Germany – No More Helping the RIAA
In Germany, the RIAA equivalent company for the EU was filing criminal proceedings against file-sharers to discover their IP addresses. Now German courts say that practice will stop because sharing a few files is a petty offense and not worth the court’s time. It’s a step in the right direction. Remember, many people who download music are ones who wouldn’t have bought it in the first place. These big companies .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Domestic Spying Gets Black Eye Under FISA
Wasn't it nice that Bush decided after he was caught breaking the law to put the spying program under FISA oversight (which is where it belonged by law before)? The best part of this story is that the FISA court has blocked certain parts of the program as a result. It's no wonder Bush is trying to have FISA amended. This was all so much easier for him when the .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Bruce Schneier Interviews the Head of the TSA
Bruce has some very good pointed questions that the head of the TSA mostly doesn’t answer. What a shame. In five parts: Bruce Schneier interviews head of the TSA
Tags: Utter FailureHuge Bust – Mod Chippers Go Down
This story makes me a little sad. It’s true that Mod Chips generally allow you to play downloaded and burned music, but they also allow the very important ability to play import games and backup discs. There’s no reason someone shouldn’t be able to play a backup copy and keep the real game in pristine condition and there’s no reason at all that these dummy hardware manufacturers should limit what .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
DRM Scorecard – Hackers 1000, Industry 0
I wonder how much money these companies spend to create DRM that gets broken by content fans in just a few days. Anyway, it's clear that DRM is not a good investment. (H/T to slashdot for the link)
Bush, “I Need MOR POWA!!!” Wants to Revise FISA
Bush is pressuring congress to give him more authority by amending FISA. I just can't take this anymore. Someone please tell me that even if congress won't impeach him, he'll see the inside of a jail cell sometime after his "presidency". JTAG ERROR: No privacyorg_ht index defined
Tags: George BushCalling for Accountability of the Federal Trade Commission
If you didn't already know, I'm pretty mad at the FTC. Though ID theft has been the top consumer complaint for the last 6 years running, though they have put a large amount of resources into their consumer education campaign (on their anti-ID theft website for example), though the chairwoman of the FTC, Deborah Platt Majoras, co-chaired the Presidential ID Theft Taskforce, they have completely failed to educate customers about .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
FTC Seeks Comments on Use of Social Security Numbers
I wonder if it will do any good this time, but the FTC is requesting comments on how SSNs tie into ID theft. I wasn't too excited by the results of their last attempt to seek comments.
Minnesota Law Requires Credit Card Numbers be Purged After 2 Days
I have long said that data brokering is the second leading cause of identity theft problems. Most companies have no legitimate need to store your credit card numbers at all after the transaction is completed which may be why Minnesota is now banning the practice of storing credit card information. The only problem here is that they put an arbitrary date on it instead of having it be "after the .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Tags: Good StuffRFID Tollbooths – False Billing, Serious Consequences
Besides being annoying and costing you money, errors at RFID toll booths can get you into all kinds of interesting spots. One girl was refused a job for having 30 outstanding tickets for going through the pass in her jeep without paying. The problem is, she’s never owned or driven a jeep. Is anyone surprised by this?
