Supreme Court to review porn filtering Act
“NYT” story.

“WASHINGTON, Nov. 12. The Supreme Court agreed today to review Congress’s latest effort to shield children from pornography on the Internet, a federal law that requires libraries to install filters on all computers providing Internet access to adults as well as to young patrons.

A special three-judge federal court in Philadelphia ruled last spring that the Children’s Internet Protection Act was unconstitutional because it induced public libraries to violate their patrons’ First Amendment rights as a condition of receiving federal financing for Internet access….”

UK Government discovers danger of email scams. Sharp cookies, eh?

Speaking yesterday at the launch of National Consumer week Consumer Affairs Minister, Melanie Johnson, said: “We have warned the public about the danger of postal scams, such as bogus prize draws and competitions. But people also need to bear the same warnings in mind if they use mobile phones, fax machines and e-mail.

“Every day, people throughout the UK open their mail, turn on their computers or switch on their mobile phones to learn that they’ve won ‘an exciting prize’ in a draw, lottery or some other promotion. While much of the marketing conducted in this way is legitimate, unfortunately it also includes examples, which are misleading or untrue.

“All too often those people taken in by scams make the mistake of being too trusting and lose money as a result,” she said.

McDonalds cuts back to, er, beef up, profits

Now here’s an interesting thing: McDonalds is pulling out of three countries, shutting 175 outlets and laying off 600 staff because of falling sales. Needless to say, the Middle East has suddenly become a profit-free zone, and sales in the UK have not recovered from the BSE scandal — which has put a lot of people off eating beef they haven’t been introduced to beforehand. But the really interesting thing of course is that McDonalds, like Coca Cola, is a token for American values. If it is really a victim of anti-Americanism, then the US corporate world will sit up and take notice. Who’ll be next? Disney? Microsoft? Meanwhile, fat people in the US are suing fast food chains for selling them the gunge that made them obese. Isn’t capitalism wonderful.

What Bruce (Perens) did next (contd.)
Register story.

” One thing you have to admire about Bruce Perens: he has lots of ideas and he’s not afraid to implement them. Before the door was fully closed behind him at HP, he started Sincere Choice to counter Microsoft’s “Software Choice” initiative. Now he’s heading up a new non-profit: the Global Technology Policy Institute.”…

Review article on Lessig, Benkler etc.

Remarkably intelligent and useful article by Bryan Alexander. Useful for our forthcoming T182 course. And here is Yochai Benkler’s terrific paper on how the infusion of the concept of ‘property’ into the world of ideas has imposed huge social costs on us all.

Boosting the disruptive signal

According to the “NYT”, a start-up in California has found a way of harnessing phased-array antennae technology greatly to extend the range of WiFi coverage. The formal launch of the technology is scheduled for next week, but there won’t be products until Q1 2003. That’s assuming it’s not vapourware, of course.

Saddam’s inbox

Thanks to Gerard de Vries for a link to an International Herald Tribune article about how a journalist from Wired hacked into Saddam’s inbox. How did he do it? Why by the old trick of guessing that the password for press@uruklink.net (Saddam’s email handle) would be — wait for it — ‘press’. Lots of interesting stuff in there, including messages from Western companies offering their assistance to the Butcher of Baghdad. But it seems that he doesn’t check his email all that often — the box had reached its quota and begun bouncing messages! Sigh. Poor ol’ Dubya will just have to pick up the phone. Or send his opposite number a message by cruise missile.

Microsoft’s er, ‘generosity’ spurned by Namibia
Register story.

“The African nation of Namibia is large in area and small in population with considerable distances between communities. Imagine the challenges of getting its schools wired to the Net. SchoolNet Namibia, a chiefly volunteer organization, struggles to do precisely that with a free ISP and numerous other initiatives to get the nation’s schools, many of which lack any library resources at all, on-line.

Imagine the pleasure with which SchoolNet would initially have confronted a charitable overture from Microsoft involving free software. Now imagine the disappointment of learning that accepting the ‘gift’ would entail outlays of money in the range of fifteen times the value of the M$ Trojan horse….”

The weakest link in computer security — as ever
Economist piece.

No — it’s not your Microsoft operating system (though of course that also figures in the calculation). It’s humans. In one survey, carried out by PentaSafe Security, two-thirds of commuters at London’s Victoria Station were happy to reveal their computer password in return for a ballpoint pen.

Jeffrey Rosen on the Eldred case

Interesting and insightful commentary on Larry Lessig’s case against the CTEA. “In Congress, defenders of the CTEA came up with only one argument for how the act might promote creativity. They testified that the act could encourage major studios to digitize hit films from the ’20s and ’30s by extending their economic value. But this argument is not convincing. As the head of The Hal Roach Studio–the leading restorer of Laurel and Hardy and other films from the ’20s and ’30s–argued in a principled brief that clashed with his financial interests, the CTEA extends the copyright for 19,000 films made between 1923 and 1942. Of these, only 5,000 continue to earn royalties, which means that the remaining 14,000 have little economic value but are of great historical interest. Many of these are “orphan” films whose copyright holders are very difficult to track down today. The CTEA makes restorations of such films economically prohibitive by requiring nonprofit restorers to hire private detectives to track down the lost copyright holders for the music, the credits, and so forth. As a result, the orphan films will continue to rot unwatched in the Library of Congress. And even if the CTEA actually did increase the incentive to restore these films, as Congress unconvincingly concluded, the preservation of 14,000 films hardly justifies the removal of more than 400,000 other creative works–books, poems, songs, and photographs–from the public domain. ”