] The landscape has not changed so much that if you had a
] vote taken today, even with all the horror stories of
] RIAA subpoenas sent to grandmothers and honor students,
] the vote would come out in favor of seriously altering or
] removing" that section of the law, Godwin said. "I think
] what you are getting is some impulse, somewhat more
] strongly from the Republican side of the aisle, toward
] some slightly higher level of judicial review and some
] safeguards and remedies for misuse of process."

The DMCA supeonas are a way of removing judicial oversight (and therefore the rule of law) from the information collection phase of intellectual property proceedings. Congress has shown a repeated interest in removing the rule of law from the equation when it benefits their friends in the media industry. Some Republicans are starting to point out that the DMCA supeonas can be used (and abused) by other people, some of whom Congress doesn't like. This is a good thing in general because this law needs to be tightened up. Fortunately its unconstituional for the goverment to give a specific interest group a special right, so they are going to have to lock this thing down across the board. The RIAA offers the same sort of non-technical, and therefore irrelevant response that you're seeing to questions about the security of voting machines. That means they are wrong, and are probably going to loose. This is progress.

Congress starts to look critically at the DMCA

] VeriSign/Network Solutions' recent actions to effectively
] "hijack" all unused domain names in the ".COM" and ".NET"
] TLDs (Top Level Domains) for their "Site Finder" service,
] unilaterally and without prior warning or consultation
] with the Internet technical or policy communities,
] represents an arrogant and dangerous abuse of their
] vested, dominant, special position, and have vast policy,
] legal, and technical implications.

Lauren Weinstein, Peter Neumann, and Dave Farber rip Verisign a new asshole. 'Bout damn time someone did it. This is an undercovered story.

PFIR Statement on VeriSign/NSI

] RATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3
] player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database
] of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings
] and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks
] are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal
] downloads of their music.

Hmm..

iRATE radio home

"Johnny died due to complications from diabetes, which resulted in respiratory failure," Cash's manager, Lou Robin, said in a statement issued by Baptist Hospital in Nashville.

One very interesting tidbit that was on NPR this morning, but I can't find references of on Google yet, is the statement that while in the Air Force, Johnny Cash was a codebreaker. This would make Johnny the Alpha-Geek, and most beloved, as the original codebreaking Man in Black.

The following whitespace is for Johnny Cash:

.

Music Legend Johnny Cash Dies at 71

] In April, the legendary Pixies will reunite for the first
] time in over a decade. The notoriously quarrelsome
] quartet have buried the hatchet, clearing the way for all
] four original members to hop onstage together for a world
] tour, according to a spokesperson for the band.

Yes! I have been waiting for a Pixies reunion for soooo long..

Frank Black said in an interview a few months ago that the idea was being considered.. Looks like its happening.

MTV.com - News -Legendary Pixies To Reunite For Tour, Album

] The music industry has turned its big legal guns on
] Internet music-swappers - including a 12-year-old
] New York City girl who thought downloading songs was fun.
]
] Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was
] among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant
] music companies in federal courts around the country.

FOXNews.com - Top Stories - 12-Year-Old Sued for Music Downloading

Comments from Decius:

The RIAA's Clean Slate program.

This website is positively creepy. I guess they are holding it under a different domain name so that people who are basically not very bright won't get that these are the same people that are filing the lawsuits. Having said that, reading explanations of "what your liability might be" knowing that the writer is the person filing the suit feels like listening to the mafia explain in a concerned and polite tone that you wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your family and the best way to avoid that is to pay the protection money. I realize thats been said before, but I can't think of a better way to explain it.

Typical corrupt logic abounds:

Upfront on the site is says that copying music is just as illegal as stealing CDs, which is correct. Its also just as illegal as running a red light, or on the other hand, committing international terrorism. This analogy is chosen for another reason, which they shore up deeper in the content by saying that copying music is just as "wrong" as stealing CDs... The typical obligatory and incorrect analogy between theft and information crimes. Later the site says that theft of physical CDs is "legally no different" then copying music. In reality, the penalty for copying music is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more severe.

Parents are literally set against their children through the use of fear. "You could be liable for your child's actions, so start monitoring their computer use..."

"Tell that to the struggling young musicians in a garage band who can’t get signed because record sales are down." Sure... Your friend's band isn't getting signed because of Gnutella... Right...

