The court stopped short of allowing random tests for any student, whether or not involved in extracurricular activities, but several justices have indicated they are interested in answering that question at some point. "

I just don't get it. If you can test a subset of the student body based on this reasoning, then you can test the whole student body. If you can test the whole student body, then you can test the whole town. If you can test the whole town for drugs, you can search the whole town for other criminal behaviour as well. There is no fourth amendment any more. The consitution was just declared unconsitutional.

CNN.com - High court approves random drug tests in public schools - June 27, 2002

"The fundamental issue is that whoever controls the Fritz chips will acquire a huge amount of power. There are many ways in which this power could be abused, and Intel has refused to answer questions on the governance of the TCPA consortium. "

Ross Anderson's TCPA FAQ

TCPA / Palladium FAQ

"SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) -- A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag cannot be recited in public schools because the phrase "under God" endorses religion. "

Wow, this is going to be messy. Of course, the article notes:

"The 9th Circuit is the most liberal and the most overturned appeals court in the country."

CNN.com - Court rules Pledge of Allegiance 'unconstitutional' - June 26, 2002

"People believed that the GPL made it impossible for a company to come along and steal code that was the result of community effort. That may have been the case so long as the processor was open, and anyone could access supervisor mode. But TCPA changes that completely. Once the majority of PCs on the market are TCPA-enabled, the GPL won't work as intended any more. "

A more coherent discussion of the threat of processor certs. (I did a talk on this at SummerCon 1997.) People should simply refuse to buy computers that refuse to do what they are told. Worked with DivX... If this fails, then lets organize a collaborative cracking effort...

More Ross Anderson on Vile TCPA

"Chad Struer has played golf with almost 20 Fortune 500 CEOs. One in three cheats, he says. Struer finds that rather peculiar, because those same CEOs hire him and his Salinas, Calif., company, USA Diligence, to investigate the honesty of start-up companies so the CEOs can decide whether to invest. "

The culture of dishonesty. USA Today's top story.

USATODAY.com - Many CEOs bend the rules (of golf)

"Adelphia Communications Corp. is in the process of filing for bankruptcy court protection in New York, according to people familiar with situation."

Will they make it back out? Sounds like a good excuse for a betting pool.

Adelphia is filing for Chapter 11

The United States is aware of the consequences of its demand. By making reform and new leadership prerequisites for further American participation in a peace process, the United States has created the framework for its withdrawal from that process."

The Strategy behind the Bush Mid-East Plan

"Public confidence that the United States and its allies are winning has slipped to 33%, the lowest level since Sept. 11. "

Confidence in war on terror wanes

"Copyright holders would receive carte blanche to use aggressive tactics to stop the illegal distribution of their works on online services like Morpheus and Kazaa under legislation outlined today by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.). "

This is an extremely bad idea because it undermines the rule of law. Would the copyright industries really be held liable if they did this right now? Absolutely not. A goverment stamp of approval means this sort of behavior is "OK." The government should never advocate that citizens take the law into their own hands.

This is also an extremely bad idea because this sort of pressure is only going to cause the pirates to develop more mature technologies. The copyright holders cannot out-tech the pirates in the long term. The result will be that copyright law will go from being very difficult to enforce to being absolutely impossible to enforce.

If you are a pirate, you can read all of this as good news, essentially.

Proposal to allow pro-copyright vigilanti squads...

"The company said an internal audit showed that transfers of $3.055 billion for 2001 and $797 million for the first quarter of 2002 were not made in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. "

!!

WorldCom in accounting trouble - Jun. 25, 2002