping we can get both Jabber and AIM support over the next few days to the point where we can ship both, but obviously what finally happens isn't my call ;-) )

Ouch. 12^th hit for "jeremy boring" on Google.

Damn that's one good search engine...

Review Scripting News on Alexa.  

Observation: To those who claim things like web annotation are necessary, this is exactly the sort of site I've been saying should exist instead. If you must review sites, this is how to do it; elsewhere. Linked in, but elsewhere. No need to worry about Alexa stomping on sites, or affecting the editorial integrity, while at the same time, it still provides a platform for discussion of the site.

'[[Humorix's] Editor's Note: The following is a letter that HumoriXP sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to the proposed SSSCA.]'

'1. WHEREAS Congress finds that the vast majority of Internet users and entertainment consumers are thieves, pirates, miscreants, Communists, hackers, and anarchists, and that musicians, artists, writers, authors, directors, actors, programmers and executives are suffering undue harm as a result, we hereby enact the Secure Software Systems for the Children Act of 2002 to declare war against copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret violations throughout the world.'