Their list of places to "legally download music on the web" is mostly (although not entirely) a list of internet CD stores.

"Copyrights don’t last forever." No, they DO last forever. Limited copyright is a legal fiction in the United States. The definition of fiction is something written on paper that doesn't actually happen in the real world. I am 27. No copyrighted material has entered the public domain during my lifetime. Repeat after me: If it doesn't actually happen, then it is not real.

"We are not against P2P services." Really, you could have fooled me at the P2P "porno" hearings last week!! From NYT: "P2P stands for piracy to pornography," quipped Mr. Lack. (That's "Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment.")

"We think MP3 technology is a great thing—as long as it’s used legally and properly." REALLY!? Then why did you sue to ban the sale of portable mp3 players in 1998??
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,15535,00.html

musicunited.org

This is the first time I've ever recommended a TV show. (Like an actual episode rather then a program in general.)

1. This is illegal as hell.
2. If the ads are included there is no good reason for ABC to have a problem with this.
3. This looks like an interesting program.
4. The ensuing discussion is exactly why I want to connect mythtv to memestreams.
5. If it is legal, and it is, for me to save television programming off the wire, and view it at any time, why should it not be legal, and it isn't, for someone else to download television programming, and provide it to me. This is assuming we aren't talking about cable, and we aren't cutting out the ads. Seems to me that people who make television like this, which is entirely ad supported, could simply increase their viewers, as well as revenue, by posting the archives online. There might even be some money to be made in selling access to complete archives. I think there is a short term strategic advantage for the company that does this first....

(U: Its about 20 minutes of video. No commercials (hrmph). Comstock does a good job of defending the act. She handles Koppel well. Its clear that the "enemy combatent" issue is more serious then the Patriot act. Its clear that the level of secrecy makes it difficult to know if the FBI is abusing the law. They clearly state that they can't discuss specifics, and then they offer specific examples about notification timeframes for "sneak and peek" warrants that are probably reasonable. I.E. The secrecy allows the FBI to only release information that is politically useful to them, and they clearly take advantage of that here. Can we say "I rest my case" yet? When Koppel comes back for his closing remarks, however, he lets them have it. Its totally worth watching to see him come back and tear into them.)

On Lisa Rein's Radar: Ted Koppel On The Dangers Of The Patriot Act

There are interesting dynamics to the financial and technological scenes that suggest broadband access may arrive sooner than generally expected. It may also arrive through unexpected channels. On the other hand, fiber-to-the-home, widely regarded as the Holy Grail of residential broadband, might never become widespread. In any case, there is likely to be considerable turmoil in the telecom industry over the next few years. Robust growth in demand is likely to be combined with a restructuring of the industry.

This paper also appears in the September 2003 issue of First Monday. You'll want to print it to read it, so I've linked directly to the PDF version.

The Many Paradoxes of Broadband | Andrew Odlyzko [PDF]

] A wealthy businessman helping the Ohio Republican Party
] try to win the state in 2004 for President Bush also is
] the head of a company competing for a state contract to
] sell voting machines.
]
] Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told
] Republicans in an Aug. 14 fund-raising letter that he is
] ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes
] to the president next year.''

Watch the bouncing ball here. The mainstream press has widely discredited the security analysis of the Diebold's machines because the person that performed it is on the board at a competing company. On the other hand, there is hardly a peep about this. There are 9 links on google news from 6 outlets, 4 small local news stations, and two leftist journals.

Want undeniable proof of press culpability, compare a google news search for "Walden O'Dell" with "Avi Rubin votehere" Not all of the Avi Rubin stories are critical, but we're talking about 63 to 9 here. Furthermore, consider the impact that the blaster worm stories have had on the American mindset. We may not say "this kid created the blaster worm" but we build that association in your head anyway.

The AJC: "Furor over the report was partly defused when the lead researcher acknowledged this week that he failed to disclose that he had stock options in VoteHere, a company that competes with Diebold in the voting-software market, and was a member of VoteHere's technical advisory board."

From ABC: Diebold officials said they were "shocked and disappointed" by Rubin's admissions.

"Diebold Election Systems has consistently questioned the conclusions drawn by the Johns Hopkins-issued report," the company said in a statement. "It is now clear, by Mr. Rubin's own admission, that questions of bias must be considered."

Diebold appears to have conflict