Greetings! I'm back! :) I'm sure you missed me, oh so much (mom). So, I've collected a few things of interest over the past couple days (or more) and thought I'd toss them all into a single post (since technorati whines if I post more than 1 article per couple hours [which is so weird]). Anyway, a quick overview of the topics:
1) A good blogger law resource.
2) Interesting notes from groklaw on MS, SCO GPL tapdance.
3) 9th Circuit Court ruling on warrantless monitoring.
Blogger Law Resource
There's an excellent article on Aviva Directory, 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know, that every blogger should read. It's very thorough and well-researched and, frankly, about scares the pants off of me. So much for freedom of speech in the U.S.!!!
For the record, I don't make paid posts, and I will treat your personal information as completely private, should you post to my site. I'm a strong advocate of personal liberty and privacy. In fact, that's one of the reasons I joined EFF.
MS, SCO Doing GPL Tapdance
PJ has an interesting posting on her Groklaw site. She provides an example of how we lowly little consumers could apply the same principles that Microsft and SCO are trying to pull in getting around the GPL. Don't know what GPL is? Check out this wikipedia entry or the Copyleft program.
9th Circuit Court Ruling on Warrantless Monitoring
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, out in California, has issued a ruling that is strangely unfriendly to consumers. It's concluded that law enforcement (LE) monitoring of Internet use is roughly equivalent to use of pen registers. The good news is that it takes a court order to require an organization to create a pen register. The bad news is that, once the register is created and functioning, LE will not be required to get court approval to view the records. A key quote from the article:
"In Friday's ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages."
I would encourage everyone to contact their ISP and find out a) if they've setup a pen register, and b) what their policy is on monitoring their customers. I find this whole thing increasingly disturbing. We're accelerating toward a police state where the Executive Branch has excessive powers and can look at quite a lot of information without any sort of court oversight. The Legislative Branch is increasingly at odds with the White House on the power struggle, but things don't look overly promising yet. It's going to take impeachment and removal of the President and Vice President to start getting things back where they belong, I fear. And I'm not overly confident the current crop of dipsticks in Congress have the balls to do the right thing. In the meantime, miles are taken for every inch given. Very disturbing.
Postscript:
If you want to know how not to conduct a vacation, then check out Chris Anderson's tale.
If you want to know how to do a vacation right, then check out Mike Fischer's blog where he's recounting their recent 17 day tour of Europe. It appears they had an awesome time over there!
Compare and contrast. Talk amongst yourselves. ;)
