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The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals launched a redesigned web site yesterday. Although much of the site’s content requires a membership password, see this publications link for access to abstracts and some full-text articles without a fee.
The New York Times reports on a New Jersey program, beginning this summer, to implement digitized security features on the state’s driver licenses to prevent theft and fraud. The features will include “holograms, a bar code and digital signatures.”
The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider this Friday the case of Healthgrades.com v. Northwest Healthcare Alliance Inc. for their fall docket (No. 02-1250). This case is of considerable interest in light of the recent Internet jurisdiction decision from Australia, Dow Jones and Company v. Gutnick, which was back in the news last week. For …
EPIC, along with a coalition of 10 advocacy groups, filed a complaint with the FTC today stating that Amazon.com is violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (“COPPA”) by collecting and disclosing personal information about children. EPIC provides specific examples of children, with key information redacted to protect their privacy, who are registered …
From around the country, more articles on the escalating backlash against the Patriot Act as exemplified by defiant libraries and local governments. In Washington State, Libraries routinely toss data on patrons’. From New York State, Libraries, government at odds over Patriot Act, and from California, Local Officials Rise Up to Defy The Patriot Act.
On April 15, the Department of Homeland Security proposed new regulations for Procedures for Handling Critical Infrastructure Information. The rulemaking states: “The Department recognizes that its receipt of information pertaining to the security of critical infrastructure, much of which is not customarily within the public domain, is best encouraged through the assurance that such information …
According to this article in PC World, “the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service is currently considering a regulation that would let it ignore any public comments on its rule-making process sent to it through Web-based forms.” The agency also intends to ignore comments sent using form letters and postcards that result from lobbying/advocacy efforts. …
Rep. Henry Waxman, Ranking Member, House Committee on Government Reform, Minority Office, sent a letter to the Committee on Energy and Commerce requesting an investigation into accusations that over the course of two years, Philip Morris destroyed e-mail relevant to the DOJ case filed against the company in 1999, alleging deceptive practices. See also this …
Ask Jeeves Inc., seeking to move out of the number two search engine position, today launched the new Ask Jeeves’ “Smart Search” features that facilitate more effective searches “by helping narrow, broaden or more directly answer user queries.” This announcement describes the new features and tools now available: Jeeves is now 50% faster. The cleaner …
See Burn a Country’s Past and You Torch Its Future: “Do libraries really matter for a nation’s sense of its self? Evidently Iraqis felt the destruction of their national library, archives and museum in the past week as a loss of their connection to a collective past, something like a national memory.”
Joe Clark, author of Building Accessible Websites, published a white paper on Accessibility implications of digital rights management in which concludes, “Digital rights management, as currently designed, will harm people with disabilities and others who rely on accessibility features.” See also Fiddling with the Internet Dials: Understanding Usability.
All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster, was reviewed in the Sunday Washington Post as “a richly reported behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of Napster Inc., the online music-swapping phenomenon.” From the Boston Globe, see also this article by the book’s author, Joseph Menn, The Man Who Hijacked Napster, …