Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
From the Council on Foreign Relations, in cooperation with the Markle Foundation, comes this informative and timely website, Terrorism: Questions & Answers. “The purpose of our site is to help sort out issues as they relate to terrorism in a question-and-answer format that is authoritative, easily understandable, and nonpartisan.”
Via Digital Libraries, news about a new blog, VIP2, “for librarians, visually impaired individuals, and others interested in talking about digital books, talking books, digital audiobooks, library services for the visually impaired, and other issues of interest.”
From the International Herald Tribune, Net programs to catch spies gives a positive review to the free application Spybot Search Destroy from PepiMK Software. One of its features “is a file shredder under the Tools button that lets you completely delete a file from your computer in a way that leaves no traces of it …
The Congress Online Project released a report resulting from two years of research, Congress Online 2003: Turning the Corner on the Information Age (html). The entire text of the report is also available in PDF. The report evaluates 610 congressional member, standing committee and leadership websites, identifies effective techniques and tools for design, usability and …
According to a report in today’s Seattle Times via AP and Bloomberg, and the March 1 WSJ, on December 6, 2002 ICANN granted Amazon.com approval to sell TLD (top level domain) Internet addresses to the public. A search of ICANN’s site yielded confirmation of this approval in a very discreet manner: on a ICANN-Accredited Registrars …
A new organization, the Internet Research Task Force, comprised of 13 Research Groups, one of whose goal is to fight spam, launched their website last week. The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) has an email list at [email protected].
IDCs recently released study, Worldwide Bandwidth End-User Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007: More is Still Not Enough ($$$), predicts that within five years, Internet traffic generated by end-users will double, from “180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007.” The press release uses an interesting analogy to illustrate …
From the Digital Rights Management Conference, February 27- March 1, 2003, sponsored by the The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology: Lon Sobel, DRM as an Enabler of Business Models: ISPs as Digital Retailers, 18 Berkeley Tech. L.J. xx (forthcoming 2003) (Word, PDF, HTML). See also this New York Times article, Pondering Value of Copyright …
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on February 28 that Attorney General Ashcroft has threatened to prosecute California law enforcement officials who continue to access three government databases, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the National Crime Information Center and the Interstate Identification Index, to track illegal gun owners.
From the New York Times, Online Library Wants It All, Every Book: “The directors of the new Alexandria Library, which christened a steel and glass structure with 250,000 books in October, have joined forces with an American artist and software engineers in an ambitious effort to make virtually all of the world’s books available at …
Reuters reports that the January 7, 2003 decision from the Oslo, Norway Court of First Instance, acquitting teen Jon Johansen of criminal charges related to creating a utility (DeCSS) that descrambled the code for DVD players, has been appealed. The new trial is scheduled for Fall 2003. See my previous posting on the case here.
From Rep. Boucher’s website, this Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act Supporter List (H.R. 107). On 2/14/2003, the bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection.