The saddest part of this story is that Harvard’s bookstore is so desperate to prevent students from shopping online that they kicked out a student who was writing down the prices to compare them online later. They claimed that the pricing is copyrighted, which, of course, it’s not. Face it: if you charge more for a book in your store than I can get it online, there’s a really good chance I’ll get it there. If these stores are so desperate for the business, they should have a terminal in their store and referral programs set up with all the major online retailers. That’s about the only way it would work for them. Tags: Schools

TransUnion becomes the first credit reporting company committed to providing U.S. consumers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia with the ability to freeze their credit files, should they feel that step is warranted.

The pricing is as follows:

– Free to add, lift or remove for all ID theft victims – $10 to add, lift or remove for non victims

Before, there were only certain states with freeze laws, but Transunion is making the move to allow freezes anywhere!? That's a surprising move. With this, they've basically vonluntarily shot themselves in the foot as far as selling credit monitoring services. This is probably some kind of public relations "first strike", but as long as there aren't any scary drawbacks or fine print (and it doesn't appear there are any so far), this is awesome. Let's hope the others follow suit. (H/T to slashdot for the link) Tags: Identity Theft

In some slightly overblown reporting online, Microsoft has been caught downloading updates to its software without user knowledge or consent. In this case, they were just updating the Windows Updater, but the key complaint here is that the users didn't get to choose. In the past many people delay updating (or avoid it altogether) because the updates can sometimes cause less security or add features that we don't want. (H/T to schneier for the link)

Google, trying to hold up their former image of being a rebel company who "doesn't do evil", has proposed a universal privacy standard that they say all companies should follow. The main idea is that there should be a minimum set of standards that everyone agrees to follow when dealing with private user data. I sure hope it's not their standards since they hold your private data hostage for months. (H/T to privacyorg for the link)

There’s just nothing more I can say about this so I’ll stick with pointing you to the news articles and just shut up. Tags: Identity Theft

Rather than try to prevent people from copying or sharing music with drm, Microsoft has patented a watermarking procedure that will allow them to tag music with IDs that are very hard to remove. First take: this is bad, bad news. While Ars Technica believes that this could help to get rid of the much hated DRM, I believe the replacement is far worse. Now instead of merely being annoying in preventing you from copying a CD, the RIAA will be able to track music by ID to see where (and who) it came from. If your son shares a song online that's from your CD collection, you will be much easier to find and prosecute. Tags: Microsoft

How many years has it been since America's Funniest Home Videos came around? How many videos do you still see of some dad somewhere teaching his kid to swing a bat, but he stands behind him and gets nailed in the crotch? You think they'd learn. Well the same can be true of these laptops. How many times does a company/government branch have to lose a laptop before they learn? The simplest solution is to stop putting people's data on laptops! Sheesh. (H/T to privacyorg for the link)

It would be nice if this worked: allowing customers to pick only the channels they want and not charge them for all the ones they don’t.

Here's an interesting take on the whole situation. According to Computer and Communications Industry Association, fair use of copyrighted materials adds more value to the US economy than the copyright holders themselves. (H/T to slashdot for the link)

After one hour of use, a Vista machine that thinks it’s illegitimate will go to a black screen with no functionality of any kind. Remember the article about the activation servers failing and disabling thousands of computers a week or two ago? Combine that with this new policy and things should get pretty interesting. Does it seem to anyone that Microsoft is starting to go a little crazy in the head? It’s like a paranoid king who starts killing off the subjects thinking they’re going to turn on him. The scary thing (if I hadn’t seen it coming) is that this “feature” was built in to Vista and just needed to be remotely activated by Microsoft. Right now it’s an hour then a black screen, but I wonder how far it can go? 10 minutes then self destruction? Tags: Microsoft