] E-mail privacy suffered a serious setback on Tuesday when
] a court of appeals ruled that an e-mail provider did not
] break the law in reading his customers' communications
] without their consent.

I intended to comment on this in some detail, but I'm not even sure where to start. This is one of those things I have trouble believing happened, and sickens me as I'm preparing to enjoy Independence Day festivities.

It matters who hosts the services you use. Always has. That being said, it still doesn't make this any less of an attack on personal privacy.

Wired News: E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible

BGPlay is a Java application which displays animated graphs of the routing activity of a certain prefix within a specified time interval. Its graphical nature makes it much easier to understand how BGP updates affect the routing of a specific prefix than by analyzing the updates themselves.

BGPlay - graphical visualisation of BGP updates

Stripe Snoop reads the contents of a magstripes (Track 1, 2, or 3) through different hardware interfaces and not only displays the contents, but uses a CDDB-like database of card formats to try and figure out what the contents mean.

Stripe Snoop 1.1 Released - SourceForged!

Decius wrote:
] Choosing stories this morning for their pictures. This is
] Victoria Park full of protesters. I usually stayed in a hotel
] in Hong Kong which had this same view. If its possible to feel
] homesick for a place you only worked in over the course of a
] few months this picture does it.

Linked are a few more pictures via Yahoo.. I recognize most of them as being from the Causeway Bay area, but there is one that I'm pretty sure is the tram station/u-turn thing in Happy Valley. Looks like there were mobs of people everywhere.

Yahoo News Photo Search

In its quest to block access to the video of Kim Sun-Il's execution video, South Korea is now blocking access to Blogger, Blogspot, TypePad, and LiveJournal.

South Korea blocks major weblog services. | Metafilter

] The selection of former Agriculture Secretary Dan
] Glickman to replace Jack Valenti as head of the Motion
] Picture Association of America won't result in any
] changes in the industry's policy of aggressively fighting
] online piracy, the two men said Thursday.

The Hydra has spawned its new head.

Yahoo! News - New MPAA Leader Committed to 'Net Piracy Fight

] Novell and the Mono project developer community is proud
] to announce the release of Mono version 1.0, an open
] source implementation of the .NET framework for use on
] Linux, Unix, MacOS X and Windows system.

Mono hits 1.0.

Anyone here using it?

Mono .Net Framework

] The Electronic Frontier Foundation is spoiling for a
] fight, and on Wednesday it named the top 10 patents it
] wants killed, or at least redefined.
]
] The EFF said all 10 patents are in some way illegitimate
] and are being used to limit free expression.

Wired News: EFF Publishes Patent Hit List

] A divided U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday barred
] prosecutors from filing criminal cases under a federal
] law designed to restrict Internet pornography, concluding
] that enforcement could violate Americans' free-speech
] rights.

No more COPA.

This is a good day for porn, speech, and kids under 13. Porn and speech are great, but I do concede that its a good idea to keep the kids out of it. 13 is a fine age. I only objected that sites like this had to follow the same restriction or risk liability when a kid got sent to Suicide Girls or something.

Most young kids now know how to lie on web forms and bypass windows boot-up processes, COPA never stopped them. It did nothing to stop production of child porn content. In general, it never really addressed any problem directly.

] "I don't think that pornographers have any more right to
] shove their smut into the faces of children in cyberspace
] than they do at the corner newsstand," he said. "The
] pervasiveness of pornography on the Internet is going
] to be a barrier to its development."

Porn, Porn, Porn, and Warez carved the Internet from the wilderness.. The first seriously successful businesses on the Internet were service providers and porn sites. Face it, if history were to end right now, it would be said that the Internet was a device that simulated sex. No one would know any better of it.

And to clear one thing up. No one is anti-porn, they are anti-porn popup and anti-porn spam. There is a difference.

Supreme Court: COPA ....Bad! Porn ......Good!

] ICANN should see DNS Whois for what it is, a relic of a
] simpler time, and focus instead on the IP address Whois
] systems, where their efforts might reap meaningful
] results.

After the drama Decius stirred up last week (see the politech list) Circle ID offered to feature an article from him about the DNS Whois issue. Here it is.

DNS WHOIS: Barking Up the Wrong Tree