My interest in the anti-spam legislation's effect on anonymous business transactions has gotten me reading cypherpunks again. Although I guess its a poor idea to recommend other blogging tools, this one is cool enough to be worth a look. Its set up so that you post to it via mixmaster.

Cypherpunk Weblog System

] Executives at Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems,
] Hewlett-Packard and Intel say they have reduced their
] building needs by hundreds of thousands of square feet --
] or expect to do so in the near future -- by eliminating
] offices for many of their employees.

I think John Seely Brown would have critical things to say about this trend.

Silicon Valley: Companies eliminate office space

] Falsifying e-mail header information or using either a
] mail server or open relay to "deceive or mislead
] recipients" about the origin of a commercial e-mail
] message. Also outlawed is registering for "5 or more"
] e-mail accounts or "2 or more domain names" with false
] information and using them to send commercial e-mail
] messages. Penalties include up to three years in prison
] for a first offense.

Most of the provisions of the new anti-spam law are reasonable in that they target the sort of behavior that most of us have a problem with. It remains to be seen if the government will effectively enforce this legislation. I honestly doubt it as I remain fairly convinced that abuse of open relays is already illegal, but I've heard it argued that prosecutions under existing law have failed. We'll see...

Of note, however, is a certain section of the law which does not just target bulk commercial email, but targets ALL anonymous commercial email including transactional messages.

What that means is that it is basically illegal to run an ecash based service behind anonymous remailers because you are not allowed to send transactional messages to your customers through the remailer network.

In short, the U.S. Congress just banned nearly all effective forms of data haven under the auspices of protecting you from spam.

This, I must say, I oppose.

House passes antispam bill - Bans all anonymous business on the internet

] Apple is leading a race of lemmings into the zero-profit
] business of closed music downloads, says the founder of
] MP3.com, Michael Robertson.
]
] "It seems kind of crazy to me, the economics don't make
] sense," Robertson told us Thursday. "Why are all these
] guys like Microsoft and Wal-Mart rushing into a business
] where the industry leader says 'we cannot make money with
] the contracts that we have'?"

I don't fully agree with the conclusions this article makes, but I found it an entertaining perspective nonetheless.

The Register :: DRM stores a money pit

] Call it spam rage -- a Silicon Valley computer programmer
] has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill
] employees of the company he blames for bombarding his
] computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.

Wired News: Man Arrested Over 'Spam Rage'

] We decided to "ferberize" her. Dr. Richard Ferber is a
] child sleep specialist who has a come up with a method to
] train babies to go to sleep on their own, and help them
] sleep through the night.

Of course, years later they learn that this technique produces a generation of homicidal whackos.

Ferberize your baby...

The requirement, announced Friday by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, applies to all electronic voting systems already in use as well as those currently being purchased. The machines must be retrofitted with printers to produce a receipt by 2006.

E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail

] As more large customers move to distributed computing
] architectures, firms will want to leverage the
] flexibility and independence a integrated stack can
] create for a business. Our product line is being built
] through the delivery of software sold modularly. For
] example, our cluster suite.

Red Hat's answers were not very good.

Slashdot | Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds

] Revisiting a motion that had narrowly passed by a 4-3
] vote last month, Los Alamos County Council rescinded
] funding for the purchase of 17 Sequoia Pacific "Edge"
] touchscreen voting machines by a vote of 7-0 Tuesday.

A victory for the open source voting movement...

lamonitor.com: The Online News Source for Los Alamos

] Red Hat’s use of the Fedora™ brand name and its assertion
] of ownership over that name are of considerable concern
] to the Cornell and Virginia Fedora™ project team. Red
] Hat’s guidelines for use of the Fedora™ brand place
] restrictions on use of a term for which the Cornell and
] Virginia team have over five years of prior use. This
] position seems inconsistent with Red Hat’s stance on open
] source and its prominence in the open source community.

Sounds like redhat is aware of the concern here and is moving forward anyway. Stupid. They'll settle eventually, or they'll loose the name.

The Fedora