CNET has a special report that is worth review. It includes the following articles: Safety: Assessing the infrastructure risk, Politics: Weighing security against liberties Lessons, and Keeping networks alive in New York.
Fortune Small Business (FSB) columnist Maggie Overfelt offers short reviews and grades for AlltheWeb, Google, MSN, Teoma, WiseNut and Yahoo. Also from FSB, see the article All the Right Moves about the incredible rise in the fortunes of the 4 year old Google, a company that is making what appear to be all the right moves in a dot-com market that has seen an overwhelming failure rate. Their success is in no small measure due to the outstanding group of technologists and scientists that have been drawn to the company fold by the challenging work and serious financial support of major venture capital firms.
According to this New York Times article, Dr. Raymond Lorie, Research Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center, has been testing a program to preserve digital documents so that they can be read decades into the future, despite the obvious obstacles of the evolution of hardware and software. A paper he wrote on the topic, titled A Project on Preservation of Digital Data, describes the program as follows: "For data archiving, we propose to save a program P that can extract the data from the bit stream and return it to the caller in an understandable way, so that it may be exported to a new system. The program P is written for a Universal Virtual Computer (UVC). All that is needed in the future for executing P is an interpreter of the UVC instructions. The execution of P in the future will return the data with additional information, according to the metadata (which is also archived)."
For more context and other perspectives on this important issue, see Richard Wiggins' article, Digital Preservation: Paradox & Promise (from the Library Journal, 4/15/2001, reg. req.) Richard also recommends an excellent resource from the National Library of Australia: PADI, Preserving Access to Digital Information. Here you will find links to topical articles, organizations and web sites, policies, strategies and guidelines, projects and cases, and related journals and newsletters.
The California State Senate will decide today whether or not to pass the most recent marked up version of Senate Bill 773, the California Financial Information Privacy Act. If passed, financial institutions would be required to obtain written permission from their clients to disseminate, sell or market personal data to third parties.
On August 23, 2002, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, issued a decision which was a rare reversal of its own previous decision of January 1, 2001.
A group of California activists are hopping mad, to the tune of a $2 trillion lawsuit against a fax broadcasting company (fax.com, inc.) who they claim is invading their privacy. Cases were filed in both the Northern District of California and in the California Superior Court for Santa Clara County on August 22, 2002. These cases come on the heels of the FCC proposing to fine fax.com the sum of $5.379 million for sending unsolicited faxes, for a fee, on over 489 occasions.
In the Circuits section of today's New York Times, there is an article about adoption of 24/7 virual reference services by public libraries around the country. These services are provided both by contract employees from their homes during off-hours, and by librarians serving their patrons during scheduled hours when libraries are open. One of the largest providers of reference services is 24/7 Reference.
On August 28, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced that a settlement had been reached with publisher Ziff Davis (whose holdings include PC Magazine, Extreme Tech, eWeek and CIO Insight) to resolve a security breach that compromised the personal data of some 12,000 subscribers to its Electronic Gaming Monthly. The agreement stipulates that Ziff Davis will be required to be far more diligent in implementing and maintaining its computer security, data encryption efforts, and oversight of employee operations. The 16 page text of the agreement is in PDF.
The Electronic Financial Services Council is spearheading an initiative called SPeRS (Standards and Procedure for Electronic Records and Signatures) to create acceptable non-partisan guidelines for digital signatures in e-commerce transactions.
On July 24, 2002, the USPTO submitted a Report to Congress on the Removal of Classified Paper from the USPTO's Public Search Facilities. In response, the National Intellectual Property Association is seeking to stop the USPTO's systematic destruction of the world's largest paper collection of patent and trademark documents, which number in the tens of millions. In addition, the National Intellectual Property Law Institute has offered to be the custodians of the whole paper library of documents. In place of the paper documents, the USPTO is instituting an automated search and retrieval system, Examiners Automated Search Tool (EAST) and the Web Enabled Search Tool (WEST), that apparently is not up to the massive task at hand.
F***edcompany.com, the notorious, and apparently lucrative site that foretells the demise of dot-coms, succumbed to Ford's threats concerning copyright infringement (after being shut down by their ISP for two days), and removed postings which were send-ups of several of the auto manufacturer's popular advertising slogans.
ICANN adopted a resolution on August 22 creating a waiting list service (WLS) for those who are interested in acquiring dot-com and dot-net domain names that have lapsed.
Gallerywatch.com has announced that this September they will offer subscribers access to summaries of all, yes, all, published CRS Reports. The thousands of reports issued annually are not made available online, but there are resources that selectively provide the full-text of some reports. An excellent guide on this topic was written by Stephen Young.
The Canadian Department of Justice has released a consultation document to amend their Criminal Code, and grant law enforcement agencies broader access to data collected on Web subscribers by their respective ISPs (Patriot Act redux?).
NARA is facing the daunting task of archiving millions of electronic records for public access, many of which were created using formats that are now obsolete.