A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Chapter 38 of Title 43 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to private detectives and security agencies, so as to revise a definition;

HB 1259 is back, and if anything it is worse. If this bill becomes law it will be a felony for CompUSA to remove virsuses from infected computers without a PI licence and a law enforcement professional on staff. If you are computer consultant and you respond a computer breakin you could face a year in prison under this statute.

This matter requires national attention from the IT Industry. Now.

At this point, both the IT and Internet content industries need to give serious attention to the Georgia state legislature as a whole right now. We are facing serious threats to our ability to function in Georgia on several fronts.

There is also Georgia Senate Bill 59 (SB 59), which would make sites like MemeStreams illegal.

Georgia General Assembly - HB 504

"Defuse the ticking time-bomb known as your child's imagination before it explodes and destroys her completely," said child-safety expert Kenneth McMillan, who advised the HHS in composing the guidelines. "New data shows a disturbing correlation between serious accidents and the ability of children to envision a world full of exciting possibility."

The guidelines, titled "Boundless Imagination, Boundless Hazards: Ways To Keep Your Kids Safe From A World Of Wonder," are posted on the HHS website, and will also be available in brochure form in pediatricians' offices across the country.

According to McMillan, children can suffer broken bones, head trauma, and even fatal injuries from unsupervised exposure to childlike awe. "If your children are allowed to unlock their imaginations, anything from a backyard swing set to a child's own bedroom can be transformed into a dangerous undersea castle or dragon's lair," McMillan said. "But by encouraging your kids to think linearly and literally, and constantly reminding them they can never be anything but human children with no extraordinary characteristics, you can better ensure that they will lead prolonged lives."

Satire: Experts call for restrictions on childhood imagination - CNN.com

That didn't take long. On Feb. 8, I posted to YouTube a clip taken from the Super Bowl: not the football, but the copyright warning the NFL stuck into the middle of it, wherein they tell you it's forbidden even to share "accounts of the game" without the NFL's consent.

Their copyright bot didn't seem to see the fair use in my educational excerpt, so YouTube just sent me their boilerplate takedown. Time to break out that DMCA counter-notification.

Wendy's Blog: Legal Tags: My First DMCA Takedown

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

YouTube - Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop

Con artists and swindlers in China who try to use fake ID will have a tougher time trying to pass themselves off as someone else now that the public has access to the Ministry of Public Security's population database.

Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country's population information center's website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person's identity card match. If they do match the ID cardholder's picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other
information is available to ensure a citizen's privacy is protected.

This is a novel approach.

Xinhua - China has an open ID database.

The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores.

The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute.

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies.

Decius's comments are right on:

Steve Jobs speaks openly about DRM here, which is interesting, but he is obviously negotiating with European anti-trust entities in this essay. He presents a proposition that the two major European music companies license their music to him without a DRM requirement. Thats a bit "let them eat cake" I think. I'm sure he thinks the pressure that Europeans might put on those major music companies as a result of this essay will release some of the pressure on him, allowing him to find a better negotiating position.

Unfortunately, with regard to the passage I'm quoting, he's wrong. In order to have a DRM system you have to put the enforcement technology in the hands of all of your users. Those people can reverse engineer that technology, and spread their results via the Internet. DRM encoding systems can be just as blackbox as DRM enforcement systems, and you aren't handing them to as many people, so the idea that you can't tolerate the risk of those encoders being reverse engineered doesn't make any sense. You're already taking the greater risk that the decoders will be reverse engineered, and thats the fundamental crux of DRM. Furthermore, there is no reason why Apple couldn't support another companies DRM technology that already has shared encoders.

I am of the opinion, and have been for some time now, that the record companies are going to start abandoning DRM technology. I am also of the opinion that we need, and will get, a means of attaining blanket licenses to cover music downloads, as well as a reasonably elegant system for paying royalties.

I would be shocked if Apple is not expecting things to go this way as well. The line they are taking here actually puts more pressure on the powers that be to take moves to open licensing, then if Apple opened their technology. The big win for everyone is if it became possible to sell non-DRM'd tracks. Unless that happens, it is not to Apple's advantage to open their DRM technology.

Screw opening the DRM, open the licensing regime. Like Steve said:

Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Music

A bill has been proposed in the Georgia State Senate which would require social networking websites, possibly including MemeStreams, to verify that minors who create accounts have parental permission. In practice this would mean that any Georgia website, no matter how benign, which allows users to create profiles, would be required to implement as yet undefined age validation procedures for all new users.

We believe that this proposal is a bad idea for a number of different reasons. We composed the following open letter to the sponsors of the legislation in an attempt to articulate our concerns.

Our response has been noted on the MemeStreams Defense website.

We don't do much with the defense website, and we like it that way. We would prefer not to have to do anything with it, but it's there.

MemeStreams response to Georgia Senate Bill 59 - 2007

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Go to Google News, and then past this into your URL window and hit enter

National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications
Havaria Emergency and Disaster Information Services
Budapest Hungary

Well, here is one for your bookmark list. A website in Hungary that keeps an up to date map of the biggest disasters currently occuring everywhere on the planet. Its a death and destruction information console!

RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service

Fyodor has started NoDaddy.com in response to last week's shutdown of seclists.org...

I created this site to document instances of customer abuse at GoDaddy. The goal is for GoDaddy to either improve their policies and customer service, or suffer continued loss of market share to their customer-focused competition.

While I gave this site its bare skeleton, I'm hoping it becomes more of a community effort. If you have been frustrated by GoDaddy's behavior, please see our call for volunteers and join in.

But it turns out GoDaddy has defenders! I found this article linked off of Google News!

Screw Seclists.com, you should higher an internet security employee from MySpace to make sure you don't post our personal, highly secure information on your website. Obviously you aren't capable or maybe you just don't understand internet law.

Talk about Comedy Gold! The layers of irony in that passage are so thick its like a work of art!

NoDaddy.Com - Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names