Sunday, August 10, 2003

Large US retailers and food companies are trying to get RFIDs designated as anti-terrorist devices according to Wired. This would be comical if it wasn't so serious. Of course the natural follow up is that it is the patriot duty of every citizen to support anti-terrorism measures. Can't wait to see David Blunkett jumping on this bandwagon.

The RIAA's P2P war hit a slight snag on Friday when a Boston judge threw out their subpoena from a Washington D.C. court to identify Massachusetts students. . "The court rejected the RIAA's bald-faced attempt to use a single D.C. court ruling to steamroller Internet users' privacy nationwide," said EFF staff attorney Wendy Seltzer. One up for MIT and Boston College. Nice article on the RIAA crusade here. Haven't come across Phillyburbs before.

IBM are coming out all guns blazing against the SCO lawsuit over linux. They're treating SCO's advice that they indemnify their customers against IP infringement claims with contempt. A clear sign they don't believe SCO has a chance in court. They're also saying SCO ahve violated the GPL and undermined their own case with their past behavior and finally, in true IBM form, they're accusing SCO of violating at least four IBM patents. Anyone for settlement talks?

Elsewhere, eBay have written to Google to demand they ban advertisers using keywords like 'ebay', 'bay' and 'auction web sites'. Francis Hwang wonders if domain names matter as much as they used to?

And the 9th circuit, according to Yale's excellent Lawmeme, "will be hearing arguments on a suit challenging the constitutionality of computerized voting systems that do not generate paper records." As Steven Wu says, "What in heaven's name are the arguments against requiring a paper trail or some other independent (and independently verifiable) indicator of voter intent?"

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