FBI Bugging Case Goes to Court Surveillance and Privacy from Government 'The legal limits for these new investigative tools will get a test Monday when a federal court in New Jersey examines a mob case in which agents, without a wiretap order, recorded a suspect's computer keystrokes.... 'Armed only with a search warrant, the FBI broke into Scarfo's business and put either a program on his computer or an electronic bug in his keyboard -- officials will not say which -- and recorded everything typed by the son of the jailed former boss of a Philadelphia mob.

Techs Must Report Child Pornography Misc. For South Carolina" 'Tucked into a new law on education standards for day care workers is a requirement that private technicians tell police if they find child pornography when servicing computers.' *blink* *blink* On the one hand, these people shouldn't be required to perform in a law enforcement capacity. On the other, giving computer folks a little law enforcement capability could be very interesting.

The Great CNET Spam-off Spam & E-mail 'CNET contributor Matt Lake opened 12 free e-mail accounts (and monitored some older ones) and dedicated each to one typical online activity. He even opened accounts at each e-mail provider and left them untouched just to examine the myth that just having an e-mail account can generate spam. Next, he joined up at sites that require you to register an e-mail address, posted messages on message boards around the Web, registered domain names, and visited chat rooms.

Taming the Wild, Wild Web Misc. '"We don't have any control over the Internet," said Michels, president and chief executive of Maryland-based CSP Inc., which helps big clients protect priceless corporate data in the event of an earthquake, computer network outage or other disaster. "If something goes down, you don't even know who's accountable. The Internet is, like, 'Who ya gonna call?' " 'That's an example of how the Internet's leading virtue, its unruliness, is increasingly getting cursed by business executives and economists as its worst flaw.

Still in DMCA Prison DMCA From Slashdot: Let's go over the Sklyarov situation. Sklyarov is still in jail. In fact, he's still in Las Vegas, where he is being held without even a bail hearing, much less bail. The excuse given for not having a bail hearing when he was arrested on July 16 was that he was being immediately transferred to San Jose and would get a hearing there.

The Copyright Cops Go Too Far DMCA 7/24/2001; 11:40:29 PM 'It's also difficult to understand how the prosecution of Skylarov will help Adobe -- not to mention the rest of us -- which is supposed to be the justification for criminal laws. So far, the arrest has done little more than galvanize anti-DMCA activists and create a barrage of negative publicity for Adobe, which I'm willing to bet has not translated into an increase in the already pathetic sales of eBooks.

Linux: The electoral test that pencil and paper meet Misc.7/24/2001; 12:28:18 PM 'When Carol Boughton's Canberra consultancy, Software Improvements, won a $200,000 contract to provide an electronic voting system for the ACT's October election, it was critically important her team got the technology right.'"ACT" stands for "Australian Capital Territory". This is still a poll-based scheme... you have to come in and vote, it's not a remote thing. (This is good.

Sad and lonely in cyberspace? No, not really. Technology & Sociology7/23/2001; 3:22:23 PM 'A new, longer follow-up from a study that linked Web use to poor mental health — heavily publicized three years ago — shows that most bad effects have disappeared.'"Either the Internet has changed, or people have learned to use it more constructively, or both," says the study leader, psychologist Robert Kraut of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Go Ahead, Make Ashcroft's Day Misc.7/23/2001; 2:08:20 PM 'So on Friday afternoon, when Ashcroft announced a tough-on-hacking initiative to combat the people of "poor and evil motivations" who seek to bring down the world's precious computers, did cyber-punks flinch and ask themselves if they felt lucky?'Not likely.... The new program will create a cadre of specialized cybercrime attorneys -- called "computer hacking and intellectual property" units, or, stupidly, CHIPs. They'll be based at 10 field offices around the country, from which, Ashcroft promised, they'll be able to respond like lightning to any digital threats.

Digital signature becomes law Misc.7/21/2001; 8:32:43 PM 'Electronic signatures are now as legally binding as hand-written ones.'A European Commission directive came into force on Thursday, legally recognising the digital signature for the first time. 'These signatures can be used for signing contracts on e-mail and will make business much more efficient, speeding up transactions around the world.'If I recall correctly, these are electronic signitures, not digital signitures.