Author archives

Communicating With White House Via E-Mail Now a Daunting Task

White House E-Mail System Becomes Less User-Friendly: “Those who want to send a message to the president must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a form that asks if they support White House policy.” A New York Times follow-up article: “The White House Web site began more prominently featuring the …

Subjects: E-Government, E-Mail, Web Site Accessibility and Usability

Hearing on Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003

Legislative hearing on H.R. 2517, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003, to enhance criminal enforcement of the copyright laws, educate the public about the application of copyright law to the Internet, and clarify the authority to seize unauthorized copyrighted works. Witness List, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Jana Monroe (FBI), David Trust (Professional Photographers of …

Subjects: Copyright, Cybercrime, Legislation

Public Underestimates Website Privacy Standards

Three Things You Don’t Want to Know About Your Personal Information: “Online merchants are frantically sucking up every scrap of information they can get about consumers, but consumers know next to nothing about what happens to that information.” Also see New Annenberg Report Examines Americans’ Understanding of Online Privacy. Yahoo! and Your Personal Information: “Yahoo’s …

Subjects: Privacy

Your New Passport Will Have A Digital ID Chip

From FCW.com: “The State Department is developing a passport that contains biometric technology to authenticate the identities of U.S. citizens who travel abroad.” Also see, Vendors boost biometrics for homeland. “In a trusted traveler program, such as one proposed as part of the Transportation Security Administration’s Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) II, a passenger …

Subjects: E-Government, Privacy

Even Shredded Documents Are Not Beyond Reconstructing

Picking Up the Pieces: “People perceive it (the paper shredder) as an almost perfect device,” said Jack Brassil, a researcher for Hewlett-Packard who has worked on making shredded documents traceable. If people put a document through a shredder, “they assume that it’s fundamentally unrecoverable,” he said. “And that’s clearly not true.” For more detailed documentation, …

Subjects: E-Records, Privacy

Critique of Google

From Slate, Digging for Googleholes, ends with the following paragraph: “We’re wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It’s closer to a collectively authored op-ed page — filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion — than an encyclopedia. It’s still the connected world’s most dazzling place to visit, a …

Subjects: Legal Research, Search Engines